Tara Fitzgerald: Naked ambition

Tara Fitzgerald may be too much of a free spirit for the National Theatre or Hollywood. But her fondness for the bohemian lifestyle is sometimes an advantage, she tells Maureen Paton

Think of Tara Fitzgerald and the archetypal free spirit, sometimes sky-clad as nature intended, tends to float into that thought-bubble. As the daughter of a hippie mother, she even had the AbFab upbringing to prepare her for the kind of career that has often lapped against the wilder shores of showbusiness. You can spot those family influences as soon as the actress walks into a hotel bar for our meeting: pointed snakeskin boots (fake, she assures me) and several layers of trailing paisley teagown worn with aplomb.

Fitzgerald has never been, it's fair to say, one of life's librarians, so who better to embody rampant bohemianism? Or as she prefers to put it with masterly understatement, "I tend to play independent-minded people." The Bohemian image continues with her two latest screen roles, linked by the fact that both women were writers' Muses. As the dotty but heroic fictional creation of Topaz Mortmain in Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, she communes with the elements on the castle battlements in nothing but a pair of wellies as she seeks divine inspiration to revive her husband's writing career. And in a BBC drama about Philip Larkin, she lights up the late poet laureate's sex life with her red suspenders when she plays his longest-serving mistress and chief Muse: the university lecturer Monica Jones, who died in 2001. Both very game parts, both very Tara Fitzgerald.

She herself grew up among artists as the daughter of the Irish painter Sarah Fitzgerald and the artist Michael Callaby, the stepdaughter of the actor Norman Rodway and the cousin of the novelist Jennifer Johnston. Coming from such a background, Fitzgerald feels sympathy with the former artist's model Topaz in the first film adaptation of Smith's novel. Not only is Topaz's influence over her husband threatened by his writer's block, but also by the arrival of another woman who claims to understand him better. "Topaz lives to inspire, so she feels a failure. It's important that her pathos and tragedy are seen; it would be too easy not to take her seriously," says Fitzgerald.

Coincidentally, the BBC2 drama Love Again shows Monica Jones, chief sultana in Larkin's harem of women and the inspiration for his first published collection of poems, facing exactly the same dilemma as Topaz when a younger rival comes along. Just to add to the parallels, both roles required the kind of thrillingly deep voice that often has Fitzgerald being addressed as "Sir" by mistake on the phone. "I have an unusual larynx; when I auditioned at RADA, they thought I had nodes on my throat, but it's just my natural voice and it's always been this way," she says.

Although she was the right wand-like shape for Topaz, Fitzgerald bulks up impressively as Monica Jones. Fitzgerald plays Monica from the ages of 32 to 62, quite a feat for a 35-year-old actress who still looks no older in real life than when she made her debut more than a decade ago with Hear My Song and The Camomile Lawn.

The quintessential man's woman, Monica shared Larkin's right-wing saloon-bar politics, awesome drinking ability and taste for smut. "Her story was quite tragic," says Fitzgerald, "but I was struck by the way she had no self-pity. She was pretty sexy and liberated, and there was a spirit there that I wanted to catch. I get bored with our political correctness; I find it irritating, dreary and lacking in imagination. Larkin wrote some silly, harmless little schoolboy stuff, which they call pornography but which wasn't offensive to women."

Fitzgerald learnt to shed both physical and emotional inhibitions during her training at London's Drama Centre, once remarking, "I don't have a problem with nudity and I never have." Yet she admits she was pleased that Love Again was directed by a woman, Susanna White, especially when it came to the bed-scene between Larkin and Monica. "You feel very safe and I knew there was an empathy," she explains. "I could talk honestly to Susanna if something was difficult. I have never felt exploited in the past, but I think if you're a male director, you are curious about how women are in those situations. And generally people are curious about sex."

She once flippantly described her image as "posh totty", but there's more depth to Fitzgerald than that. She played Antigone in Declan Donnellan's Old Vic production, Ophelia to Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet in the Almeida Theatre production and Blanche DuBois in Streetcar opposite her husband John Sharian, even though she seems too much of a free spirit to join the National or the RSC. And despite her beauty, she's too much of a maverick for Hollywood. "I've had fun in LA but I haven't engaged with it somehow; I find it quite scary," she admits .

Sharian, who has reverted to his full name of John Shahnazarian to pursue a parallel career as a director, has already directed Fitzgerald in The Snatching Of Bookie Bob, based on a Damon Runyon story. "John has more fun now that acting is not his sole focus; he likes being at the helm," she explains. It's an attitude Fitzgerald can empathise with; so much does she relish the role of Muse that she's now hoping to play it in real life by developing a more creative career as a producer. So far she hasn't got further than a short film, A Family Man; her planned film version of Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, has come to nothing. She continues to choose challenging acting projects yet there's a restless intelligence about Fitzgerald that makes her rebel against being a mere hired hand. As she puts it, "I'm interested in life in general and not just acting; I don't think you can offer any value creatively otherwise."

'I Capture the Castle' goes on general release on 9 May. 'Love Again' is on BBC2 in July