Hotel Rwanda's Sophie Okonedo on turning 50 and playing Cleopatra opposite Ralph Fiennes

‘Because I live out of London and don’t see people very often, I had a lot of time just with the text, reading over and over and over,’ she says, as we talk in the theatre’s café over cups of coffee, while the late summer rain lashes down on the Southbank. She is dressed for the weather in a mustard-yellow jumper, black jeans and trainers.

For the past few weeks Okonedo has been arriving on her bicycle a couple of hours before rehearsals start, to warm up and prepare to become Cleopatra. Every morning, cycling over Waterloo Bridge towards the National from Clerkenwell – where she is staying while she’s in town – she is hit with a pang of pride. ‘I literally, on my first day, welled up. When I was at drama school it was like if you’d got here you’d made it. I mean, this building…’

She wipes her eyes. ‘I don’t go around like this all the time,’ she says, apologising. ‘I think it’s because I’m so emotional when I’m rehearsing. I just feel like all my skin is peeled off as soon as I walk in.’ 

She almost comes across like a wide-eyed ingénue about to appear in her first major show. In fact, Okonedo celebrated her 50th birthday last month, and has barely been out of work since she left Rada nearly 30 years ago. Her career has been impressively varied.

Okonedo has a whole host of acclaimed film and TV roles to her name – in 2005 she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for playing Tatiana Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda.

Two years later a Golden Globe nomination for the BBC miniseries Tsunami: The Aftermath, and a Bafta nomination in 2010 for the BBC’s Criminal Justice. Her first stint at the National was in 1999 playing Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, and since then she has made meaty leading roles her bread and butter, including appearances on Broadway as Ruth Younger in A Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington, and as Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible opposite Ben Whishaw.

Few British actors can say they have had a rave review from an American president, but when she was in A Raisin in the Sun, Barack Obama came backstage during the interval to tell her how much he had enjoyed her performance. 

And her star just seems to keep rising. She is being asked to do more now, she says, than ever before. ‘I’d love to say it was planned but it wasn’t, it’s been twisty turny,’ she says. ‘Weirdly enough, I thought as I got older I would get less, but over the past few years I’ve been offered more than I could ever do.’ 

It helps, she says, that the industry has changed a lot since she started out in the early 1990s, with more roles finally opening up for women over 40. ‘There has been so much in the press about it that I think it has forced a change. I also think that as you get older, there are just fewer of you around. A lot of people, I started with have just dropped off, not because they weren’t good actors, but because they couldn’t make a living.’

Also her Jewish-Nigerian heritage and north-west London upbringing means she doesn’t fit easily into the boxes the acting world likes to put people in. Not to mention the fact that she is one of those women who is fiendishly difficult to pin an age on, with perfect skin and an athletic frame that make her look years younger.

‘If I think about the last three jobs I’ve done on television and in film, they are completely different. So I don’t know what category I’m in now. Some are much younger than me, some older.’ 

The only child of a Jewish Pilates teacher and a civil servant father (who left when she was five), Okonedo grew up on the Chalkhill estate in Wembley. Her mother brought her up on her own, with occasional help from her parents – who would take their young granddaughter to synagogue with them (although they weren’t particularly religious, she says). ‘There weren’t many black Jewish girls there,’ she jokes. ‘I must have really stuck out.’

It is a tense time for British Jews, as allegations of anti-Semitism continue to plague Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, while many families are choosing simply to leave the country altogether, no longer feeling welcome here. I ask if the events of the past few months have been on her mind. ‘I’m not going to get into it right now,’ she replies, her face briefly hardening. ‘That’s for another interview.’

It was while watching the Royal Variety Performance, aged seven, that she first decided she wanted to act. ‘They did a little segment of Annie and there was a girl playing one of the kids in the home who looked like me, and I thought, “Right, that’s what I’m doing.” I suppose it made me feel that it was a possibility that I could do that. When you’re really young you don’t think about colour so much.’

Okonedo has a daughter Aoife, 21, from a relationship with the Irish film editor Eoin Martin; they separated when Aoife was young. (She also has two stepchildren, aged 15 and 19 with her husband, who she doesn’t talk about in interviews.)

Aoife had, she thinks, a very different experience of growing up as a mixed-race girl in London. ‘My generation will often talk about what culture they’re from or what colour they are. Aoife never mentions it. When she talked about a friend I was unaware of what colour they were or what culture they were from until they walked through the door. I think it’s less in their mind, which is lovely.

‘It was so different growing up in the ’80s, everyone was talking about it all the time. And not always in a bad way. Sometimes it was great to be able to say “my father’s from Africa”. But with the younger generation the influences are all so mixed that the cultures are less separated.’

As a child, the idea that she might one day become an award-winning actress might have seemed far-fetched had it not been for her mother. ‘If anyone looked at me, a child growing up in Wembley, they would think you haven’t got a hope in hell’s chance of going that way. But my mum has always been a very positive person and I had the feeling I could sort of do anything. Even now I can do anything on the stage and she’ll go “Ooh fantastic, brilliant, best ever.” I mean I can really do no wrong.’

These days, with her children old enough that she doesn’t need to worry about being away for weeks on end on foreign shoots, she feels more free to pick and choose roles. Though it has to be a pretty great offer to entice her away from her Sussex vegetable patch for long – she moved out of London with her husband three years ago.

When she takes work now, it’s because it’s an offer she can’t refuse or a good friend has asked her to come on board. ‘It’s so different now, I’m really free, other than the fact that I just love being at home. I love where I live. There are cows when I look out my window.

‘[At the moment] I’m here four nights a week and then I go home for three days. The way things are now, it’s just absolutely perfect.’

Recently, actor Toni Collette, a pal (with whom she starred in Tsunami), ran her up and asked if she’d play her therapist in the BBC TV series Wanderlust. Created by playwright Nick Payne, the show follows Collette’s character Joy, a relationship counsellor who tries to resuscitate her own marriage and, crucially, her sex life. It’s full of honest, brilliantly observed, fumbled midlife sex scenes, which will raise eyebrows and spark conversation between couples up and down the country.

Okonedo has a supporting role in it, but she couldn’t resist the chance to work with Collette. ‘I would rarely miss an opportunity to work with Toni because she is not only a stunning actress, she’s also the best fun you could ever have with someone. She brings the party. 

‘With Wanderlust I just thought, “Oh yeah, I’ll definitely do that.” There is one episode where it’s just us two in a room having a therapy session.’

Despite a bevy of famous friends (she admits her five closest friends are in the business), she celebrated turning 50 last month not with a big, flashy party – the mere idea of it makes her guffaw – but on a cycling tour of Suffolk her husband surprised her with. ‘I said, I don’t want a surprise party, especially when I’m in the middle of rehearsals. I don’t really like holding parties. I feel too stressed that everyone’s having a good time. The cycling tour was great.’

She is fully embracing 50, then, and seems refreshingly relaxed about it. She doesn’t push herself to stay in shape, only working out if it’s with her personal-trainer daughter – ‘a way to make her see me’ – and doesn’t feel any pressure to stave off the ageing process.

‘My career hasn’t really been like that, I haven’t felt any pressure to look or be a certain way. I’ve never really played glamorous parts, apart from Cleopatra, she’s about as glamorous as they get. Let’s just say costumes could be disappearing at the end of this run.’

Antony and Cleopatra opens on Thursday; to be broadcast live to cinemas worldwide on 6 December