FINTY WILLIAMS TELLS PENNY WARK ABOUT THE LOSS OF HER FATHER AND LIFE WITH HER MOTHER, DAME JUDI DENCH

ON BALANCE, Finty Williams thinks she will not listen to Silas Marner on the radio this week. It was recorded the summer before her father Michael died in January 2001. He played Marner, Finty his adopted daughter Eppie, his "precious golden girl".

"It was tricky because we weren't sent the recording until after my dad died," says Finty. "There's a scene I remember where she says, 'I'll only ever call one person in my life Daddy' and I found it unbelievably hard to do because he was very ill. I looked at the page and thought, why can't you see it? You know when you're blinded by tears and you can't see? Those tears just fall, there's no effort involved, and there's no stopping them. I found that so hard to do that when we were sent the recording I thought, no, I can't listen to it."

Finty and her mother, Dame Judi Dench, are happy for BBC 7 to broadcast the adaptation, which was made for American public service radio and has only just become available in the UK. It was Michael Williams's last radio performance, made when he was too ill from cancer to stand but too proud to sit as he worked. Finty relished the opportunity to work with him: "The other members of the cast said it was like intruding on a moment that was very much about two people saying what they wanted to say to each other."

We are drinking tea in a hotel near the theatre where Finty was appearing in Richard Harris's Party Piece. Voluptuously tiny, she wears sparkly jeans, tall tottery sandals, a plunging top and a sweeping tattoo across her back. It's sprayed on, she says. "Put it this way, I wouldn't have dreamed of having a tattoo before Daddy died because I'd have been thrown out. He was unbelievably strict."

An only child, she is 31 and sometimes talks about her parents as if she is still a teenager. She is friendly, girly, sensitive, and full of the kind of zeal that comes from having reassessed her life since her father's death. This knocked her profoundly and forced her to deal with her difficulties, including her status as the actress daughter of a famous and feted actress mother and a father who was warm but also controlling.

Finty is the mother of a 7-year-old son, Sam, who at the time of our interview was in Italy with Judi Dench. He was born to his single mother two weeks after she told her parents she was pregnant, a revelation that was astonishing because of the family's cultivated closeness. The identity of Sam's father remains off limits but what will become increasingly clear as I talk to Finty is that the family's dymanics have always been more complex than mother, father or daughter have previously admitted.

"I thought Daddy would kill me," Finty says of her pregnancy. Because of his Catholicism? "Yes. Which sounds ungenerous of me. Things like that were very basic to him. But he and Sam loved each other so much. Sam was the best thing that ever happened to him apart from the papal knighthood." Shortly before Michael died his devout faith was recognised with a papal knighthood of St Gregory. "It meant a huge amount to him, huge -- when you think of the awards that my mother's won. He held it up and said to Mummy, 'This is my award. Nobody else was up for this'."

Did he mind his wife's greater and global success? Loyally, Finty responds that he was incredibly proud of her. But he was also more complicated than that, a product of his generation and his Liverpool upbringing, she explains. "His mum did everything for his father, his brother and himself. He could do no wrong in her eyes and he was brought up to believe that men went out to work and brought the money in and women looked after the children and cooked the tea. I think that aspect of it he found really hard."

Michael Williams's public reputation is based on A Fine Romance, the 1980s comedy series in which he and Dench played husband and wife and in which he was gentle and whimsical. Finty paints a more robust picture: he loved The Lion King and Eddie Izzard; he was great fun and full of laughter but could be a harsh critic of her work; he was the person to whom she turned for support when things went pear-shaped; he was intolerant of modern attitudes to sexuality; he liked to go to the pub, where he believed women had no place. And he loved his car, a Jaguar XK8 convertible which he bought one day when he went out for a pint of milk.

"On Sundays Daddy went to the pub and Mummy and I would have lunch on the table by quarter to two and it was his prerogative whether or not he came in. He got hell if he didn't and we once locked the doors on him and he had to get a ladder and climb in through a window. That was what happened regardless of whether Mummy had done eight shows that week or not."

He found the Oscars difficult, Finty says (Dame Judi was nominated as Best Actress for Mrs Brown in 1997 and won Best Supporting Actress for Shakespeare in Love in 1998). "The Oscar thing was tricky for us both. He was immensely proud but he got very, very riled when he was called Mr Dench, which he was a lot. Very different world, LA, I hate it. I don't have a great ambition to go into films because I couldn't bear that kind of move to LA, become skinny and get plastic surgery attitude.

"There's such a big divide there. If you're known, you have the city at your feet.

If you're nothing you're not even worth the carpet and at the Oscars you get pushed out of the way. I don't buy into it. I've seen the damage to people who've gone over there. I don't know where your integrity goes."

Finty works steadily, though not in leading roles. Careful, Finty, I think. You're digging a hole for yourself. A lot of your friends, including your mother, are Hollywood players. She picks up the point. "I'm not saying all these people don't have integrity, but I think your judgment goes out of the window because you must think how much money is it going to make me, and is it going to further my career? I respect that but I don't have that in me. Maybe because I've lived vicariously through my mother for so long."

Maybe because her career came with ready-made connections. Yet in choosing to act she has invited comparisons with her parents. She could have chosen an easier path, I suggest. "If a love of the theatre gets instilled in you early on," her voice drops, "it's almost inevitable, actually."

I ask whether her family is good at communicating. Her reply is telling: "We are now." When her father was dying her parents were "very much a unit", she says.

"Yes, he was my father but he was my mother's husband first. That was the first time I really felt that. There was something very personal between the two of them. If you take my mother's fame out of it, our family was like a triangle. It was Mummy and me, and Daddy at the top, and when he went we didn't know where we were because we didn't have a structure to our family. We were both floundering and we grieved in very different ways. She started working and I just became a nightmare.

"There was the shock of my father dying. There was also the shock of seeing somebody dead for the first time, which is a huge thing. I suddenly said, well, how are we alive? If somebody can be OK in a coma with blood pumping through his veins, where has he gone? Where has the energy gone? It was so painful, like standing in the middle of a very dense wood on a very black night and whichever way I turned I hit into things. I obviously couldn't see my way out of it so I used to drink to take the pain away." In December 2001 her mother was awarded a Bafta fellowship: Finty found the timing difficult. "It's a tricky thing, and I've talked to her about this, as a daughter, because at the time I was so insecure I didn't know if I was coming or going. The worst thing in the world had happened to me and people were carrying on with their daily lives and you want to shake people and say, 'Don't you see, half my world has fallen off? How can you say, 'How are you?' and not expect me to say 'Absolutely terrible'. I was so messed up I didn't know what to think about anything.

"It was quite hard sitting listening to a lot of people that I admire talking about a person that I love dearly and hearing them say she is the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most generous, the most charismatic, the funniest, the most talented. You go, well, why am I bothering because I'm never going to live up to this. At that stage I was just, sod it, there's no point in anything. I'm never going to live up to this woman's image."

Eighteen months after her father's death she booked into the Priory Clinic and, many hours of therapy later, she is sober and sorted. "I think I have a lot of problems. I may have come out of it on my own but it may have taken a lot longer.

"It was very peculiar. I couldn't remember what Daddy looked like because he didn't look like him when he was dead. It was awful. I had a process called EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) because I couldn't remember what his hands looked like and that panicked me. When you are a little child you bunch your fist up and Daddy takes your hand and it fits round and it's warm and comforting and big."

She no longer drinks alcohol and feels too frightened to try it, she says.

"There's no reason for me to do it. My quality of life is better, my relationship with my mother is better, I have this fantastic boy who I love to distraction, I have a job that I love doing. I'm not interested in sitting down with a bottle of wine and saying let's see what happens."

She has a house of her own but spends most of her time at her mother's in Sussex: she doesn't like her mother being alone, she explains, and Sam goes to school near by. It's clear that she and her mother look out for each other. "If somebody had said to me ten years ago (when a candle she had lit caused an accidental fire at her parents' Hampstead home), 'You and your mother will go through the worst time of your lives and come out the other side better friends than you could have ever thought possible,' I'd have said we can't be better friends than we are now. I honestly don't think there's anything I couldn't tell my mother now. She takes the mickey out of me and I take the mickey out of her.

"When she says, 'Oh my God, I've got to go to the theatre again,' I say, 'Do you know how much I'd like to be going to the theatre now? Do you know how much I don't want to sit here watching EastEnders again.'

"She got very cross the other day because I said I've got to watch Big Brother.

She hit the roof: 'How can you watch that crap? You're an educated woman'."

Finty affects a little girl voice: " 'I don't know, and I've voted for Nadia as well'."

" 'Who the hell's that?' " " 'She's a transsexual from Portugal'."

" 'Oh God. How can you waste money that way?' She can't believe the amount of rubbish I watch."

Repeating this conversation amuses her and she giggles heartily. Finty is very pleased that Nadia won, and tells me why at some length. She also explains the kind of man she hopes to meet: "Just the fairy tale, the guy on a big white horse, or certainly a nice red car, who comes up and looks after me and all of that."

Might the intensity of her relationship with her mother put men off, I wonder.

"Well, yes, I think it's fairly threatening that we get on so unbelievably well. I think they're scared, but if they were genuine they wouldn't mind."

There is a final riff on her mother which she must say because if you don't take these opportunities you regret missing them, she says. "My mother is the most extraordinary person on the planet. What she's done for me over the past three-and-a-half years -I didn't think human beings could do that for each other.

I feel like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music running up the hill; you want to burst into song all the time about my life being better than I could ever, ever, ever have hoped it would be thanks to my mother and her support. I haven't ever really said that."

This article appeared in the Features section of The Times (UK) on September 6, 2004.