'You've Only Got One Life And You Must Make The Most Of It'

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To millions around the world she is Downton Abbey’s housemaid Anna Bates, with viewers in over 100 countries gripped by roller-coaster storylines that finally ended happily when she and husband John greeted the birth of a baby boy. But there is much more to actress Joanne Froggatt than life in television’s most famous servants’ quarters.

Since Downton finished, Joanne has played Victorian poisoner Mary Ann Cotton in ITV’s Dark Angel, and co-starred with Tom Riley in Starfish, about a young couple battling to keep their family together when the husband contracts a rare and brutal disease. And on the rain-swept day I visit the Kent seaside town of Deal, Joanne is busy filming her latest role in a new thriller from the writers of The Missing.

In Liar, she plays Laura, a dedicated teacher not long out of a relationship and unsure about getting back on the dating scene. Welsh heart-throb Ioan Gruffudd co-stars as Andrew, a renowned surgeon whose son is a pupil at Laura’s school. An initial attraction leads to a date, but neither fully realises the far-reaching consequences of that meeting. Both have different versions of what happened.

Before I can ask Joanne, who turned 37 in August, about the series, I watch her film a sequence in which she walks along the Deal seafront, buffeted by a freezing wind. How does she keep warm during so many retakes? ‘Heatpads!’ she explains, when we meet up. ‘They’re the size of teabags and I have eight of them under my costume. A trick of the trade.’

For obvious reasons she can’t reveal too much about the plot, only to say how excited she is to be appearing in her first ‘real traditional thriller’. ‘Except it’s not traditional at all really,’ she says correcting herself. ‘But it gives you what you’d expect from that genre.’