Actor Diana Quick tells Jane Wright how her taste for exotic roles reflects her colourful family history

ON Tuesday, the curtain went up on Diana Quick’s first ever stage role at Hampstead Theatre. Given she has lived in Kentish Town for the last 21 years with her actor husband Bill Nighy (Love Actually, State of Play), this is somewhat surprising.
Even more surprising, for the actress who made her name playing the archetypal English aristocrat, Lady Julia Flyte, alongside Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Jeremy Irons, in the legendary 1981 television adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel, Brideshead Revisited, it marked her third Caribbean role in a row.
Last year she starred to great acclaim in the West End as the aging, unstable novelist Jean Rhys, in Polly Teale’s play, After Mrs Rochester.
(Born and brought up on a sugar plantation in Santa Domingo, Rhys sympathised with the demonised creole heiress who was Mr Rochester’s raving first wife in Jane Eyre and imagined her early life in her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea.)
Before that Diana Quick starred in glossy Channel 4 mini-series The Orchid House, about three sisters revisiting their childhood home, also on the Caribbean island of Dominica.
Now, at the playhouse in Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, Ms Quick plays Cuban matriarch Ofelia in the European premiere of Anna in the Tropics, which last year won playwright Nilo Cruz the first ever Pulitzer Prize for a Cuban American.
Ofelia presides over her immigrant family’s cigar factory in Florida in the 1920s, where, in the Cuban tradition, her husband hires a new reader for the workers, who chooses to entertain and educate the factory floor with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
Ms Quick explains: “Some of the cigar rollers can’t read or write, but they can quote Jane Eyre and Don Quixote. They’re not even sure who Tolstoy is, but Anna Karenina has a dramatic effect. This is a proper play. The audience gets to know every character and is very drawn into their stories.”
She adds, significantly: “It’s enormous fun playing a new accent and another religion, here the Spanish Roman Catholic church.”
In the case of Diana Quick, these have been more extreme than most, as she has interspersed what she calls “the frightfully English girl roles”, such as Julia Flyte, with a succession of “Greeks, Romans and exotic princesses”.
This is, of course, the business of acting. Now 58, Ms Quick says: “If you talk to any actor, they always feel slightly outside society. We’re obsessives who don’t want to be pigeon-holed, so we stand apart, waiting to inhabit different shoes.
“I’m classically middle class, the daughter of a dentist, but growing up, I wanted to be an exotic love child.”
However, one role got her thinking about her own identity, and led to some surprising discoveries. In Kindertransport she starred at the Vaudeville theatre, London, in 1996. “It was about the Jewish children rushed out of Nazi Europe on Quaker trains in the 1930s,” she says. “
I got into the role through the things I know about, like my father, who was born in India, and was sent to a cooler climate for months at a time as a small boy because of his health. Then, at 17, he came to England to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital.
“He had been raised to regard England as home, but it was cold and unwelcoming. Then he quarrelled with his father back in India and became cut off from the family.
“He died of a heart attack when I was only 19. I remembered all his stories of growing up had been very exotic, about losing his mother young, acquiring a cruel stepmother and about wild animals in the jungle.”
Driven to trace her family history back through the Indian Raj of the 19th century, Diana discovered an ancestor with a native Indian wife, Lakshmi, whose name had been anglicised to Lucky.
She also found out, via a five-year diary written when her father was a medical student, that she was indeed a love child, after her father’s family forbade him from seeing her mother, who was a hairdresser.
Furthermore, her father’s father, a doctor in India, who came to England only in the 1950s, left behind a home on the India-Pakistan border, which the servants simply shuttered up, insisting 35 years later: “We’re waiting for Doctor Quick to come back.”
Ms Quick says with a laugh: “This added an extra dimension to my fantasies. I imagined going over to rescue the house after all these years and open it up again.”
Instead, she has opted to write a book about her family in India, called Waiting for Dr Quick, which she hopes to publish next year.
But even without her family history, she still seemed an extravagant creature at 24, at the time of Brideshead Revisited. A former president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, she had already been photographed by Cecil Beaton and lived with Albert Finney.
At Oxford she was a buddy of Gospel Oak resident Michael Palin. She remembers: “We used to act out sketches together at balls. He was lovely and earthy and kind – we’re still friends. I see him at parties or on Hampstead Heath.”
But she eventually married Bill Nighy, with whom she has executed the potentially tricky relationship, in the jealous and competitive world of acting, of swapping the role of major bread-winner. When they got together, she was the big name performer of the pair, who bought the house and paid the school fees.
But now Bill, who won two best actor Baftas earlier this year, for Love Actually and State of Play, is the star who can afford to be generous.
Diana admits: “With two actors in the same household, it’s very difficult. You have to have absolute confidence in the other person’s ability and then really want them to do well.”
But having bagged a run of meaty older-woman roles in recent years, which she cheerfully describes as “bonking grannies”, Diana Quick seems set to continue breaking moulds and defying stereotypes.
• Anna in the Tropics runs until January 8.