Reeves was never encouraged to pursue acting as a career by her father, who appears to have had a distinctly non-rose-tinted view of the industry. “He had a saying pinned up above his desk which read, ‘You can have talent and you can have luck, but what you really need is perseverance,’” she says. “And that landed right in my brain.”
She says she became an actress out of “desperation”. “When I was a teenager I was slightly off the rails. And I remember overhearing a conversation in our kitchen about drama school, for which you apparently didn’t need any A-levels. And I thought: hmm, this could get me out of a really sticky mess.”
She graduated from Guildhall in the early 1980s and spent many years in the theatre, working with the RSC, the National Theatre and Cheek by Jowl. Her career has been an intriguing mix of the classical and the thoroughly unexpected, mixing Shakespeare and classy TV with risk-taking arthouse work such as Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 by the Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier. She also researches each role to a prodigious degree, once spending days talking to nuns at a nunnery in Brixton, London, ahead of starring in Measure for Measure at the Young Vic. “And then I went into the rehearsal room and realised, ‘Oh, perhaps I should have spent a bit more time reading the actual text.’”
She thinks career choices for older actresses are improving. “People are starting to make these stories, people are funding them, and people are watching them. We still have a bit of a way to go, but that’s more of a political conversation along the lines of being an older woman of a certain age, and whether you still have a voice. But you can always make a character more interesting.”
This is a skill at which Reeves excels. That, and perseverance. “When I started out, I had no safety net. I had no second string to my bow. So I think that’s where my tenacity comes from, because I had absolutely no plan B. I had to make it work.”
End is at the National Theatre London from Nov 13 to Jan 17; nationaltheatre.org.uk
