Helen McCrory: ‘How should a woman live her life?’

In 2000, the actor Helen McCrory, who has died aged 52, wrote for the Guardian about her role in Anna Karenina and modern life as a woman

How should a woman live her life? Survive to the age of 70, fearfully, being as everyone else instructs her to be? Or play the heroine, passionately, in the knowledge that trying and failing need not equal defeat?

This is the timeless conundrum Tolstoy's vivid heroine, Anna Karenina, took on, long before it became fashionable to discuss the conflict of desire and expectation in women's lives. She was an original of her era, but what are the resonances of Anna's story for the modern woman?