Dame Harriet Walter - ‘I wish I’d had all this attention when I was 40’

Olivier and Emmy-award-winning Dame Harriet Walter must have acting in her blood: her uncle is the legendary horror star Christopher Lee, she turned down a place at Oxford in favour of drama school, and began her career at the Royal Shakespeare Company. On screen you’ll know her from Killing Eve, Ted Lasso, The Crown or as Lady Caroline in Succession - plus films including Sense and Sensibility, Atonement and The Last Duel. On stage she’s embodied everyone from Prospero to Elizabeth I. Her failures include failing to master the piano or music theory, failing to get roles that she auditioned for, and finally failing to cook. I absolutely loved talking to this unbelievably smart and astute woman. Enjoy! She Speaks by Harriet Walter is out now. ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 01:25 Acting Journey 04:38 Exploring Shakespeare's Women 08:22 The Challenges of Acting 09:29 Family Background and Influences 14:17 Succession and Intimidating Roles 17:59 Failures and Reflections 25:38 Pursuing Drama School Dreams 26:34 Influence of Family and Early Inspirations 28:04 Facing Rejection and Audition Failures 31:58 Portraying Historical Figures 33:45 Playing Margaret Thatcher 37:56 Personal Loss and Love 41:45 Fear of Loneliness and Self-Reliance 45:53 Struggles with Food and Anorexia Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Lawrence-Tickell Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to

• 0:45Elizabeth Day?

  live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail.

• 1:07Elizabeth Day?

  Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that firmly believes that failing better can help us succeed better too. Before we get to my wonderful guest, just a reminder about my subscriber podcast, Failing With Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and offer advice on some of your failures too. Here's a bit of Dame Harriet to pique your interest.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Probably the best way to conduct yourself at the party is to ask other people about themselves. And then they sort of don't notice you, because they're too busy talking about themselves. That's one way of doing it.

• 1:39Elizabeth Day?

  Or they'll find you incredibly charming.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'll love you.

• 1:43Elizabeth Day?

  Do send your failures in to get advice from one of my esteemed guests. Follow the link in the podcast notes, or look out for my callouts once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Thank you so, so much.

• 1:56Elizabeth Day?

  When Harriet Walter was a young woman, she was so curious about other people that she once trailed someone in the street, followed them into their house and got trapped in the cupboard under the stairs. Her insatiable interest in others is arguably what makes her one of our finest actors. She's the recipient of a clutch of awards, including an Olivier and five Emmys, as well as a damehood. Determined to act from a young age, it was perhaps in her blood, her uncle was the horror star Christopher Lee, she turned down a place at Oxford in favour of drama school. She began her career at the Royal Shakespeare Company. On stage, she has embodied everyone from Prospero to Elizabeth the First.

• 2:40Elizabeth Day?

  On screen, she has acted in films including Sense and Sensibility, Atonement and The Last Duel. And most of the Anglo-American Emmy-worthy TV sensations of the past decade have included a stellar turn from her. You've probably seen Dame Harriet in Killing Eve, or Ted Lasso, or The Crown, or as the emotionally dysfunctional matriarch Lady Caroline in Succession. She is also an author, and in her latest book, She Speaks, Dame Harriet cleverly imagines what Shakespeare's female characters might have said had they been given half the chance. In Dame Harriet's hands, Ophelia does not actually drown but escapes to a nunnery,

• 3:23Elizabeth Day?

  and Lady Macbeth rhymes dagger with nagger. Now in her 70s, Dame Harriet says, "I wish I'd had when young the fuck it all confidence I have now." The paradox is that you get more confident at the point where the parts have run out. Dame Harriet, not in your case.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm still crossing my fingers. It can all peter out any time soon.

• 3:49Elizabeth Day?

  But welcome to How To Fail, first of all.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Thank you. What a wonderful introduction. I didn't know I'd done so much.

• 3:57Elizabeth Day?

  I love that story about you ending up on Dr. St. George's Stairs.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  This guy was loading his car. They were going away the weekend. And I snuck into the house and then sort of had to hide under the stairs. And it was a totally useless exercise because of course, because they were loading the car, they were going away. So I wasn't going to be able to eavesdrop on a conversation or anything. You know, I'd intended to sit there and listen to a dining room conversation or something. But of course, they were going out. So, you know, I sat there and then I thought, my God, they're going away. They'll lock the door and I'll be here for life. So I had to find a way of sneaking out again, um, which I managed, you know, but it was, I sort of thought about

• 4:43Speaker 01

  it three minutes afterwards and collapsed in giggles at what I'd just done and how useless it was. But you're right, it was to do with being curious about other people. And I had this combination of nosiness and curiosity about what other people were like and what made them tick alongside such ridiculous shyness that I could never have asked anybody, you know, what makes them tick. So the only way I could sort of find out about other people was by getting into their skin and, um, you know, imagining I was them, which is very inadequate because you, you, you really only ever interpret people through your own filter. You don't really find out what they're really like. And that's the frustration of acting.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  I can, I can try and figure out what it was like to be Lady Macbeth, but ultimately it'll be Harriet Walters Lady Macbeth. Anyway.

• 5:34Elizabeth Day?

  Well, that is a seamless link into what drove you to write She Speaks, this, this desire to give voice to the things that have been silent or are incapable of being communicated in some way. And I, I, I mean, you cite this extraordinary fact that when Shakespeare's characters are put in order of the number of lines they're given, only 15 women's parts fall into the top 100.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:00Elizabeth Day?

  And Lady Macbeth comes in at 138.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I know, I know. But she has huge impact and people project onto her and have done for centuries. You know, people talk about someone being the Lady Macbeth, you know, the power behind the throne, the evil women that. Sort of make men do things they wouldn't otherwise do. And it's almost impossible to dent that kind of story that people have written. And so that was partly what I set out to do. I thought, gosh, now I can act all these parts. I can express myself through all these other people. I can find out what these other people are like. And the job of acting is that you do spend an awful lot of time preparing, thinking, imagining,

• 6:43Speaker 01

  writing notes about them, analysing them, answering questions in interviews about them. And you've you've worked out this elaborate backstory and this elaborate sort of psychological pathway. And yet, nine times out of ten, you don't have the stage space or the screen space to express it. So out of habit, one has been building up these pictures inside oneself that haven't really had a proper outlet. And without my realising it, that's what fuelled this book was really to sort of all the years spent thinking about people, that I hadn't actually had the the time to express them or the stage space to express them.

• 7:24Elizabeth Day?

  Which of Shakespeare's women did you find most frustrating in that respect to perform?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  I suppose Lady Macbeth is one that, you know, I feel a through line and I've worked out a through line. And no matter how much, it's not that I apologise for her, but I explain her inside myself. And still people project the same old thing on to her. And that is very frustrating.

• 7:49Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm. When you say that you imagine how these women might speak, what you fail to say is that you do so in verse. It's actually so extraordinary and such a talent. And we were chatting before we started recording about how a lot of that came quite naturally because you're so accustomed to Shakespearean rhythms.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  It's quite a strange thing because I suppose so many lines come into your head. And I'm not very good at remembering lines. I'm rather awful about it. I mean, I'm fine when I have to do the job, but I forget them and scrub the tape as soon as I've done it. Whereas I know people who can quote huge chunks of Shakespeare. And I can't really, but I know that the rhythm of a thought. Or or or something that is very moving, it's almost like a piece of music that's a phrase um and that it sort of stays in your skin, it stays in your mind like a piece of music. So my subconscious was always throwing up these phrases that were

• 8:50Speaker 01

  in Shakespearean rhythm, because that's how I had thought and spoken those characters. And so I didn't set out to say, I'm gonna write verses. It it sort of came that way. Now, I don't want to sound mystifying or but that was it basically came from the fact that I'd thought in those rhythms and felt in those rhythms as those characters. And therefore, that's how they expressed themselves to me.

• 9:18Elizabeth Day?

  Do you have bad dreams where you forget your lines on stage?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:21Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, good, because I do, and I'm not an actress. I can't imagine how much more terrifying that is if you do act.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's more that you know you've got to go on in an hour in some play you did twelve, thirteen years ago, and you can't remember it, and you know you can't remember it. And you're not given any time to practise. All you need is to look at the book and and go over it in a quiet room. But what happens is you can't find the book, nobody's giving you any peace. And all the time, you're going, I know I've got to go on in an hour in this play that I haven't had time to look at. So it's more that, really.

• 9:57Elizabeth Day?

  Something getting in the way.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you want to be Freudian about it, there is that sort of people pleasing aspect that, you know, if somebody comes, you know, not asserting myself and saying, I need a room with the book, please leave me alone. And I never do that in the dream. I just get drifted along into these other situations where I'm sort of smiling and yakking and being sociable when I actually should be sitting in a room on my own studying. And that is the story of my life.

• 10:25Elizabeth Day?

  That's very interesting, because I read somewhere that I think it was your grandfather who said, well, Harriet's mad to want to act.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:32Elizabeth Day?

  Even though your uncle obviously made a great success.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yes, they were on different sides of the family. And so that was significant, I think. I think my father's father thought that my mother's family was sort of historic Italians. I mean, we did have Italian blood, and we did have a line of sort of, you know, other performers in the family. And I think he sort of regarded them as sort of unreliably foreign.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  But yeah, one of my regrets is that I didn't get to know, now, we have partly, because it's the profession I'm in, but partly it's the way things are now, there's much less of a barrier between old and young. And you can have very good friendships with people who would be your grandchild. I was born into a time when there were rigid structures about age, and I would never have asked my grandfather anything personal or, you know, or revealed anything personal about myself. So he knew me very little. He hardly knew me. But he did know my school reports and I'd sort of been quite academic. And he thought I should do something academic.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  And that, and that by its nature, the acting profession was totally unacademic. And what I've lived to find is that the two sides of me can come together. You know, and more and more, you know, my brain has been researching, analysing, doing whatever I'd have done at university in order to do my job well.

• 12:06Elizabeth Day?

  Before we get on to your failures, I want to ask you about intimidating women. Because you are so profoundly brilliant at playing intimidating women on screen. And yet you said earlier that you had this crippling shyness. And someone like Caroline in Succession, who has that emotional courtisation and yet you're able to, because of your acting, so to see, and the writing, see through to some sort of vulnerable core of her. It's, I imagine it's a fascinating process to play. But tell me why those sorts of women appeal to you?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  It's funny, I don't think, it's not that I proactively go out looking for those parts. It's that they come my way. Because like it or not, in the acting profession, you are cast according to how you appear. And by fault of...

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Biology, nature, whatever.

• 13:07Elizabeth Day?

  Gift of biology.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  I look probably much more intimidating than I am. And therefore, people think, oh, she can play that. And I can, because I would say, not because I am like that, but because I've observed people like that. If you see what I mean. And I've got this feeling that, you know, this sort of thing I've had since a child of looking across the tube train and going, I wonder what they're thinking. I wonder what their day is like. And if that person then catches your eye

• 13:51Speaker 01

  and you sort of feel, gosh, I've been looking into your soul and I shouldn't have been doing that. You feel this sort of terror on the receiving end. And I think there were teachers at school or friends of my mother or people that came into my sphere who behaved like Lady Caroline to me. And I was intimidated by them. So I observed, sort of like cat and mouse. The mouse gets very familiar with how the cat behaves. So it's not so much that I'm frightening as that I know what it's like to be frightened and what it is that frightens me about those people. And I became very good at reproducing that.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And then having to find out what, because that's what I like to do, getting inside that person and seeing why are they like that? And in every case, it's a different story. And that's what I get slightly frustrated, that they get lumped together when actually they're all very different. But they're lumped together because they all look like me. And what can I do about that except change my wig, you know, and change my accent slightly or, you know, I hope change my demeanor. But some people just lump them together, which is the frustration, is you're trying to break stereotypes and some people resolutely maintain their hold on those stereotypes.

• 15:13Elizabeth Day?

  Before I get into the meat of this interview, which is the failures, please indulge me and talk to me about succession. If you're not sick of it. Did you know when you were acting in succession that it was going to be what it was going to be? Did you feel that you were in the presence of something special?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I suppose I did. I mean,

• 15:34Speaker 01

  I didn't know it would be that special because to get your head above the parapet when there's so much out there now, so many, you know, reams of stuff out there, to get, to get any show up above that parapet is extraordinary. And I don't even think that the writers involved have full understanding of why that of all shows should have risen above so many others. But I saw the pilot. I had that advantage. They sent me the pilot. They'd shot one episode and they said, do you want to be part of this? Well, forget it. You know, of course I did. It was already sharp, witty, extraordinarily well acted,

• 16:21Speaker 01

  just a sphere of life that I had no idea about. But at the same time, as it grew, you became more involved in the people and you started to actually find you were pitying some of them or, you know, rooting for some of them. And you thought, you know, and that is something to do with its power. And so suddenly being parachuted into this family that was ready made and I was part of what had made them the way they were, was sort of rather, you know, intimidating, but at the same time, you know, exhilarating. It was exciting. And although I knew I was surrounded by great actors with a brilliant script,

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I thought it would be good, but I didn't know it would be sort of above good.

• 17:10Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. As a viewer, who's your favourite Roy?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Roman, I still think of as my baby.

• 17:16Elizabeth Day?

  Oh.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Although in fact, I got that wrong. I think Shiv is the youngest, you know, so. I should know, shouldn't I? But it's rather characteristic of Caroline that she doesn't even know which is the child she had last. But I think of him as my baby because you can't really mother Shiv. She's very hard to mother. And just physically, she's so unlike me that I imagine she's very much her daddy's girl. And Kendall is so messed up.

• 17:50Elizabeth Day?

  I love Kendall.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I love Kendall, but as a mother,

• 17:53Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I always think he's going to accuse me of being a terrible mother. He's the one who's sort of, he's been, there was a tiny bit that was cut that would have been very useful to me in season one, where he says, you know, I've been seeing someone, a therapist, and I want you to know that I forgive you. And in an improv, which Jesse said he wanted to keep in, I said, have you forgiven your father? And I thought, why should there always be the mother who gets the blame? And also, in the scene that a lot of people quote, where I say, let's talk about it over eggs tomorrow morning at breakfast, and then I'm not there, to say in her defence, she thinks he's going to give her another great whole harangue about what a dreadful mother she is. She doesn't know he's just in a terrible tis because he's caused the death

• 18:38Speaker 01

  of a young man by drowning. She doesn't know that. So she's not being insensitive as in, I know you need to talk about that and I'm walking out on you. She thinks she's going to be given a whole sort of mother, what you did to me when I was a child, and she can't be bothered to go through all that again.

• 18:55Elizabeth Day?

  Let's get on to your failures. So your first failure, and I share it, is your failure to master the piano or music theory. When did you attempt to try?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  As a school kid, I was, did piano lessons when I was really young. And I'm going to sound pretentious here, but I have a deep, deep love of classical music, of complicated music. It can be modern, but complicated. I love what it does to the brain to have to follow several strands of music that are emotional and intellectual. And my first impulse as a child was to dance. To music. That was my first sort of look at me, look at me thing. So I got very familiar with Chopin's Etudes and this, that and the other. Then I'm going into a class and I'm going da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, bing, bonk, you know. And I can't, and the distance between

• 19:49Speaker 01

  what I've heard and what I'm playing is just giant. And nobody really understands that, Harriet, if you practise that every day, one day you might be able to do that. And I couldn't bear the difference between what I heard and what I was doing. And so my big regret is that, you know, I'm blaming other people, that nobody actually said, this is what you do, you practise so that your fingers learn how to do it. It's not just in your head. And I think it was partly to do with, and the sort of story of my school life was that there were lots of things that came very easily to me that I didn't have to work hard at. And then when I was 20 onwards, I've been trying to catch up.

• 20:33Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think you had an innate resistance as a child to doing things that you weren't good at?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yes, I think I did have that. There were enough things that I was good at that I sort of sailed through exams.

• 20:44Elizabeth Day?

  Well, you did your A levels two years early.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  I know, ridiculous.

• 20:47Elizabeth Day?

  I mean, that is ridiculous, but very impressive.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's partly because I was born in September. So I was, you know, you were either in a form where you were the oldest or you were the youngest, and I was usually the youngest. And they got us through our A levels school sort of at 17, but therefore I was 16. And, you know, then what was I going to do for a couple of years? Because I was at boarding school, I couldn't wait to leave and get out there and, you know, join the swinging 60s rather late in the day. That was really all I was interested in.

• 21:24Elizabeth Day?

  I'm very fascinated by your family. Your mother, I believe, did something top secret with the Admiralty during the war.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, she was junior, but she was working on the ultra secret. You know, the Enigma machine had cracked the German codes and we were trying to pretend we didn't know them. If you sunk a U-boat, you had to pretend there was a plane flying over at the time that spotted it. You know, you couldn't say, we knew that U-boat was there because we got, we've tapped into your codes. So it was a very complicated operation, which she was a minion in, I'm sure. And she worked in that building that's all disguised by ivy next to Admiralty Arch, which was known as the bunker or the citadel, I can't remember. Anyway, I wish I could have talked to her more about it. But there was such, not only

• 22:13Speaker 01

  were my parents of that generation and that ilk that didn't talk about themselves, but they'd gone through a war where you never talked about what you were doing. So that culture of secrecy and untouchableness and you don't probe, you don't ask questions. It was very frustrating now when I look back and say, God, I wish I'd asked them, I wish I'd known more what they were doing. But she was vaguely connected to Ian Fleming and Peter Fleming, who was Celia Johnson's husband and Ian Fleming's brother was high up in the, in that department of Admiralty.

• 22:49Elizabeth Day?

  Celia Johnson, the actor?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:50Elizabeth Day?

  Right.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  So, and Ian Fleming was connected to my mother by steps. I mean, my, my, my mother's stepfather was Ian Fleming's mother's brother.

• 23:03Elizabeth Day?

  Got it. Okay.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  So they were cousins by step, step cousins. And I think that's how indirectly she got that job. And she was just a sort of secretary shoving things around on a board, you know. But I then, much later, I did a TV play written by Ian McEwan called The Imagination Game, long before the film. And it was about a woman working as a minion interpreting the coding. It was written by Ian McEwan. In his screenplay, she discusses it with a friend and then gets sort of court martialed. And of course, I asked my mother, I said, you know, was this sort of what you were

• 23:46Speaker 01

  doing, what you were doing, you know, and she said, you would never, ever, ever have talked to your best friend about it. Numero uno, that, that is unbelievable. It wouldn't have happened. And of course, in fiction, you have to sort of go with things that didn't happen.

• 24:19Elizabeth Day?

  This idea of secrecy and that feeding into a certain emotional remove makes me think of your parents splitting up, which they did when you were quite young.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was 12 going on 13, or 13 going on 14, that sort of age.

• 24:36Elizabeth Day?

  I wondered if it was ever spoken of.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  You did not ask. And I remember sort of saying to my mother, why did daddy leave? And she said, darling, you'd better ask him. So I wrote him a letter saying, why did you leave? I think actually I did find it amongst his things years later, he'd actually kept it. And he wrote back to me a very sweet, but totally unenlightening letter. And I almost think he didn't know why he'd done it. That generation had almost a sort of taboo about self-analysis, looking into themselves, asking questions about themselves, the very opposite of how we are now.

• 25:14Elizabeth Day?

  They would hate this podcast.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. They would hate this podcast. They would spin in their graves. And he came back with sort of a few platitudes about, you know, I still love her, but we can't live together kind of thing. I wondered whether it was a sort of midlife crisis on his part. He was 53 or something when he left. So that sort of rings a bell. And he always had lots of girlfriends. Not during the marriage, I don't think, but before and after.

• 25:42Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think that part of your desire to get under the skin of other people is because you want to get to a truth that you weren't allowed to ask about?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Exactly that. As I said, it's sort of a mixture of curiosity and shyness.

• 25:58Elizabeth Day?

  So you leave school, you have this place at Oxford which you turned down, and then you apply for drama college and you get rejected five times.

• 26:08Elizabeth Day?

  Which must be another sad experience in not having been good at something. I mean, that you turn out being fantastic at, but that must have been difficult.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  That does fascinate me. I got into Oxford to do modern languages and I just passed my 17th birthday. I mean, and I had to wait to go. And it wasn't my desire to go to university. It's come down from my grandfather, who was actually, I now see, you know, I learn now, a champion of women's education. My father was not pushy, was very laid back and said, oh, well, if you don't want to go, never mind. And somehow I was able to say no to something I knew I could do.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  And say, I'm, I've got to pursue this thing that after the decision about not going to Oxford. I then tried to get into drama school. So it wasn't like I got into drama school already and therefore turned down Oxford. And I found a diary, this sounds so self indulgent, but I wrote a diary the, the year that I was trying out for these drama schools. And I found this entry saying, four names were called out, mine was not among them, went home with the other losers. But I know I'll get there in the end. And I don't remember thinking it, and I cannot think where I got that thought from.

• 27:37Elizabeth Day?

  Gosh. How influenced were you by your uncle, Christopher Lee?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Sort of not very. I mean, he was in this very glamorous film world and I was going into fringe theatre. So our, our lives didn't cross over until much later. Although, you know, I say that, but it was films that I first wanted to do. Because I saw Hayley Mills on screen and she was like a little bit older than me, but the same sort of person and the camera was focusing on someone of my age and saying they were important and they were effective and they could make things happen and they could have adventures. That was very influential, I think, in where I wanted to be. There was

• 28:25Speaker 01

  that feeling of, you know, the duality which I still have of feeling very unimportant and wanting attention and wanting to count and wanting to matter. Because I was the youngest in my family and it was a family that already didn't say, you know, everything you do is important. I was actually small. I wasn't tall like I am now. So that feeling of that somebody's small and supposedly unimportant was on the big screen in close up. I think that was probably, quite selfishly, that's what I wanted. I wanted attention.

• 29:01Elizabeth Day?

  You were right. Your diary self was completely correct. You got into Lambda. You became the phenomenal actor that we all know and love. And your second failure is your failure to get roles that you auditioned for. You say too many to enumerate. Who knows where any different path might have led, but this is the norm for any actor.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 29:20Elizabeth Day?

  But getting used to that kind of rejection must be challenging.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  It's almost like, you know, a tightrope walker goes through the fear of falling to their death, you know. It's like, it comes with the job. You hear people say, I wanted to be an actor, but I couldn't face the rejection. And you go, oh, there are some people who really can't deal with that. Well, you sort of have to.

• 29:45Elizabeth Day?

  Is there one failed audition that particularly haunts you?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Helena Bonham Carter knew me. She'd seen me on stage quite a lot and we'd met through mutual friends. And she was about to do Howard's End. And she said, you must audition to play my sister. You'd be very good.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And my agent wasn't very powerful at the time. And the answer came back, they're not seeing anybody over thirty, which I was, although I looked much younger. And so the part went Emma Thompson and her life took off. And also, I'd worked with Anthony Hopkins and he said, she's all right to the director. So everything was all set to part, and I never even got to meet the director, James Ivory, because I was too old. Oh, that's the one thing where I go, would my life have been different? Or we all know Emma Thompson's a genius and, you know, she went the way of all geniuses and perhaps I'd have just been an okay actor.

• 30:44Elizabeth Day?

  You would be a fantastic novelist, Lenny. Have you ever played an EM Forster?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  No, no, I haven't. Dare I say, this sounds a bit generalized, but quite a lot of the great writing for women has come from homosexual men who were not able to write about what they really felt. Like Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, Tennessee Williams, all those writers write sympathetic women from the inside, almost as though they know what it's like, because they're actually projecting themselves into the female role and EM Forster falls into that category.

• 31:25Elizabeth Day?

  You're so right, that repression, the inability to be who you feel you are or to be seen as you really are, particularly when those writers were writing, is, does dovetail so exactly with the experience of being a certain kind of woman.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yes, it really does work. And then when, you know, we got the liberation of, you know, post-war, you know, John Osborne, Kitchen Sink, Arnold Wesker, they were very male and the woman was doing the ironing and laughing at the jokes of the man. Do you know, it wasn't an advance in lots of ways.

• 32:07Elizabeth Day?

  Thank goodness we live when we live now.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Oh, God. And women are writing.

• 32:12Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  That was the big revelation when a lot of women playwrights came along, women screenwriters.

• 32:18Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think you've ever got a part that you shouldn't have gotten, that you feel you were miscast in?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Well, quite honestly, I don't usually accept a role if I know how I'm going to do it. Usually I'm taking on a role that I think someone else would do better. But what would be more interesting would be for me to go on the journey to try and do it.

• 32:40Elizabeth Day?

  How interesting.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:41Elizabeth Day?

  So if you do know how you would do a role, you tend to say no.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if it's obvious and there's not much to explore.

• 32:48Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Why do it? Or if I've done it before. And you do get lots of offers that are basically wanting you to repeat something you've done before. But, um, but usually aren't quite so good.

• 33:02Elizabeth Day?

  What was it like playing Elizabeth I on stage in Mary Stuart?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  That was amazing. I read lots and lots of books about her. But of course it's Schiller's Elizabeth the First. It's not the real Elizabeth the First, if you see what I mean.

• 33:16Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  And what I found fascinating about playing somebody who actually existed was that I suddenly got, I suddenly got this moment when I was reading about her where I thought there was once this one person who inhabited this one body and had this voice and this destiny. And she did actually live and she was. And because that individual gets replicated in images, in stories, in different historical takes on her, you forget that there was just one person who was five foot something, who had red hair and a tingly voice and piercing eyes and had lived that experience.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And when you, when you think of that one individual that you wish you could stand in front of and hear from historical reality.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  You realise that everything that you read and everything you've heard comes from other people. And that it's really, you've got to sort of synthesise all that and choose what aspects are relevant to tell the story of this play. And that is to narrow it down. But it's just, your imagination wants to hear her voice.

• 34:37Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  And wants to talk to her. And you can't, you can only see her or read about her through other people's opinions, which vary hugely with Elizabeth the first, obviously.

• 34:49Elizabeth Day?

  And I want to come back to Elizabeth first, but you're about to play Margaret Thatcher.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have actually played her.

• 34:55Elizabeth Day?

  You've played, right. And that must be a slightly different, I mean, similar but slightly different feeling because there's so much footage of her and we all grew up experiencing what it was like living under her rule. What was the balance like for you there?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  That was different, you're right. Partly because I know people can just go to YouTube and see how different I look. That's one of the things I was worried about because I do look very different from her. And we had a terrific team giving me blue eyes and blonde wig and big tits and whatever, you know, we had all that going for us and people did a brilliant job. But within that, I've always felt sort of the nearer you get to somebody externally, actually, the more it throws into relief how distant you are internally. And again, I thought, here's this woman who really was a person.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  You know, for all the images of her and reports of her, there was this one woman who closed the front door and went to bed at night with her curlers in, talking to Dennis, having a hot mug of cocoa, whatever it was, you know. And who is that woman and what did she think as she went to bed? And what did she think when she got up in the morning? And you'll never get close to that. So it's a sort of vicious circle where you, the nearer you get, the further you get. But I was, again, rather like the Elizabeth the first case, I was. Honing down to what was necessary to tell the story of that play. It was not a biopic.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  It wasn't attempting to embrace everything that was about her. So that got me slightly off the hook.

• 36:42Elizabeth Day?

  So this is, it's a James Graham TV screenplay, isn't it? And it's, is it called Margaret and Brian?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  It was called Brian and Margaret. Now it's called Brian and Maggie.

• 36:52Elizabeth Day?

  Okay. And it's about a TV interview that she did with an interviewer called Brian Walden.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Brian Walden.

• 37:00Elizabeth Day?

  Did you end up liking Margaret Thatcher more having played her?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  I didn't really, I can't say I liked her in the sense of, I imagine, sitting next to her at a dinner party or something, we would have zero to talk about, I think. But I did start to understand her more. What a lot of people have said, and I've discarded because I just didn't want to hear anything I wanted. I so disagreed with her politics that I found it very difficult to sort of think of her as a sympathetic human being. And then I sort of had to for this job. And I think what I, what I did really embrace was this wall of white, public school men that she walked into every day with grey suits on and suits

• 37:48Speaker 01

  and ties who were going to their clubs that night and who might be saying awful things about her behind her back or not, and how she just had such sureness about herself and not so much about herself, but about her ideas. She was so sure that her ideas were right and that the world should go in her direction, that she was willing to, to, to go up against that. And I just thought of her as a woman amongst men. And that gave me great empathy and admiration that I had heard other people say, but I'd gone, yes, she's a woman, but she's not really a woman. She doesn't represent us. She's not like

• 38:32Speaker 01

  a woman. She's, she's, she didn't help women. She didn't help women to come up the ladder. She didn't really like women. That was my image of her. And then I watched various bits of YouTube that showed a little bit of a different softer side of her. But basically, she was an economist and a practical woman. She was not, as far as I know, interested in the arts very much. She would have thought of me as a wet.

• 39:00Elizabeth Day?

  She would also have hated this podcast, probably.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  She would have hated this podcast.

• 39:05Elizabeth Day?

  Before we get on to your third failure, that phrase, a woman amongst men, brings me back to Elizabeth the First, and the fact that you met your husband whilst playing her.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was one of the grey suited men.

• 39:19Elizabeth Day?

  And I wonder if I could ask you, he is your second husband, and I want to approach this with sensitivity, and you don't have to talk about it. But I know you lost your first husband to cancer. And I wonder if I could ask you about that, about how you feel that terrible loss has informed you and what you think about love.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I have to just correct that he wasn't, we weren't officially married. But I'm glad to call him my husband, because we were going to get married. And it's always so difficult to explain to anyone that you've lost your partner, or you've lost your lover. It doesn't sound as cataclysmic as losing your husband. But it was losing my husband. I was losing my life partner of eight years. And it reverberates all the time. I mean, I think about him nearly every day. And my current husband is super sympathetic

• 40:21Speaker 01

  and good about that. I don't have to apologize for that. And I don't make comparisons. And I love my husband, and I love my life with him now. And he's very secure of that. But I suppose there's a part of me that doesn't want the first one to vanish. Because basically, all we are is hot air. And when we stop breathing that hot air, what are we? You know, that's what I, that's what I find confrontational about everything. You know, the performances I've done on stage have vanished into air, into thin air, as Prospero says. You know, our lives have vanished into air when we die. And I was, I've just got this fight to keep him alive in my head because he wasn't

• 41:05Speaker 01

  super famous. He was very private. He didn't have millions of friends. It's not like, you know, Maggie Smith dies and everybody has a story about her or a treasured memory about her. I have to keep him alive somewhere, so I sort of resolutely think about him. Do you know what I mean?

• 41:23Elizabeth Day?

  Beautiful.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  But, but, but, but he's not a threat to my current marriage at all. But I do think, God, I'm now older than he was when he died.

• 41:32Elizabeth Day?

  His name was Peter?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Peter Blythe. And, and he was a lovely actor and a lovely man, but he had a family. It wasn't easy to get married because he was still officially married, et cetera, et cetera. But I think his daughter and his grandchildren considered me, you know, to be married. And so he was, he was my family.

• 41:56Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm. I'm so sorry, Harriet.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it was, it was dreadful when it happened and, and I think I got through it through friends. And that's, that's proved to me. And when I got married now to my current husband, Guy, who I've been with longer than anyone now, almost twice as long as I was with Peter, I still cultivate and keep up my friendships in a way that he doesn't really under, well, he does understand, but they helped me get through that time when I didn't have anyone.

• 42:32Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And so I'm not going to dump them now. You know, I don't want to dump them. I love the variety of friends I've got. But in, in many ways, I could live just between our front door and the walls and with looking inwards at our, our very happy relationship.

• 42:49Elizabeth Day?

  This is going to sound like a strange question, but it's rare. It shouldn't be rare, but it's rare that I get the chance to ask it. So I'm in my mid forties now and don't have children, tried, failed. And one of the things that scares me, if I'm being really honest, is the idea of being older and not having anyone.

• 43:11Elizabeth Day?

  To look after me or to be with and that fear of loneliness, the sort of existential loneliness. Did you ever experience that fear and is it okay?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  I absolutely have experienced that fear and I call it the L word. You know, loneliness is the thing we don't speak about enough. It's absolutely woven into the experience of being old is the fear of being alone. And sort of trying to develop that muscle of self reliance and self love and self caring. Because you think I'm going to need that. I know people who would answer me saying, well, I can't rely on my children to look after me. You know, and I know children who have abandoned their parents and not looked after them.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  And I know people who would rather be looked after by people, you know, who whose job it is to look after old people than put their loved ones through that task. So there are various ways of looking at it. And no, I don't have children. Maybe I wouldn't want them to feel obliged to look after me. Maybe that's not why we should have children. But I think loneliness is something that is experienced at every stage of life. You know, I think there are lots of very lonely young people. And I also know there are some very lonely old people.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  And it's very hard to, you know, sometimes you just want to go up to an old lady in the street and talk to them. And I'm not brave enough to do that. Or to give someone a hug without them being offended or say, you know, call me anytime to someone. Which I do say that, I say, call me anytime midnight or whatever, you know, if you need to talk to my friends. But. Physical loneliness is a terrible thing, you know. And I think as people get older, just not, not being hugged, not being touched. I think those are things I'm very frightened of.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  What can you do to prepare yourself for that? Very little. Grab hold of the wonder of having it now, having companionship now. And try and cultivate some kind of self reliance, which is harder to, you know. If you, if you're physically disabled in any way, that's much harder, obviously. But emotionally, try and be your own best friend, your own companion. Talk to yourself. Don't we all talk to ourselves when we're alone? That's my best friend. My, my, me and me, me and, me and I are very good friends. And somehow to cultivate that without feeling this awful sense that I think one, one of the reasons

• 46:05Speaker 01

  we don't talk about the L word is because there is a sense of failure. There is a sense of I'm on my own and I'm lonely because nobody likes me and nobody wants to be with me and I've done something wrong. And, and I'm uncool and I'm needy and I'm, you know, someone's going to see through to that neediness and be repelled by it. So I'm going to put up on this front that I'm absolutely fine when I'm not. And actually, we're all moving around pretending to be absolutely fine when we're not. So let's drop the mask occasionally, you know.

• 46:38Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Shelley Jensen was about to retire early after selling her veterinary practice for millions. But a moment of vulnerability became a way to take away her rights.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Don't you see how destroyed I am as a person?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Her husband fought to save her before Shelley lost her freedom forever.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  This is a life or death matter. My wife's life is at stake.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, this is Free Shelley Jensen. Available now on The Binge.

• 47:15Speaker 05

  Greetings, it's Mel Gerroch here, host of Where There's a Will is Awake, the podcast that laughs in the face of death. Yes, that's right. Celebrities plan every detail of their dream demise, from the funeral playlist to the buffet at the wake. And our recent live funeral shows in an actual church delivered plenty of deliciously dark surprises. So if you've ever wondered what Mark Watson's final meal would be, or how Phil Wang would like to be remembered, you're in luck. Watch and listen to Mark Watson's funeral now exclusively on Amazon Music. And don't miss Phil Wang's cracker of a funeral, coming on the 12th of November. See you on the other side.

• 47:55Elizabeth Day?

  Your final failure, because I'm getting so carried away just talking to you, is that we have one more failure to go through, which is your failure to cook.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:03Elizabeth Day?

  Maria Margoli's had the same one.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Really?

• 48:05Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Really?

• 48:07Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  I've got this mad relationship with food, which, which every, you know, lots of people have. And I got mildly anorexic for six years when I was in my twenties. And I've had friends whose daughters are going through it and they want me to help. I cannot really get to the root of that. But one of the remnants is that I don't like being in a kitchen around food. I don't like preparing it. I don't like, I'll come to the kitchen table and eat and I'll do the washing up. But I don't like being around a lot of food. It's a weird thing. I don't like food shopping. And I know it comes from that fear of overeating

• 48:52Speaker 01

  or whatever it is that, or losing control. You know, there's a bowl of crisps, I'll finish it and then I'll fill it up again and finish that, which I used to suffer from. And now I just, I just will go and do something else. And then I won't have that temptation.

• 49:08Elizabeth Day?

  Right. That makes such psychological sense.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 49:11Elizabeth Day?

  Because, thank you for talking about your anorexia, or how you experienced it. Because when I read about it, you said, Exactly what you just said, I can't explain it. I can't help someone going through it. All I know is you went to a GP and the sort of response was, well, eat something.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Go eat, have a good meal.

• 49:30Elizabeth Day?

  Which is so, I can't imagine how difficult that was to hear and so dismissive. But you said what got you through in the end was work.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:38Elizabeth Day?

  So again, it's a sort of distraction technique.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And I think probably there is nothing wrong with distraction techniques. I believe in distraction. I really do. I think a lot of life is about distraction and that's fine. And I wish I could find the quote, but in Arthur Miller's Time Bends, there is something about, words to that effect, that that's what we do and that's what we're allowed to do. And a lot of creativity comes out of it and a lot of survival techniques come out of it. That we can't be sitting there in the centre core of our distress all the time, you know, we'd be very unproductive. You know, I intuit that the anorexia is about

• 50:21Speaker 01

  control, about emotional control, about being able to control your needs, which, you know, are expressed through your need to eat, but actually your need for love, your need for attention, your need for everything else. And to be distracted from that need, like a baby. You see babies wailing and then you sort of go, look at that bird over there. And they go, oh, and they stop crying. It's, distraction's fine.

• 50:49Elizabeth Day?

  Do you feel that that need for attention that you started off this interview explaining that you experienced as a child, do you feel that it has been sated now? Or do you still want it?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  That's a very good question because it's been sated ages ago. That sort of reason for doing the job has sort of moved, really shifted. And I feel that that was my driving force to acting. And then sort of.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Melted away and was taken over by something else, which is to do with expressing stories to the world, working in an ensemble, doing my job well, travelling, communicating with people. And now that I'm actually getting a very belated, if you like, high profile, I'm going, oh, go away. I don't want the attention. It's embarrassing. I love it so much, but I don't want it. I shouldn't want it. It's far too late in life to be getting this. You know, it's not real. So there's this strange thing where I'm going, I wish you'd given me all this attention when I was 40. And yet, it's very nice to get it at all. Of course, you like it, but it's kind of embarrassing as well. Do you know,

• 51:58Speaker 01

  it's like some hot spotlight being on you and you're squirming that the hot spotlight that you longed for when you were 17 is now arrived.

• 52:08Elizabeth Day?

  Well, Dame Harriet Walter, I'm so grateful that that spotlight is on you, no matter what discomfort it causes you. May you long carry on trapping yourself in people's downstairs cupboards.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 52:23Elizabeth Day?

  And thank you so much for coming on How To Fail.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  That was great. Thank you.

• 52:27Elizabeth Day?

  You're going to stay and answer listener failures on Failing With Friends. I can't wait to hear what you have to say.

• 52:36Elizabeth Day?

  We heartily recommend you follow us to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do tell all of your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.