Diana Quick: All grown up and somewhere to go

Forget the starlets, says Simon O'Hagan, if you want to see a really sexy actress try Diana Quick

In the years when Diana Quick was Albert Finney's partner, he used to tell her, "You're going to find it very hard to have a career in England. The English don't really like grown-up women. They only like girls." As a young actress of beauty and sensuousness, Quick was left to ponder Finney's words and wait for the time to come when she would be forced to confront their essential truth. "Albert's a very wise person," she says.

Except that, to Quick's surprise, it has not worked out like that at all. Now in her fifties, and still beautiful and sensuous, Quick is finding that far from having to settle for the eccentrics, loveable or otherwise, that might be seen to be fitting of an actress of a certain age, sexy roles are still coming her way. Her latest is a masterpiece of interpretation in a British film far more deserving of success than many.

A 30-year career in which Quick has worked with everybody who was anybody has also had its setbacks, and she is certainly not as well known as she should be. It hasn't helped to have Diana Rigg, an actress in a not dissimilar mould, as a near-namesake, and she acknowledges without apparent bitterness that many parts she thinks she might be offered instead go to one or other of her good friends Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie or Julie Walters. But in referring to Quick as a "might-have-been", one leading critic hints at something very special in her, and the signs were there when she starred in Ridley Scott's 1977 directorial debut The Duellists, and, soon after, the landmark TV drama Brideshead Revisited.

Just because Quick could be said to have failed to make the impact that her early career promised doesn't mean she has squandered her talent. Rather it is testimony to her desire to do only good work, even at the expense of exposure. Her CV is exemplary – both in its range across TV, radio, theatre and film, and in the way that it embraces the best directors of recent years – and to watch Quick is to be reminded of the power of her screen presence, and of the richness and subtlety of her characterisations.

Her new film is the extraordinary AKA – first-time director Duncan Roy's autobiographical tale of how he escaped a brutal upbringing in the working-class south-east to con his way into London's high society. AKA may be set in 1979, but as a redemptive tale of self-reinvention, it chimes perfectly with modern times. It has already picked up awards at gay film festivals in north America, although as Quick says, "it would be a terrible shame if the film was ghetto-ised".

Quick plays an aristocratic art gallery owner – Lady Francine Gryffoyn – who takes the Roy character – played by Matthew Leitch of Band of Brothers – under her wing. Part monster and part saviour, the Gryffoyn character is based on the real-life boutique owner and 1970s fashionista Lady Clare Rendelsham, long since dead. The role brings a quietly devastating performance from Quick, although she wonders now whether she shouldn't have made Lady Gryffoyn even bitchier. "Duncan kept telling me to go further. But what appealed to me about the character was that there was something very real about her. I loved it that she had this reputation for being a complete cow, but actually she had this very kind side to her as well."

It was Roy's script – spare but eloquent – that drew the interest of an actress of Quick's calibre. "If you have any control you go for the good scripts, wherever they are," she says. "As an actor you want to do work that is worth the candle." Roy's came to her via the Script Factory, a London institution which gives potential backers the chance to hear read-throughs, and would-be film-makers the chance to meet the people with the money. AKA's progress to completion was still blighted by budgetary problems, and at a paltry £300,000 Quick says it was a miracle it was made at all. But although she had never met Roy, she believed in the project. A fine cast was assembled (including Quick's husband Bill Nighy), and the end product is a vindication of her judgment.

Roy describes the making of AKA as "guerilla-like", with ejections from locations commonplace, and a constant worry about money. For her part, Quick says she got a thrill out of working with people who had the first-timers' freshness of approach. The compliment is more than reciprocated. The presence on the set of an actress of Quick's experience and standing was invaluable to Roy, and immensely reassuring. "I learnt a huge amount from her," he says. "She is one of those people who really understands their craft. She knew where she had to be to be photographed ... at times she was virtually directing the thing herself. But she's also the most unstarry person you could ever meet. She really mucked in."

Life has perhaps taught Quick never to get too carried away. She grew up in Dartford in north Kent, the daughter of parents who had met through amateur dramatics. Hanging out as a teenager at the same local coffee bar as Mick Jagger gave her an early taste of glamour, and a lucky break at Oxford University got her into plays with the future Monty Python members Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Her career was under way.

Brideshead and The Duellists opened up possibilities in America, and she was in Los Angeles when, without warning, she collapsed outside a concert hall one evening, fell and suffered serious injuries to her face and neck. She lost 16 teeth, her voice box was badly damaged, and in the year that she needed to recover she had to virtually rebuild her voice from scratch. "I went to these friends in Massachusetts, and they gave me my voice back. In fact I ended up with a better voice than I had before."

Nonetheless, she had lost a lot of work she had lined up in America, and in the parts she subsequently played, including a number with the RSC and the National Theatre, she was noticed more by insiders than by the public. Having a baby in her mid-30s meant another career break, and when she returned it was in France, to appear with Charlotte Rampling in Max, Mon Amour. She hoped for a future in French film, but none materialised.

For now, though, Quick's rather French qualities – the style and the shrewdness, the warmth and the air of amusement – appear to have been rediscovered in England. A succession of parts has come her way that she refers to as "bonking grannies": in AKA, and in both a reworking of The Revenger's Tragedy (set in Liverpool in 2010 and also starring Eddie Izzard and Derek Jacobi), and in The Discovery of Heaven, a film based on an acclaimed Dutch novel in which she appears with Stephen Fry and Greg Wise.

Quick is delighted. "For a woman over 40, an acting career is touch and go," she says. "There's definitely an element in the public imagination that likes older women only if they have somehow been neutered. But I'm playing all these women who still have a very active libido. Perhaps things are changing." Albert Finney, take note.

'AKA' (18) opens in London on Friday