INTERVIEW
Blythe spirit
Since Taggart, Blythe Duff has won huge acclaim for her work on stage. A new role this summer looks set to enhance her reputation even further
WORDS ANNA BURNSIDE IMAGES EOIN CAREY W
‘I needed to remind myself why I want to be in this business, not because I was disenchanted but because I wanted to do more than 21 years of Taggart‘
hen Taggart, the long-running detective series that subsidised Scotland’s theatrical community for many years, came to an end in 2010, Blythe Duff faced a choice. After a double-decade
shift in the long leather coat of DI Jackie Reid, should she sit back and live off the repeat fees? Or was it time to hang up her ID badge with pride and see what else was out there? Given that Duff will be spending the next couple of months on stage
in Edinburgh and London, playing a central role in the Edinburgh International Festival’s James plays – a trilogy of works by Rona Munro about three generations of Stewart kings who ruled Scotland in the 15th century – it’s safe to say that she chose option two. It turns out that, when the network finally decided there had been
quite enough murder and mayhem on the streets of Glasgow, Duff was happy to let the character go. There is nothing in her career – or her life – that she regrets, and ‘Jackie Reid sits in the middle of the past 51 years like some big incredible gift’. The Taggart legacy was partly financial. ‘I couldn’t have afforded to
do theatre for the past four years if I hadn’t had the backing the series brought me,’ she says during a break in rehearsals for James I. ‘When people ask if I miss the show, I tell them I don’t but my bank manager does. I was on TV when it paid a good wage, had brilliant repeat fees and the contract stated the amount of work you had to do.’ Thanks to the miracles of digital television, DI Reid et al are still
sorting out the drugs neds of Govan and the dodgy moneylenders of Easterhouse on the Alibi channel but the returns are, she laughs, ‘getting thinner’. Happily, she and her husband Tom, a former police officer, were ‘sensible’ about money when they had it. The actress’s mother, who brought up her kids in East Kilbride without having much of the folding stuff to splash around, describes this as ‘not going off and buying fur and diamonds’. Duff waves her hand across the room, a dingy production office
decorated in the style of an unloved student flat. ‘Could you imagine me walking about Govan in furs? My mother has this notion of an actress who would swan around, Greta Garbo style, dragging her fur coat behind her.’ In fact, Duff
is wearing stretchy workout 48
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Image: Blythe Duff follows up last year’s Fringe hit Ciara with a meaty role in the Festival’s James plays.
trousers and trainers. Together with the rest of the cast she is currently rehearsing in Film City,
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