Olivia Williams

When I last wrote to you I was embarking on a 12-week run of a play in the West End, extolling the virtues of theatre over film, the self-applied slap over the hour and a half in the make-up trailer, the warm applause of a living, breathing audience over the bored nose-picking of a weary film crew…

Well, I’d just like to make a little correction. I have just started filming again, and have found that what this Tigger likes best is to be picked up from her doorstep by a handsome man in a Merc, deposited half-asleep into a warm trailer where people apply make-up and a rather fetching blonde wig, and only having to remember a maximum of four lines at a time. I’m not saying that I won’t crave the Boris Bike ride down Shaftesbury Avenue again very soon, I’m just saying Hello Movies, It’s good to be back.

I decided to go temporarily blonde for Now Is Good as I am playing Dakota Fanning’s mother, and she is improbably, but naturally, very, very blonde. I have always been too chicken to reach for the peroxide bottle after an early skirmish with it in my teens that left me looking like a Muppet – not exactly the “highlights” I was trying to achieve but rather a dander of fluffy broken hair that waved in the wind like a cornfield. So for this movie I have a fabulous wig.

I mentioned late Debbie Harry to the hair designer, and we have gone a little more Meg Ryan, but it has put me in the perfect position to observe from a disinterested brunette point of view whether or not blondes have more fun, and it is my considered opinion that they do.

Not that my brunette life has been dreary. I arrived on set to overhear Paddy Considine trying to explain to Dakota who the Milk Tray Man was, and I was able to throw in the fact that I have dated the Milk Tray Man – not the original one from our childhood, but the Comeback Milk Tray Man from the mid-Nineties.

Dakota remained puzzled but Paddy was suitably impressed, so I explained the next step in the game, which would be to leave the Milk Tray Man and another former beau, the present Foreign Minister of Poland, in a room together, and see how long it took them to work out what they have in common…

I would like to think, as I write this, that I am preparing for my next role, Eleanor Roosevelt, who among myriad other duties and passions, wrote a daily syndicated newspaper column from 1935 to 1962.

After some slightly undignified begging and pleading I have secured the part of this great woman of the 20th century – I admit she’s a rather minor figure in a film about her distant cousin Daisy Suckley, but ferreting around in her writing and biographies has been an end in itself.

After years of haggling over camera angles to try and live up to present standards of beauty, it is a relief to play Eleanor who was too busy drafting the Declaration of Human Rights to disguise her several chins.

The director is very anti-wig, so I have dyed my hair grey and been fitted for some Eleanor teeth, as they were so much part of the smile, which was so much part of her.

I have had a fitting with the maestro of movie teeth Chris Lyons at Fangs FX, whose dental surgery is not decorated with dog-eared copies of Hello, but framed messages of love from just about every movie star you ever saw – all of whom seem to have donned false teeth at some point in their career. It seems they are as vital to an Oscar nomination as overcoming a disability or fighting the Nazis. I realise I have been missing a trick.

It is important to get used to speaking with my Eleanor teeth in, so I’ve brought them on holiday to Tuscany. I’ve become so used to them that I forget they are in, and some of our recent acquaintances here are a bit puzzled by my inconsistent appearance. If I could just whisk them out with a flourish, we could all laugh about it, but taking them out involves a rather obscene two-handed struggle and trails of saliva, so I just leave them in and let them wonder.

I have been attempting to relive my youth, when Merchant Ivory and Room with a View made Tuscany the Ibiza of my generation.

I came here to get high on the Boboli gardens and an unrestored Perugino, and it is a relief to see that Chianti-shire is still moving with the Renaissance groove.

Listening to the unaccompanied chants of Orlando Lassus in the cathedral of Pieve and staying at La Foce, a beautiful villa and estate that was restored to a kind of feudal idyll by Iris Origo in the Thirties, it is possible to forget that Berlusconi and the “bunga bunga” generation have redefined the female role as one where crawling around in a cage being sprayed with foam, wearing little more than a sequin, is considered entertaining daytime television.

Dignity was a word beloved of Eleanor and Iris. I know I had some somewhere. I think it’s in the suitcase I left going around and around the carousel at Fiumicino airport.