Of course Harriet Walter would choose this place, I think, swishing through the revolving door of Arlington in Mayfair into an Art Deco hall of mirrors reflecting monochrome stripes and polished tile. The atmosphere is almost cruelly chic. Where else would a woman famous for her portrayal of stony-hearted, acid-tongued ice queens want to meet?
The waiter takes me to a table in a discreet corner. David Bailey’s black-and-white portraits of 1960s icons look on from every wall. The nearest is of a white-stockinged, kohl-eyed Penelope Tree in 1967, photographed lounging next to an open bottle of champagne, cheekbones like razors. It all makes perfect sense.
So when Walter herself appears, the disorientation is profound. She looks soft — almost fluffy — in a powder-pink herringbone tweed suit and pearl earrings. Her smile is eager and warms up the atmosphere by several degrees. And then there’s her voice. At first she speaks so quietly she sounds almost timorous. It is genuinely hard to believe this is the same person whose sardonic drawl ripped shreds out of her spoiled children in Succession or barked orders as Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar set in a women’s prison. How on earth will she pull off playing Margaret Thatcher in her next TV role, I wonder?
As usual, first impressions are misleading. Over the course of the next couple of hours, in a gradual crescendo, all these characters, and more, will make appearances at our table. Harriet Walter is just warming up.
She’s had plenty of opportunity lately to practise the art of summoning characters she’s played back to life. Her new book She Speaks! is a collection of speeches for Shakespearean women, in which Walter imagines (in blank verse) what Ophelia or Cressida or Desdemona might have said to an audience had they been able to talk frankly instead of being left silent while their fates were decided by the men around them. It’s Walter’s way of redressing the balance of power a bit — and of sharing some of the theories she’s developed in five decades of performing Shakespeare.
Walter sits down opposite me, gesturing to Penelope’s legs. “There’s vintage,” she murmurs. “They were all the people I wanted to look like when I was 17 — and really didn’t.” Born in 1950, Walter was exactly that age when the picture was taken, about to decide that she wanted to become an actor. Since then, hers has been a fantastically varied career, starting with regional theatre, then the Royal Shakespeare Company, the West End and Broadway. She’s done period drama, from Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 to the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. She’s had six words in a Star Wars movie and six seasons as Detective Inspector Natalie Chandler in Law & Order: UK. But even so, until relatively recently, her name might elicit only a vague nod of recognition among those outside the theatre world.