Michael Grandage: I've got the best of Nicole Kidman creatively – and personally

In the past two years Michael Grandage has directed Judi Dench, Jude Law and Simon Russell Beale. Just yesterday it was announced that in early 2016 he will pilot Forest Whitaker’s Broadway debut. Yet still, when he speaks of his latest lead actor, Nicole Kidman, it is with a kind of awe.

“She can take my breath away with how she lands a line,” he says of the Oscar-winner, who next month makes a much-anticipated return to the West End stage. In Photograph 51 Kidman plays the British post-war chemist Rosalind Franklin, the so-called “dark lady of DNA” whose contribution to determining the helical structure of DNA was undermined by her male peers.

Astonishingly it is 17 years since Kidman’s explosively seductive performance in David Hare’s The Blue Room, memorably declared “theatrical Viagra” by The Telegraph’s quite undone critic Charles Spencer. Can she do it again? “Well, it’s not the part for that,” chuckles Grandage, who was “absolutely mesmerised” by that 1998 Sam Mendes-directed production at the Donmar, where Grandage then became artistic director from 2002 to 2012.

“But I have no doubt she will prove her quality again. I’ve definitely got the best of Nicole Kidman in terms of where she is creatively — and personally, by the sounds of it, with Keith [Urban, her country singer second husband of nine years, with whom she has two daughters] and the children,” he says.

“What you want as a director is an actor who is completely open, because you want to access every part of their experience to see what they can bring to a character. Nicole is amazing: anything you suggest she says, ‘Let me try that’.”

Grandage, 53, “an actor-led” director, first approached Kidman as he and Donmar producer James Bierman were leaving to form the Michael Grandage Company (MGC). “The aim is to do plays without names when we’ve created a brand that’s big enough, but in the first instance I needed to go through that raft of names of people who can act first and can also fill theatres.”

He thought his “would be a relatively straightforward pitch” to Kidman. “I suggested Ibsen, Tennessee Williams...” he recalls but Kidman surprised him by saying she wanted to return to the stage and to work with Grandage, but in a new play.

Some months later New Yorker Anna Ziegler’s play, Photograph 51, arrived unsolicited. Intrigued by the title, he began reading.

At the time he had not heard of Rosalind Franklin, a Londoner from a comfortable Jewish background whose X-ray research at King’s College, London, was shared without her knowledge with the Cambridge scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, who went on to model the double helix structure of DNA. “The play was fascinating to me for being about an injustice I didn’t even know about,” he says. “It read like a thriller: is she going to beat them and win a Nobel?”

Kidman signed up “very quickly” but in the meantime they worked together on Grandage’s first film. Genius examines the relationship of two titans of American Modernism, the writer Thomas Wolfe and the legendary Scribners’ editor Max Perkins. It is written by John Logan, who Grandage became friends with after directing his plays Red and Peter and Alice. Logan ditched the team who had originally optioned his script for Grandage but asked that Colin Firth be kept on to play Perkins which, let’s face it, is not a bad position for a tyro film director to find themselves in.

The film is a story of American literary giants but — when will the Yanks wise up to this? — played by a predominantly British and Australian cast (Jude Law as Wolfe, Kidman as his lover Aline Bernstein, Dominic West as Hemingway and Guy Pearce as F Scott Fitzgerald) and filmed mostly in Manchester. Lionsgate is deciding its release schedule. Does Grandage think his stellar cast might pick up more gongs with it? “It’s a very delicate little film about a massive subject, but certainly the performances here are as good as ones these actors have won awards for.”

Might he woo Firth back to the London stage? “He’s up for it, but he has a major film career,” says Grandage. “It would be about doing what Nicole’s doing right now and taking time out. In the time that she’s doing this play she could have made two movies, so that is a big deal for an agent.”

It is this kind of commercial understanding that makes Grandage such a credible director-producer. At Sheffield theatres his regime was a beacon in the regions. At the Donmar he used the income generated from West End seasons, transfers and films of hits such as Frost/Nixon to buy its Earlham Street site. He seemed the heir apparent to Nicholas Hytner as artistic director of the National theatre but insists that after running two buildings he never even considered applying for that job. “After those 15 years and hitting 50 I had absolutely done what I wanted to do in the subsidised sector,” says the director, who divides his time between homes in Shepherd’s Bush and Penzance, shared with the designer Christopher Oram, his civil partner and long-term collaborator.

MGC strives to be agenda-setting. There is an ambitious educational arm, MGC Futures, and a commitment to access through pricing — a quarter of the seats at every one of its West End performances will cost £10.

The Yorkshire-born, Cornwall-raised Grandage trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama in Swiss Cottage, where he is now president. We talk in the school’s boardroom. “I’m here because of an access initiative,” he says, describing lovingly the RSC touring production of Twelfth Night with Sir Ian McKellen as Sir Toby Belch and Bob Peck as Malvolio that he saw as a pupil, for free, at the Carn Brea Leisure Centre in Redruth.

MGC’s top-tier prices of £105 partly subsidise the £10 tickets but overall investors may make less. “We lost hard-nosed business people there, who were clearly thinking ‘Well, I could make a lot more with someone like Jude Law or Judi Dench in a play’,” he admits. “We’re not asking people to be philanthropic, we see it as a proper business model, but are honest about having an agenda to apply the best bits of what we’ve learned in the subsidised sector to reach the next generation of theatregoer.”

He has little time for those who say the West End has had its day. “There’s not many other places where you can find a beautifully designed 900-seat theatre.” Only last week Hytner and his former NT producer Nick Starr unveiled plans to build one by Tower Bridge. Grandage is a little waspish. “I thought it was clearly a call for investment because it’s got to be the most underwhelming announcement to discuss a space with no theatre built yet, no plays, no writers, no directors … Still, it’s all wonderful.”

Generally he avoids becoming friends with the actors he works with. “They need to separate themselves from the rehearsal room sometimes and slag you off,” he says. However, Jude Law is “someone I want to grow up with” and Dawn French, whose next tour he has directed, has become a chum in Cornwall. He has regular collaborators, including Oram, who designed his first production 20 years ago.

Do they manage to keep work out of their home? “No, the studio is in the house but I think our work together keeps us together rather than separates us. It’s what first bonded us. When I saw his very first design for that first show I thought: ‘How wonderful to have found someone with whom I can have such a deep understanding’.”

They are both passionate about promoting the next generation of theatre-makers. “Christopher and I don’t have children and we’re not going to either but we’re connected to younger people through our trainees. They fulfil something in my life that I wouldn’t otherwise have — the idea of being able to be there for people — but also to feel part of a conversation between generations. That’s exciting.”

Photograph 51 is at the Noël Coward Theatre, WC2 (0845 505 8500), Sept 5-Nov 21

Buy tickets for Photograph 51 with Going Out Tickets

@PatriciaNicol