Tamsin Greig: 'I always think I'll never work again'

It has become a truth, to the point of cliche, that once most female actors hit their 40s, the parts start to dry up. Yet Tamsin Greig, 44, seems to be busier than ever. She has just finished starring in Episodes on BBC2 as Beverly, a British scriptwriter who moves to Los Angeles with her husband when their sitcom is bought by an American network, and is currently playing Jackie Goodman, the mother of two twenty–something sons, in the new comedy Friday Night Dinner. She is also waiting to hear if she has won a second Olivier award, this time for her role as the ruthless Hollywood agent in The Little Dog Laughed, the play that transferred from Broadway to the West End last year. The woman who popped up from time to time like a friend you haven't seen for ages – in Black Books, Green Wing, Love Soup and last year's British film Tamara Drewe – now seems a little inescapable. "Come the end of March, all the work will be out there and that's it, I'll be forgotten again. I always think I'll never work again." She takes a perfectly timed pause for a broad smile. "So what a lovely way to end your career."

Friday Night Dinner is writer and producer Robert Popper's portrait of his secular Jewish upbringing. Unless you're familiar with the concept of a Friday night dinner, it isn't an obviously "Jewish" comedy - with the exception of Tom Rosenthal, who plays the annoying younger brother, the cast isn't even Jewish. Greig, having been brought up an atheist, converted to Christianity when she was 30, around the same time her parents became ill. They died shortly afterwards. "It's deliberately not religious," Popper has said. "Also, I didn't want to make it a cliched Jewish sitcom with everyone going 'Oy vey!' all the time."

For a while, Greig looked like she was doomed to play hapless, single thirtysomethings. Had she been yearning to do something different? "Yes. I think I could only be that girl for so long, really," she says. "I think you have to grow up, and how brilliant that there are parts for women of that age. Doing Tamara Drewe and playing that character [the much down-trodden wife of the oily and monstrous novelist, Nicholas Hardiment], you think who would be interested in a middle-aged woman who had slightly let herself go? It's not sexy, it's not hip, but people are intrigued by it."

The other strand that seems to run through Greig's work, especially the comic roles, is a sense of melancholy. In person, it is there too, even though she is great company and quick to laugh, usually at herself. Within minutes of sitting down, Greig is talking about how often she is mistaken for a man. "I'm in a restaurant and the waiter goes, 'For you, sir?' They did it in front of my kids one time and the middle one said, 'They called you sir!' He couldn't decide whether to feel sorry for the person or be concerned about me." Another time, a toddler in the street pointed at Greig and shouted, "Man!" What can you do? I suppose you have to go along with it. "Yeah," she says, "or I could have pointed at the child and gone, 'Shithead!'"

Early in Greig's career, a theatre critic wrote that she looked like she had stepped out of a Goya painting. "I remember thinking, 'Ooh, I look like a painting'. Then I went and looked at a Goya painting …" She gives that great booming laugh. "Oh, OK."

Her face is all unusual planes and angles that shouldn't work, but somehow does, and makes her wonderful to look at. In 2008, though, after a performance of Gethsemane, David Hare's demolition of New Labour at the National Theatre, in which Greig played the home secretary, a woman came up to her and told her she should have Botox. "That's quite funny, isn't it?" she says, her eyes widening. Would she ever have anything done? "No! I'm an actor and I'm supposed to reflect real people. I think it's dishonourable to women, I think you just have to be the age you are and live with it. You have to just engage with the little deaths, otherwise we just don't know how to do the big death. I'm not saying these things are easy, or I do this lightly, but you have to make a proper decision about things."

Not that there has ever been any real pressure on her, she says. "I'm quite an odd little part of the Venn diagram. I'm not a movie star and beautiful in that way. I do an odd thing that's funny and sad, and my face and my old body can take that. Someone like Gemma Arterton [Tamara Drewe] is so beautiful, and I know she has had incredible pressure put on her by Hollywood, and it is magnificent for someone like her to stand up and say, 'You know what, this is my shape'. And she's a size 10! It's madness."

How close is Greig to her character in Episodes? Beverly is exasperated by the Los Angeles fakery; was it the same for Greig when she was filming there? "There is an element of 'everyone is so positive and energetic', which is wonderful to be around, but you wonder what the truth is," she says. "You have to become very discerning about what people mean when they say, 'You are the most magnificent person I've ever met'." She hoots with laughter and scrunches up her face, saying, "Really? That can't actually be true, can it? You have to keep your head about you quite a lot. Someone said to me LA is a bit like death by encouragement."

After university, ("I couldn't get into drama school," she says) Greig took a typing course and temped for a while, until she got the part of Debbie Aldridge in the Archers in 1991, the long-running role that meant she didn't have to become a full-time secretary. As Greig's career blossomed, so Debbie has spent increasing amounts of time in Hungary.

Greig jokes that the more children she has had – she has three with her husband, the actor Richard Leaf – the more work has come her way. "So I should just carry on having them," she says. Has it been difficult bringing them up and having the career she's had? "It's virtually impossible," she says, laughing. "I cannot step into any day without help. I have a fantastically engaged husband who is very present for his children and our family life. We've got a brilliant nanny, other help from parents-in-law, godparents, friends. Also, I've had incredible women around me in the business. Verity Lambert [the television producer] had no children of her own and was perhaps not conscious of the problems [facing working mothers], but she just wanted to have women in the workplace and make it possible for them." When Greig was filming Love Soup and Green Wing, she was breastfeeding, "so it was in my contract that I could go from set at 11am and 3pm to breastfeed, and she made that happen."

Other female actors haven't been as lucky, she acknowledges. "I know women at work who don't talk about having a baby because they don't want to upset the apple cart, but unless people know what the problems are, why should they engage with it? I don't think it's just a lack of women [producers] because I've also known women in the business who are very obstructive."

It was Greig's husband who encouraged her to take a job at the RSC in 2006 when their children were young. "I said no when they offered it," she says. "My family was very young and I couldn't bear the guilt of leaving them for months. He said: 'Of course you don't have to do this job, but there are actors out there who would kill for this.' He said it was doable, and, of course, he was absolutely right." She hadn't done theatre for a decade, but her role as Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing won her an Olivier award and it changed her career – she wasn't just the likable actress who did comedies and cosy Sunday night telly; suddenly she started to be considered for meatier theatre roles and taken far more seriously.

"I did a David Hare play at the National, and the Yasmina Reza play [The God of Carnage] with Ralph Fiennes. All these doors start to swing open. Imagine if I had just gone, 'No I'm too afraid to do it'?"