The talented; Miss Ripley

She's casting off the smart-talking, wise-cracking image of Jen in Cold Feet to play a psychopath in Green-Eyed Monster. So why is ex- convent girl, Fay Ripley, who began her career playing prostitutes, turning her back on the best drama on TV?

FAY Ripley takes a big suck on the squeezy sport-top bottle of water in her hand and says, "Well, whoring has been very good to me, you know." I nod sympathetically and lean forward with a reassuring social worker smile on my face. "Do tell, Fay," I say gently. "I'm listening."

She sighs. "It's quite simple - I specialised in prostitution for a while." I can see the splash headline now: Cold Feet Fay's Hooker Hell. How could Jimmy Nesbitt and John Thomson have done this to her? The scum.

"I was a whore until I got the part of Jen in Cold Feet," she confesses. I catch sight of the shame in her eyes, and have to turn away - it's all too painful.

"I was Whore 1 or Whore 2 usually, or sometimes Un-named Whore or Whore with No Name. I played a whore in Frankenstein too and got killed by Robert De Niro, but Kenneth Brannagh cut it out of the film and nobody saw it. It was my best whoring ever though, I thought.

"It was marvellous being a whore - I loved it, it paid the rent. But Cold Feet got me out of prostitution, although I'm sure I'll go back to it one day."

Damn. A fake whore. She was acting. It's not a tabloid scoop after all. That kind of takes the edge off the interview with the Talented Ms Ripley, who's hooked up with me outside the awfully boho Lux cinema in Hoxton Square in London.

Although she's meant to be here to plug her new BBC drama - Green- Eyed Monster, which is on tonight - I spend the whole interview thinking how her name reminds me of a slightly effete muscle-man. It's most disturbing, but not as disturbing as what you are going to read next.

This may be too upsetting for some of you so it might be best to just skip the next four paragraphs. Ready? Here goes ... Fay Ripley is leaving Cold Feet, the so-good-it-will-seriously-damage-your-life- as-you-will-never-leave-the-house-again soap/sitcom/thirtysomething drama that has me addicted like a smack-hungry slave. Ah, it's terrible. How can the funny one leave us like this? But it's true, the fourth series is in the can and she's off after the first two episodes.

"I can't actually tell you how I leave - well I can ... but I'm not allowed. Actually, I have no idea why I'm not allowed, as it's nothing major, and there's nothing they can do to me is there? I mean, I've left so they can't sack me, can they?

"Anyway, it's all very logical. I don't die or anything. But Jen really had to bugger off - I mean she'd done it all, hadn't she ...?"

She tails off for a moment as a beer delivery truck reverses up the street making a horrible beepy noise and a cement lorry, trapped behind it, revs its engine. "Oh f**k off, please," she says imploringly in the direction of the two drivers. "Anyway, yeah ... so she's had the affairs, the babies, the broken marriage, the whole shebang. Poor girl, god love her."

Green-Eyed Monster is a considerable departure for Fay. In place of the ditzy, loveable Jen, she plays a truly nasty psycho trailer trash bitch queen, who gets obsessed with her next door neighbours, leading to rather unpleasant consequences for all concerned.

"Well, most of my fan base is in prison anyway, so I sort of had a handle on her," she says. "Yes, the men who like me seem to be all behind bars."

"Any particular prison?" I ask.

"No, no ... they are quite well spread geographically. My friends can't understand why I write back to them - but god love the prisoners, they've tried - although with me I imagine they've written to everyone on the cast list and just thrown me in too as an afterthought.

"There have been a few rather odd letters - not dirty ones, just a bit ..." She makes a shuddery motion with her body like doing pelvic thrusts sitting down. "So I'm sometimes not that keen to have personal stuff like my picture and name or anything to do with me in the paper, because of ... well, you know ..."

"Parole?"

"Yes, parole is my main worry, I suppose. Them getting out, and that type of thing."

To help Fay get inside the head of the freakish weirdo she plays in Green-Eyed Monster, the BBC enlisted the services of a coroner to help focus her mind on the general evil of human beings.

"We had this coroner who'd worked on loads of famous cases," she says excitedly. "Oh shit, what was he called? Peter - that's it ... lovely Peter the coroner, that's what I called him. No idea what his second name was, but he had worked on the OJ case, so there you go.

"He was a bit odd. He showed us loads of horrible pictures of dead people. I didn't want to see them. I'm an actress, I can play mad - I don't need a pie chart to work out what dead people look like. It was nasty-nasty-yuk-yuk.

"God knows why he showed us those bloody things, but he did and I squealed and ran into the toilet for an hour and had a nervous breakdown. So it didn't really help."

Unlike the Essex girl horror she acts in Green-Eyed Monster or the wise-cracking Mancunian from Cold Feet, Fay Ripley is actually a rather posh lady from Surrey. "My dad wanted me to marry someone from advertising and go to finishing school," she says to my total disbelief.

"But I ran away to London and went to study drama with the spirit of independence surging through my young veins at 17. To survive, I started working as a clown called Miss Chief. Lots of parents didn't get that joke, but the kids did ..."

"What joke?"

"Miss Chief. Miss Chief ... it means mischief, eh? See?"

"Oh right, I just thought it was a crap name ... and then what happened?"

"Well, it was fine if I had parties for three-year-olds, but if anyone else was there, it just didn't go well. I once had to do a stint in a Student Union. It was a pub full of pissed-up male students and they wanted the clown. I don't want to say that it was a frightening situation, but my red nose did get pulled off and my curly orange wig was no more. Frankly, I had to flee for my life.

"Actually, my kids' parties were a bit rubbish really. I love kids so I was good at the games and stuff, but when it came to the technical hardcore magic and even rudimentary clowning skills I was shit. I think I would have made a good nanny. Once the kids were above five they'd be like, 'You're rubbish, that's rubbish, get off. I can see where the scarf is, I can see where you have the flower and you haven't even got a rabbit. That is rubbish and you are pants. Go home'. But it paid me through drama school."

Fay has just finished a comedy drama series called I Saw You due out in January after it's award-winning pilot screened earlier this year, where she plays a single mum and singer. She also gets to act alongside her hunky homme of an Australian boyfriend, Daniel Lapaine, who was in Muriel's Wedding. "He's not my boyfriend any longer, darling," she says. "We're getting married this month in Italy ... ooooh! But it'll be a very wee affair. My only worry on the show was that we might hate each other. You know how different you are at work to the person you are at home. I thought, 'Shit, what if I hate him, or he hates me?' - but it worked. I know it's annoying and smug and happy and all that bollocks, but we loved it."

It was Daniel who led Fay into the cruel world of showbusiness, American-style. He's a lot more famous in the States than he is in the UK, and during a short trip to be with him while he was working, Fay was persuaded to take a trip to a US casting director just to see what the crack was.

"Oh Jesus, it was really bad," she says, her head banging against her arm resting on the table. "I thought I'd go and see what they - the Americans - made of me. Cold Feet's currently airing in the States, and doing very well thank you, which, it should be pointed out, is after they - the Americans - tried to remake it twice. They made it utterly shit and it totally flopped.

"My character was like a bloody model, totally thin with a big blonde hair do and she was all, 'Hi there!' Bitch. But frankly, who cares, as it was rubbish."

Digression over, she's back on track.

"Anyway, so my trip to the casting director was before our Cold Feet was a success. I arrived at this casting guy's office and he kept me waiting an hour and a half and when he walked in, honestly, he looked like there was a horrible smell in the room, his nose turned up and looking at me.

"It was so humiliating. I'd sat there for ages and I should have just left really. Clearly he didn't know what to do with me. I appeared to baffle him. I could tell by his face that he was thinking, 'Why on earth are you here? What am I going to cast you as, you rather funny looking English, slightly Jewish-looking and a bit Italiany, girl? You are no use to me whatsoever unless you lose at least three stone and have a leg operation ... are you mad?'

In fact, the words that came out of his mouth were even crueller: 'Do look us up again when you are in America - perhaps next year'. Actually, I've no ambition to break America ... luckily."

Irritatingly, Fay refuses to dish any dirt on her fellow co-stars in Cold Feet. She won't say if any of them slept together, she won't spill the beans over who she despises. In fact, for a women who has just finished filming a drama about hate, envy and all other manner of black passions, she is stubbornly, wickedly decent and wholesome.

"I'm happy to lay the myth to rest that we were all at dinner parties together all the time. We were just like work mates. We had the odd drink together but we didn't glam around. I think that stopped any total hatred setting in," she says.

"Hopefully, however, they will all be at each other's throats now that my shiny spirit, which held them all together, has gone."

I look up from the table, eyes wide, hoping against hope that she's about to be cruel.

"But of course I don't mean that - I'm sure they are all doing fine." Curses. She's being a decent person again.

"How do you hope the show will do now you are gone?"

"Hopefully, very badly ... I want it to crash and burn, oh yes."

"Yes? Really?"

"Nope."

"Aren't you ever nasty?"

"Not really. Nope."

"Don't you ever put on a fur coat and swan around going, 'Look at me, I'm brilliant I am. Buy me a car, get me a drink, do the hoovering?'"

"Yes, I've done that - but in fake fur and only in front of my bathroom mirror."

I don't know whether it's because everyone I know is really horrible, but Fay Ripley is actually nice. I know it's a terribly weedy word to use, but she really is nice, not in the drippy sense - after all she's a bad girl who swears, tells dirty jokes and drinks - but nice in the sense that she's just incapable, it seems, of being horrible about people.

Maybe it's because nothing bad has ever happened to her. "I don't think I've ever really had a nasty experience apart from the clown and the students of course. I'm sure nasty people do come from Surrey, but I never worked out who they were as everyone drove nice cars.

"The only nasty thing that's happened to me was my car got broken into not long after I moved in around here and the robber stole my CDs. He got S Club 7, Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland or some crap like that."

"Was he a gay robber?"

"Well, he did look very well dressed and quite toned. I couldn't see him trying to flog them down Brick Lane, let's put it that way."

"You must have bad things to say about school at least?" I ask her, sure that she must want to torture a teacher or draw a pentagram on the floor of the gym.

"Naah ... it was alright. I was sort of average. I have a mild case of dyslexia I think. I don't like saying I have it in case I don't and I'm actually being bogus, but when I'm reading a sentence the word at the end often ends up in the middle and I think, 'Oh hell, how did that get there?' So I must have it. I still get all sweaty palms and stuff when I have to sight-read a script. I have to ask to go out of the room so I can read it really slowly first before I come back in and do the audition.

"So at school, I'd just totter around not being bad enough to be bothered with by the teachers but then no one thought I was a genius either. In fact, 'cos of my reading, most people thought I was thick. Then - thank the stars - along came one great teacher, my drama teacher. I was doing some play or other and she said to me, 'Yeah, that's quite good, love'."

Her mouth hangs open and she puts on the voice Kathy Burke does when she's playing Perry on the Harry Enfield show.

"I was like, 'Thank you Miss ... oh it is good, isn't it, Miss? Maybe I'll go off now and do this for the rest of my bloody life, Miss'. Then your parents go 'Yeah, right'.

"Actually, they were quite supportive. Although my dad did want me to learn typing so I wouldn't starve. They'd come to Edinburgh and watch me bring Brecht to the people."

She sees me flinch involuntarily at the sound of Bertolt's name. "Don't you like Brecht?" she asks "No actually," I say. "I think he's shit."

"Hmm ... yeah, I think he's shit too. Weird."

"Anyway, you were in Edinburgh ... Yeah. Well I was ready for Edinburgh but it wasn't ready for me. I just wandered around like an arse from Surrey putting up posters for my poncey play and surely to God pissing off those poor people in that city who have to watch creatures like me do this every summer.

"My dad came and watched as I basically shouted and pointed at folk in the audience and then he said, 'Oh, excellent, love, you were really brilliant, but I didn't understand it ... and where were the jokes?'."

"Did you wear silver face make-up and do mime in the street?" I enquire.

"Yes I did. I'm sorry. See that is bad. Wait, I do have a bad trait. I'm bossy, and that's why I want to be a producer. My friends slip notes under the door saying, 'You are bossy, we hate you, leave us alone'. If I've got a video camera in my back garden, I start shouting at children for not remember their lines - they only have to remember Happy Birthday, for God's sake.

"I also wanted to be in the Communist Party when I was a kid, but I didn't join. I just got the newsagent to send the Morning Star to my dad's house to annoy him. Is that bad or what?"

Her lack of evil may have something to do with the rather unusual Catholic education she endured. This, I reason, probably instilled in her a dread of all things which could lead to feeling guilty. Her education was unusual in that not many convent girls are Protestants, as Fay is. But Fay's mum and dad happened to like the private girls' school down the road and didn't really care that the nuns were mortifying her mind with tales of the hell that awaited her if she didn't say 11 Hail Marys every morning and night.

"One time I just forgot. I was 11 and I was sure I was going to burn. It wasn't fair. I've been lumbered with the whole Catholic guilt thing, but I'm not even Catholic. I don't want the guilt, it's not right. I've nothing to feel guilty about. Thankfully, I didn't get beaten by the nuns, they were alright actually. Not that I'm saying that I hung out with them or anything..."

"Did you go to parties with them?"

"Yes. I'm so ashamed."

Fay finishes sucking the rest of the water out of the squeezy sport-top bottle and says:, "Shit, I have to get my laundry."

"Hang on, I have to ask your age," I say. "I'm sorry. I know it's very ungentlemanly of me."

"What is it with journalists? They obsess on age." She covers the mic on my dictaphone and hisses, "I'm 35." Then she lifts her hand and shouts into the machine: "I'm 25 ... no I'm not, I'm 23. And don't you f**king dare write me up as some Catholic, communist nutter whore. Byeee!"u Green-Eyed Monster is on BBC1, tonight, 9pm and 10.15pm. The new series of Cold Feet is on ITV from October

Copyright 2001
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