It seems we have come to an end of what might be termed Samantha Spiro's Jewish period. The actress is amused at the phrase. We are sitting in a cramped basement room below a hall in King's Cross where Spiro and fellow cast members Tamsin Outhwaite and Jenna Russell have, for the first time, rehearsed Amelia Bullmore's touching and funny play about friendship, Di And Viv And Rose, all the way through without stopping. Unsurprisingly ,Spiro looks a tad tired. On her lap sits an unopened box of avocado salad bought by the show's PR so that she does not forgo sustenance just because she's doing an interview.
"There was a Jewish period," chuckles the multi-award winning actress. It started in 2005 with Mike Leigh's play Two Thousand Years and then continued when Spiro played Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (2008) and Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly (2009), not to mention the mother of all Jewish mother roles, Sarah Kahn in Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup With Barley. And on television there was mustachioed Aunty Liz in Simon Amstell's Grandma's House.
In Di And Viv And Rose, Spiro's Viv is one of three friends who meet at university (Di is played by Outhwaite and Rose by Russell) who share accommodation and stay in touch over the following decades through thick and thin. First seen at the Hampstead in 2011, the play asks a lot of its actors, who have to convince as teenagers at the beginning and then end it as fortysomethings.
"There's no chance she's Jewish," says the 46-year-old. "She's a northern lass from a very working class background. Her kind of work ethic is Protestant rather than Jewish. There's a strictness about her."
So maybe the Jewish period really is over for a while. But it won't be because she deliberately avoids Jewish roles, as was once the case.
Grandma’s House was a highlight for me
"Maybe it was a fear of being typecast," says Spiro. "I think the only Jewish parts that came up were Jewish princesses. And I had no desire do that at all. I wanted to play interesting roles."
Being choosy has led to an ever more challenging and rewarding stage career for Spiro, who trained as a classical actress. She made her debut at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park. "I was in [the Rodgers and Hart musical] The Boys From Syracuse playing a canary with Judi Dench directing me. I thought I'd arrived.'"
Has she had that thought since? "Nooo!" she says, slightly appalled at the idea of such complacency.
She didn't even think that with her first real taste of success, playing Barbara Windsor at the National in Terry Johnson's 1998 play Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick.
Spiro never used to think of herself as a musical theatre performer but still bagged two Oliver Awards for Best Actress in a Musical; one for playing Maria in Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along (2000), the other 10 years later for her Dolly, which was so brilliant not once did you miss Streisand.
Her career is hard to sum up, other than with the word "successful". She is as likely to be cast in a musical as she is in Shakespeare; or in serious drama as she is in a comedy. She really can do it all. But it would be a mistake to think that because Spiro is a jack of all trades, she is a master of none. Spiro has mastered them all.
"I suppose I've been lucky," she says, at last tucking into the avocado, but only because I said I was worried she wasn't eating.
"Parts have come along and stretched me," she continues. "And the more you get stretched, the more different directions you can go in. Once someone sees you in something that is different, then you can go off in that direction."
All this makes sense. One thing often leads to another. As Spiro says: "If I hadn't done Mike Leigh I probably wouldn't have got Grandma's House, which was one of the highlights for me - to play the most disgustingly awful human being who happened to be Jewish - with a mustache. I loved that."
But that still leaves the question of what it is about Spiro that keeps theatre directors and TV producers coming back for more.
"It's an energy thing, I think. It's more than being a type of person. Because energy can be in comedy or tortuous anxiety. But whatever it is, it's not calm."
Strange then that Spiro's current character is the calmest of the three heroines in Bullmore's play. Outhwaite was always going to be the gay one Di because she is reprising the role she played in the original production. But with Spiro's track record of extrovert, even explosive roles, I would have thought the more extrovert, sex-obsessed Rose would have been the more natural character.
"Actually I thought they'd given me the wrong one," confesses Spiro. "When I told the director, she said I could play Rose if I wanted to, and the possibility did hang in the air for a moment. But then I thought that the reason I didn't want to play Viv was because I was scared of it. And that is always a good reason to do something."
Yes fear is still a driving force for this actor - fear of being too safe; fear of being typecast; fear that the work will dry up.
"It always feels random when a job comes in. And anyway, if I ever allowed myself to think 'I've arrived' something would happen immediately afterwards, normally connected to my children, which brings you straight down to earth." Spiro has two children with her husband, the actor Mark Leadbetter, who she met at drama school.
After this play there isn't much in the diary. Except, she says casually, a drama series called London Spy which is due to air on BBC2 later this year. It stars Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, Charlotte Rampling and Ben Whishaw, who plays the lead. "I play a detective," she says apparently unaware that once again she's chosen the unexpected role. "The cast is amazing. I was looking around and I was like," she mouths a big OMG. So surely then, that was a moment when she could have said "I've arrived".
"Oh all right," she says. "I'll give you that one."
