Sophie Winkleman interview, Merry Wife of Windsor, Tatler, 2009

The following cover feature article from Tatler magazine's October 2009 edition was written by Ticky Hedley-Dent:

Actress Sophie Winkelman is incredibly good company. We're sitting in Claridge's having a cream tea, laughing so loudly that fellow tea-goers are giving us looks. Although they could also be turning round to gawp at Sophie as she is a stunner. A combination of peachy-perfect skin, dainty features and big brown eyes. It's easy to see how this talented 29-year-old beat a Hollywood name to the lead in NBC's new comedy series 100 Questions, a show that comes from the same stable as Cheers, Frasier, Friends and Will and Grace.

I try and bribe her into telling me which actress she pipped to the post but she's too diplomatic to say. What is obvious is this quick-witted Cambridge graduate will definitely be able to hold her own against Tinseltown's finest. She is a professional raconteur - it's no wonder that her fiancé, former man-about-town Lord Freddie Windsor, swapped a life of nightclubs and parties to be with her. "I'd seen him bound around at loads of parties and I knew how hibernated I was and I didn't think that would work at all. But then I realised that he quite liked staying in and watching Masterchef too", says Winkleman. It's no surprise Freddie's mother Princess Michael of Kent is a fan. "We are both totally enchanted with Sophie and welcome her with open arms into our family. We know she will make Freddie happy and already she is like a daughter to us." The couple are getting married on the 12 September [2009] and it's tipped to be the society wedding of the year.

Since leaving Cambridge in 2001, Sophie has been building a healthy career playing the lovable Big Suze in hit Brit comedy Peep Show and numerous other parts including the scheming Princess Eleanor in ITV's The Palace, a series, funnily enough, about a fictional royal family. "I was playing an evil princess: it was brilliant. I didn't think it would be a problem, rather stupidly, and then I got into a bit of trouble in the papers for doing it and going out with Freddie, which is fair enough but it was fun and I wouldn't have not done it."

Sophie's now at a crossroads in her career. But while she's wildly excited about her acting roles, she's rather nervous of publicity. "I'm doing this interview because my manager in LA told me that I looked homeless in all the circulated photos of me and that she 'needed' some nice ones. I've known Bryan Adams [who took the new photographs] for years now and I think he's a genius."

Sophie is also doing her first big interview with Tatler so she can put the record straight - she feels a film she did with Mike Figgis, Love Live Long, was wrongly labelled as risqué. Figgis is a much respected, Oscar-winning director and the film is a clever, contemporary arthouse flick. This was hardly a Koo Stark moment. "There had been so much rubbish talked about me that I felt I owed it to nice people to say the truth, which is I'm not that sort of actress," says Winkleman. "I was in my underwear for one scene in the film. I don't kiss anyone in it and I don't begin to have sex with anyone. There's a provocative feel to it - that is true. And when the engagement was announced, I think people leapt on it and blew it up hugely, which was very upsetting."

Winkleman has actually been incredibly careful with her career choices, something she will have to continue, now that she enters the royal fold. "I couldn't have done less risqué work if I'd tried," she laughs. "I have been offered naughty roles that I've never done. I've done comedy with Harry [Enfield] and Paul [Whitehouse] and The Beauty and the Beast at the RSC - hardly erotic! So, suddenly being tarred as this scarlet lady was odd."

Sophie is far from being a scarlet woman. Her great loves apart from Freddie are frogs, books, baking cakes and word games. "Anything word-ish and I'm in heaven", she sighs. The whole Winkleman family are obsessed with word games. "If we go out to dinner we won't talk like a normal family - we'll pick a nine-letter word off the menu and whoever makes the most words wins." Sophie had a bookish upbringing in Primrose Hill. "I am absolutely lucky with my parents. They're very clever, funny and kind. Although I think in a fire it would be a very close toss-up between me and the Guardian crossword."

Her father Barry Winkleman is a publisher - a former managing director of Harper Collins, he is the man behind the popular series Prion Humour Classics and the Times Atlases. Sophie jokes that her geography is a "source of shame" to her father. "I have a lot of trouble getting from Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly Circus and he knows where loads of streets are in Bogotá." Sophie describes her father as an intellectual "in the least pretentious, most vivacious sense of the word. He will text me a funny line from Ulysses, leave a recording of Lester Young playing the clarinet with Billie Holliday on my voicemail, chatter in fluent Greek and quote Cavafy to the waiters in Lemonia and murmer about Baudelaire as he buys his croissants." Her mother Cindy Black was a successful advertising copywriter and now writes children's books. "She's written a series of books called Mojo Swoptops, about a car who swaps tops. Sometimes he's a fire engine, sometimes an ice-cream van. They're magical."

Sophie is an only child from her parents' marriage but she has an elder half-sister, Claudia Winkleman, from her father's first marriage to ex-Sunday Express editor Eve Pollard. (Eve went on to marry ex-Daily Express editor Nick Lloyd). Sophie and Claudia "are close, though not very similar", says Winkleman. "She presents TV shows, radio shows, writes columns, has 18 children and covers the Oscars. I watch University Challenge and feel like I've achieved quite a lot". They are a tight-knit family, so much so that Sophie and her parents moved to Chelsea en-masse three years ago to be nearer her maternal grandmother, although she's quick to add they all live in different houses.

Sophie and Claudia both attended City of London Girls' School. "We were both there rather unadventurously from the age of seven to 18." Did she enjoy it? " I did when I was little, but when I was a teenager I was definitely ready to get out." Next stop was Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to read English literature. "I had the best time. In a slightly pathetic way, I really, really, loved it. It was a dream. I got to read books and do plays and be around lots of brilliant people. It was a really big present." Sophie is still an avid reader - she devours the works of Jean Rhys and Emily Dickinson and gives friends novels by Siri Hustvedt, JM Coetzee, Graham Greene and LP Hartley.

It was at Cambridge that Sophie discovered her passion for acting. "I didn't really do the whole college-life thing as I threw myself into acting. I toured the Greek amphitheatres with Sophocles' Electra and Lorca's Blood Wedding and I did at least a play per term. In my final year, I joined the Footlights. It was a paradise because I got to write lots of it too and I was touring the British Isles for four months with a group of funny boys. It was slightly too good to be true." Sophie still writes scripts and is currently putting the finishing touches to a screenplay. The idea for the script is that you can have all the ingredients for a perfect "man cake" but somehow they don't add up to being a fantastic cake and by the same token someone can have all the wrong ingredients, yet light up your life. It's no surprise that Winkleman has been taken on by Richard Curtis' writing agent.

Sophie's talent was spotted by über-agent Dallas Smith (who represents Kate Winslet and Sienna Miller), when she was performing at the Edinburgh Festival in her first year. "He came and saw me doing Six Degrees of Separation and he waited very patiently while I didn't do anything and just stayed in my little nest in Cambridge and then he started putting me up for stuff after I left." Her first job was playing "a really disturbed psychopath" in Waking the Dead. "It was such fun playing a maniac", cackles Winkleman. "I'm dying to play another one". Theatre parts in Peter Hall's adaptations of Man and Superman and Galileo's Daughter, Charlotte in Molière's Don Juan and a stint in the RSC's Beauty and the Beast followed. Then many TV and film parts, including The Chronicles of Narnia, Poirot, White Teeth and The Trial of Tony Blair.

The part for which Sophie is most well known is Big Suze in Peep Show. "The writing is so knife-sharp that it's a real pleasure to part of it." In the show, Sophie is the plummy ex-girlfriend of freeloading musician Jeremy (Robert Webb). Jeremy is still infatuated with Big Suze and the joke is she always has to let him down gently - something one suspects Sophie has had to do with many admirers in real life. She will only appear briefly in the next series as it coincides with filming for 100 Questions.

It was through Peep Show that Sophie came to the attention of a certain young royal. Freddie Windsor was a fan of the show. So when he bumped into Sophie with their mutual friend Ally Aitken (daughter of former MP Jonathan Aitken), he leapt at the chance to make friends with her. "We were leaving separate parties at exactly the same time on Dean Street. Freddie told me immediately that he loved Peep Show, which was very sweet, and he took us onto a party at the Collection. He was very funny and wordish and we got on very well."

That was in 2007 and they have been together ever since. Sophie has certainly transformed Freddie, who used to be a fixture on the party circuit. "We don't do anything", she laughs, "because I'm away so much working we grab the chance to stay in." The couple divide their time between Sophie's flat in Chelsea and Freddie's off Ladbroke Grove. Freddie works in the private client arm of JP Morgan, and will continue to do so when they move to Los Angeles in September.

Sophie's a massive foodie. "I love food. My idea of heaven is to curl up in a hammock somewhere with Elizabeth David's An Omelette and a Glass of Wine." Her favourite restaurants in London are "Zuma for the thrilling sushi and aloe-vera drinks, Fino for crispy pork belly and Riccardo's on the Fulham Road." The couple are regular concert goers - Freddie takes her to Blur and The Killers while she'll book him tickets for something at the Royal Festival Hall, which is "slightly more hit and miss." Friends include Sophie's ex-flatmate Alice Bragg (daughter of broadcaster Melvin Bragg), journalists Hermione Eyre and John Prideaux, and couples-about-town stylist Caro Sieber and banker Fritz von Westenholz and bankers Raoul Fraser and Cat Taylor.

Sophie knew it was love when Freddie gave her a necklace with a silver frog on it: "I collected tadpoles until a worryingly late age." He also proposed using her other great love - a Scrabble board. Freddie popped the question rather appropriately in the grounds of Frogmore House, a former royal residence set in Home Park at Windsor Castle. "We were going for a picnic and Scrabble and Freddie said, 'I'll unpack the picnic and you unpack the Scrabble board,' so I took the lid off and there was the question in Scrabble tiles. It was very romantic and sweet of him."

The couple are getting married at Hampton Court, "I had a slightly gloomy image of it, having visited it on school trips armed with a clipboard, but I immediately changed my mind." Sophie is so busy with work that Princess Michael is giving her a helping hand with the wedding preparations. "I haven't done anything to do with the wedding at all. Load of my girlfriends have been like, 'So tell me what's happening?' and I think maybe I'm a man inside or something because I just haven't been very involved. It's a good job my future mother-in-law is very good at all that and I am very grateful for her input. We'd end up doing it in Starbucks with two people if it was left to me."

The ceremony will take place in the chapel at Hampton Court with the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, conducting the ceremony. "He's lovely and very impressive. He has a great Shakespearean voice that reverberates round every pillar," adds Winkleman. The element that Sophie is most excited about is the music: "That's the thing I'm definitely getting involved in. We're having Soave Sia II Vento from Così fan Tute sung by the Hampton Court Choir". She's also looking forward to the wedding cake, which will be "a gorgeous, spicy, booze-drenched concoction."

The bridesmaids are all little ones. "I think they're all blonde, which is rather Aryan", jokes Winkleman. Sophie's niece Matilda Thykier is one, as is Lady Helen Taylor's daughter Eloise. Princess Michael introduced Sophie to Anna Bystrova of Roza Couture, who has made her wedding dress. "Her clothes are romantic, feminine and beautiful and Anna herself is a purring delight," says Winkleman. There will be 300 people at the reception and then the young will head off to a dance at Freddie's godmother Lady Annabel Goldsmith's house in Richmond.

The couple aren't going on honeymoon because they are heading straight to Los Angeles after the wedding when Sophie will begin filming 100 Questions. "It's about a funny, sweet but slightly flawed girl who is looking for love. The writing is sparkling and I'm very lucky. I play this girl who's in a group of friends who are looking for love." says Winkleman.

Sophie can't wait to get out there and get started: "I'm quite excited to just go and work hard and just do my job rather than be a girlfriend of someone royal." Freddie is also relishing the move, but has one small concern: "I'm pleased to be moving to LA for a while but really worried about not being able to watch cricket, and if any Tatler readers know where to go in LA to watch Test cricket, please can they let me know." One small thing on Sophie's mind is her lack of driving licence. "I really can't drive. I've tried a couple of times but the instructors said that they didn't want to teach me any more. LA is not going to be very good for me transport-wise."

Freddie may be joining Sophie in LA but one thing Sophie is adamant about is that they won't be having children soon: "We're not going to have any for years. I'm going to be Britain's oldest mother - the current one is 66. I can't even look after my Oyster card, let alone a child." Not that she'll need her Oyster card: if she's as popular in the new show as she is in Peep Show, Freddie and Sophie will become fully-fledged LA residents. The dinner-party set of Los Angeles will be dusting down their dictionaries in fear.

A series of accompanying photographs by Bryan Adams features Sophie wearing a variety of designer dresses.