Now Wee Are Two

‘WOULD it surprise you to learn that at Patricia Arquette’s Malibu beach house there’s a stainless steel toilet, with stainless steel bowl, stainless steel cistern and stainless steal seat?

Does knowing something like that make you warm to her? Is Arquette now just like you and me?

We ask because a toilet is the showbiz magazine’s literary equivalent of a Northern accent. It’s earthy and unthreatening. We understand what its purpose is but we wouldn’t want to show it off.

Unless you’re Arquette, or Anna Friel. Dashing into a Soho eaterie, looking “pink-cheeked and Rubenesque” (in her native Rochdale, she’d be flushed and overweight), Friel pants her breathless apology.

“I couldn’t get a taxi,” she explains. “I’ve run all the way up from Regent Street – d’you mind if I go to the loo?”

Of course, OK! is too polite to say that it does mind. And too refined to stare when Friel, returned from the lavatory, shows them her brace.

OK! says Friel had “pregnancy tumours” between her teeth, causing her two front teeth to part. “Which I didn’t mind that much,” says Friel, “but everyone else was like, ‘No, you’re a leading woman now, they don’t have gaps!”

Madonna may beg to differ. But other leading women – and we think of the likes of Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Condoleezza Rice – may not.

“The brace is horrific,” says Friel, “really painful, like a vice.” She says she’ll apologise if anything gets caught in it.

“Just give me a little wink and I promise I’ll go straight to the bathroom! I’ve become incredibly paranoid about it. But I’ve had a baby!”

There’s that bathroom mention again, keeping “near A-list” Friel’s normal-girl-at-heart credentials dulled and approachable.

And it marks the introduction of her child into the interview. “She’s gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!” says the new mum. “People say, ‘How old’s your daughter? Six months?’ I say, ‘No, she’s only seven weeks!’”

And suddenly we too feel a need to make a mad dash to the loo. Our poor bladder can only take the sound of so much gushing…’

Posted: 10th, October 2005 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink