Britain's Bella Donna

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Perhaps what truly separates us from the British even now, in the era of Tony Blair's fox-hunting-be-damned Cool Britannia, is the permeability of our show-business class. While the British still seem to require that their actors study Marlowe at Cambridge and enunciate their words in the manner of those listed in Burke's Peerage, we live in a country where Tony Danza might--and does--turn up in The Iceman Cometh. By the restrictive standards of her homeland, then, British actress Anna Friel, 22, currently making her theatrical debut in the hit Broadway play Closer, has experienced a mesmerizing turn of fortune. In just three years, with no classical training behind her, Friel, the daughter of middle-class parents, has gone from starring as a murderous, sexually abused lesbian in the British nighttime soap Brookside to being a serious and sophisticated actress who is quickly gaining international celebrity.

Friel's role as Closer's Alice, a raw-nerved waif with an irreparably scarred heart, has easily made her one of the most talked-about actresses in Manhattan. Among those who've visited her backstage are Steven Spielberg and Mr. and Mrs. Tom Cruise, who brought flowers ("to be that famous--and so nice," she remarks). Friel's stellar reviews include one from the New Yorker where she was described as the "powerhouse" of the play's cast and "a ravishing newcomer whose authenticity makes it impossible to take your eyes off her." Next week Friel will make her Hollywood debut in Michael Hoffman's movie version of Midsummer Night's Dream. She'll also be turning up at Cannes, as a modern single mother in the British comedy Mad Cows.

In possession of beauty at once sultry, pixie-ish and refined, Friel grew up in northern England aspiring to capitalize on her skill for argument rather than her looks. "I wanted to be a lawyer," she says. "I was on the debating team; we'd re-create Parliament, and I won computers for our school." But a life as Marcia Clark was not to be. During her middle-school years, Friel became involved with a local theater group, performing in student-written plays. At 15, she landed her first TV role, as Michael Palin's daughter in the British series GBH. Film parts started to come soon after she was killed off in Brookside, and so too did a starring part in an impressive BBC production of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.

It is essentially Friel's lack of self-consequence that makes her so appealingly distinct from other British actresses--and many American ones too. "Anna doesn't have stage-school technique," notes her countryman Patrick Marber, writer and director of Closer. "She's very natural and all from the heart."

Moreover, the actress seems to be leading as unglitzy a social life as a person can have when good friends include Natasha Richardson, Ewan McGregor (with whom she stars in the British film Rogue Trader, premiering in the U.S. on Cinemax next month) and Kate Moss. She's single and dating now and then, even though she finds American men somewhat inscrutable: "Men are wonderfully upfront here. But you go out, you have a lovely time, you're asked a lot of questions, and you don't know if the guy's ever going to call again." Following her nightly performances on Broadway, Friel often goes to a divey neighborhood bar, where she has been learning to swing dance. We suspect that she doesn't run into Dame Judi Dench or Kate Winslet there.