It is difficult to believe that Finty Williams is 27 years old and the mother of a
two and a half year-old son, Sam. For a start, she is less than 5ft tall and
wears her hair in a sweet, urchin style. Then there is the fact that she still lives
with her parents, the actors Dame Judi Dench and Michael Williams, shuttling
between their homes in Hampstead, north London, and Sussex. Naturally,
when things go wrong, they are always her first port of call.
Last week, for instance, she "stupidly" poisoned herself with some prawn noodles that had been sitting in her bag for days. "I was as sick as a dog," she wails at the memory. "I was like, 'I'm so ill,' and Mummy was like 'OK, I'll send a car for you, don't worry.'
"I don't plan ahead a lot. I tend not to see past the end of next week. I hear my mother talking about what she's doing in 2001 and I can't get my head round that."
Yet, as she sits backstage at the theatre where she is soon to make her second West End appearance, smoking and gulping her way through a bottle of mineral water, it becomes obvious that Finty has recently had to grow up very quickly. For the first time in her life, it is she who has had to provide emotional support for her parents, rather than the other way round.
Tomorrow, she will open in Ray Cooney's revival of William Douglas-Home's political comedy, The Chiltern Hundreds. At one point, the script requires her to weep - something that, by her own admission, she has been doing quite a lot of recently. The night she heard that her father had cancer, for instance, she "couldn't stop crying".
Finty was preparing to attend the première of the film Rogue Trader with her friend Anna Friel, whom she met in New York while Friel and Finty's mother were both starring in Broadway transfers of British plays. As they put on their party frocks at a hotel in Leicester Square, the two girls were in happy, giggly mood. Finty called her father to find out how he was coping with a bout of pleurisy. It was then that he told her the doctors had discovered cancer.
"I wasn't very brave that night," she says. "But Anna was brilliant - she's good at hugging. I completely adore her.
"You hear the word cancer and you always expect the worst. But I'm not going to do any good if I sit around and mope; it would be totally selfish. It's not up to me to be upset. How do you know how long people have to live? It's all to do with positive outlook and not having too much stress - getting on with things and not letting it beat you. Of course, you can give up, but your body would just shut down and not fight it."
Until now, no member of the family has spoken about Williams's illness. When Dame Judi heard the news, five months ago, she abandoned her award-winning Broadway role in David Hare's Amy's View in order to be with her husband. But now, both she and Williams have thrown themselves into work - he is making a series of Radio 4 dramas, she is on film location in Aberdeen. Perhaps because of this long-maintained silence, his beloved only child appears vague about which type of cancer it is that Williams has.
"I've no idea," she says. "I have very much left it up to Mummy and Daddy to see the specialists together; I've tried to be the emotional back-up."
Eventually, however, she admits that her father has a tumour on his lung. "I am not being deliberately evasive," she says. "The story is complicated because the tumour on his lung is not a primary source. At the moment, the doctors can't find the primary source. He's been investigated so many times, had tubes put into him and all sorts of things. He's seen lots of specialists and herbalists and he's taking lots of vitamins. He's into homoeopathy big-time - my mother and I got into all that, rescue remedies, fashionable things like arnica. There has been no surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy yet.
"But Daddy looks fantastic, better than he has ever looked. He's going great guns: he has no plans to have any time off, he's just carrying on. The three of us were all worried about each other, in the way any family would be. That stems from Daddy. He's been so brilliant and strong and positive about the whole thing that you can't help but be the same, too. He's cut down a lot on smoking - masses, in fact. I'm trying hard to stop myself."
And, with that, she looks down ruefully at the cigarette she has just lit up. Her father's Roman Catholic faith, she says, has been a great solace to him. "If you've got a faith which is that strong, it can go two ways: you can lose it or it can be strengthened. In my father's case, it's been strengthened."
Besides, she says, her father is much more likely to worry about others than about himself. This was certainly the case when, nearly two months ago, Dame Judi was rushed into hospital for an emergency appendectomy.
"I got home one evening - it was September 28, I wrote it down in my diary - and my father said, 'Don't worry, your mother's in hospital.' I just thought to myself, 'But she was all right this morning...'
"Mummy had been feeling vaguely unwell for a while and wasn't feeling at all good on the Tuesday, so she had her appendix whipped out. She's fine now. But I think it was a case of God saying, 'Settle down, you! Take a break, don't rush around like a mad thing'."
Her mother will be 65 next month but does not seem inclined to slow down. "The woman has so much energy, I don't believe she knows what to do with it. She's got far more energy than I will ever have - she can't just mooch around like me. I've been tired for two and a half years; nobody warns you about that bit when you become a mother. Every time I sit down, I tend to fall asleep."
A photograph of Finty's son, Sam, takes pride of place amid the paraphernalia on her dressing-room table. She became a single parent at the age of 24, having managed to conceal her pregnancy from her devout parents (Dame Judi is a Quaker) until the eleventh hour, despite the fact that all three of them were living under the same roof.
After the initial shock, her mother and father rallied round and became devoted grandparents. The picture of Sam that she keeps with her was taken at the Highland Games in August, when Billy Connolly, who starred with Dame Judi in Mrs Brown, invited the Williams family, together with such Hollywood luminaries as Steve Martin and Robin Williams, to Candadraig House, his estate in Aberdeenshire, for a five-day house party.
With schoolgirlish excitement, Finty says she never stops reminding herself how lucky she is to have such family connections. "On the first night, Sammy wouldn't sleep, so I brought him down to dinner. I was sitting next to Robin Williams and he started doing this impromptu comedy thing specially for Sammy. I kept whispering to Sammy, 'Please will you remember this for the rest of your life' but he just sat there stony-faced. Robin said it was the hardest audience he's ever played to."
Although she will happily rattle on about Sam, she still refuses to name his father. "That's for Sam and me to know," she says, with a nervous guffaw. "The thing that matters is that Sam is here and he's fantastic and that's it. I don't get any help from his father in looking after him: it's just me. But a lot of my friends are brilliant with him, and I have a nanny.
"Sam's father does see him, and it's all very well sorted. I'm not anti-men or anti-fathers in the slightest, but I was brought up with my grandparents as well as my parents, and I love that Mediterranean way of the grandparents playing a huge role in educating the children."
Since her father was diagnosed with cancer, she has spent as much time as possible with her parents. The gift of a grandson has been particularly precious, she believes.
"There's a special bond between grandfather and grandson, especially if there hasn't been a son in between. Daddy always used to say he was surrounded by women - apart from the cat, and even he's been 'done'. But now Daddy has this lovely little child to run after and to learn something new from every day. They played football - in the loose sense of the word - on the lawn over the summer, and they go round the garden talking about life and playing on the swing."
Though she has never been out of work for more than 10 days in a decade of acting, Finty longs to tackle the great classical roles that helped her mother to make her name. While Dame Judi has recently scaled some of acting's biggest peaks - and won an Oscar last year for her role as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love - Finty is, she admits, still "bumbling around" in the foothills.
Still, as she has learnt the hard way, professional success is not everything. "For my mother, Daddy is the number one priority; that's why she came back from New York when she heard he was ill.
"My family comes before anything else: I would give it all up for them. This is a job we are incredibly privileged to do, and it can be construed sometimes as fairly self-indulgent. No one is going to die if a show is not going well - you have to put it into perspective."
The Chiltern Hundreds opens tomorrow at the Vaudeville Theatre, Strand, London WC2; 0171-836 9987.
Thanks to Christina for finding this article in the Electronic Telegraph