Britain’s Big-Time Sensation

Getty Images The 6’1” Janet McTeer is a force of nature in HBO’s Into the Storm. She spoke with Rachel Syme about her height, aging in the theater, and female solidarity.

When Janet McTeer steps onto the red carpet of the Tony Awards next week, looking stunning—and she will—be reassured by this: It was hell to find the dress. It’s not that designers weren’t clamoring to clothe the Best Actress nominee (and 1997 winner), who earned the nod this year for her role as the sullied yet proud Mary Queen of Scots in the Broadway drama Mary Stuart. It’s that McTeer stands at 6’1’’, making her physical presence as formidable—and hard to contain—as her acting talent.

“I describe myself as Michael Phelps with tits,” she jokes, tucking into a plate of sautéed leeks at a Midtown brasserie. “I like vintage stuff, but at this height, finding dresses that are long enough means you have to get them specially made. And also, when you’re working as hard as I do, it gets to the point where the last thing I want to think about is what to wear. By end of the week, we’re almost completely dead; I’m working about 100 hours, eight shows a week, and I never miss one. It’s ridiculous!”

“Life as a woman is harder than life as a man, it just is, in every way it’s harder.”

Normally, listening to an actress cluck away about how hard she works is tiresome. We’ve all heard the humble gripes: The theater is a grind, movie sets are dreary and dragging, looking glamorous is actually a dirty job—but when McTeer talks about her schedule or styling woes, it is delightful. She has one of those raspy, world-weary, authoritative voices that belong to the best British actresses working today—Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren—making all of her little quibbles sound droll and conspiratorial. She is a force, in height and personality, even as she sits in jeans and no makeup; the kind of expressive woman that one might describe as “fierce,” if Tyra Banks and fashion reality shows hadn’t drained the word of all meaning.

That McTeer is a more obscure name than Mirren or Thompson in the United States is due to a few factors—she’s younger (47), and she has devoted most of her life’s work to the stage, appearing in countless London productions and A Doll’s House on Broadway, which resulted in her first Tony Award. She has done most of her television work in the U.K., appearing on BBC period dramas like Sense & Sensibility and Portrait of a Marriage. Her biggest screen role in the United States—as Mary Jo Walker, a mother constantly skipping town with her 12-year-old daughter, in the 1999 Sundance hit Tumbleweeds—earned McTeer an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win, but it is today, 10 years later, that McTeer’s career is finally hitting a fever pitch in New York.

This month especially, McTeer’s talent seems ubiquitous; the recent reviews of Mary Stuart have been phenomenal, she’s up for the Tony again, and this month, she stars as Clementine (Clemmie) Churchill, Winston’s loyal wife, in Into the Storm, an HBO miniseries focusing on Britain in WWII. The fact that McTeer can embody two of the most iconic women in U.K. history at once, and give them both completely separate treatments, is a testament to her skill—she even seems to be able to change her height with each role. McTeer’s Clemmie, as opposed to her booming misfit of a Queen Mary, appears meek and steadfast, happy to play second fiddle to her husband. “She came from a different generation,” McTeer says of Clemmie. “She believed very firmly in duty, in a good way—looking after him. She didn’t look for applause. She wasn’t a showy person. But he very much valued her opinion on everything. It was very much a partnership between them, a very good partnership.”