Call the Midwife star Helen George: 'I used to be afraid of Trevor Nunn'

Call The Midwife star Helen George is enjoying her reunion with director Sir Trevor Nunn — having been too nervous to stay in the same room as him the first time they worked together.

The actress, 32, is starring opposite Eve Best and Anthony Head, who play lovers, in the revival of Terence Rattigan’s wartime drama Love In Idleness at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

The show, about a widow whose affair with a prominent cabinet minister is threatened by her son’s return from Canada, combines the 1944 play with an earlier more political version Rattigan eventually rejected. George plays the politician’s much younger wife.

The actress said it was nice to work with Sir Trevor, 77, “as an adult”, 12 years after he gave her her first job in the musical The Woman In White. She said: “I was very nervous when I worked with him the first time. He used to walk into the room and I used to walk out because I was so scared of him but now it’s fine.” She joked: “I’ve faced my demons and can speak to him and get to know him.”

George, who plays midwife Trixie Franklin in the hit BBC show, said Love In Idleness’s “modern” love story was part of its success. She said: “We were just saying how it’s really nice that it’s a love story that’s not about teenagers or 20-year-olds.”

Best, 45, the winner of the Evening Standard’s outstanding newcomer award in 1999, said the story was “amazingly modern”. She said: “Reading it for the first time you feel there are moments at the start of scenes where you feel this could have been written yesterday or today.

“So much of the writing is timeless then suddenly you’ll flashback into something that feels like a Noel Coward pastiche then flash into some very heartfelt realism that feels like it could be a Chekhov play.”