Frances Barber: 'The part plays itself, really'

Late on a Monday in May, Frances Barber's mobile phone starting pinging. "Are you OK?" the first text read. A handful more followed from friends with the same message. They were responding to a preview of the next day's Daily Telegraph front page that was dominated by a huge photograph of Barber – "bigger than Pippa Middleton" – and feared the worst.

Eventually, the 54-year-old actress tracked down the story: "Honest to God, it was like I'd died. My obituary won't be that big; my obituary will be two lines. I thought: 'What have I said? Am I going to be arrested?'"

Barber had, in fact, made a quip – she insists it wasn't serious – to the Radio Times that she was saving up for a facelift so she could prolong her acting career. In the process, she joined Arlene Phillips, Miriam O'Reilly and Mary Beard in the continuing media storm about mature women on the small screen.

The controversy even reached New Zealand, where her friend Ian McKellen is filming The Hobbit. "He wrote: 'What have you done now?' I said: 'I made a joke!' And he replied: 'You know you can't joke in print!'"

You might think that Barber, currently starring in the legal drama Silk on BBC1, would be cagey today but fortunately she shows no sign of having learned her lesson.

We meet in her loft in Clerkenwell, central London, which was once the Scholl shoe factory but is now a modern, open-plan apartment with a bath as the centrepiece. "Edna O'Brien walked in to a very low-key lunch party here and went: 'Owww, this would be the most wonderful place for an orgy!'" Barber reports. "Those were the words that came out of her mouth. And I said: 'Well, Edna, there are only six of us, sorry!'"

Barber believes that Silk, in which she plays a mischievous counsel (Caroline Warwick) nicknamed Lady Macbeth, has some of the best writing she has encountered in a 30-year career that has included roles in Stephen Frears's Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and TV credits in The Street and Funland. "The part plays itself, really," Barber says. "There are a few male writers I've worked with in the past who just know what women think privately. I don't know how they do it, but [Silk creator] Peter Moffat is one of them."

Silk has also been a ratings hit, with 5 million tuning in for each episode; not that Barber is getting too carried away. "It's funny, because each decade I have a moment where I nearly make it!" she laughs. "But I'm not terribly ambitious and I'm a bit lazy and I find it all slightly vulgar. It's like retweeting praise about yourself."