Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
I DON’T care what anybody thınks of me any more
She’s been working since she was four and been through as many husbands. No wonder Patsy Kensit needed a break. Now she’s back in Tina & Bobby – and says she’s had it with wanting people to like her
Fans of the young ingénue fashion designer Crepe Suzette in 1986 rock movie Absolute Beginners, or indeed of maneating ward sister Faye Morton in Holby City, might struggle to recognise Patsy Kensit in her latest role. She cuts a matriarchal figure in vintage 1960s outfits, her trademark blonde hair replaced by coppery tones, playing Betty Dean, the strong-willed mother of Bobby Moore’s wife Tina in ITV’s threepart drama Tina & Bobby.
After a five-year break from acting to concentrate on bringing up her two sons, James, now 23, and Lennon, 17, Patsy jumped at the chance to play the middle- aged mum to Michelle Keegan’s Tina. ‘I’ve been waiting for something that would really engage me,’ she says. ‘I read the script for this in an hour, and I’ve had scripts that have taken me two days to read because they’re so boring. I’ve been in a few of them too – don’t get me wrong – but this was truly a page-turner, it’s written so beautifully.’
The drama is based on Tina’s 2005 autobiography Bobby Moore: By The Person Who Knew Him Best, and covers the three decades that Tina and Bobby were together, from their first meeting in 1957, through marriage, Bobby’s battle with prostate cancer and the ultimate high of Bobby lifting the World Cup for England in 1966. But the following yea r Tina’s beloved mother Betty died, and when Bobby retired from playing in 1978 and found himself shunned by the world he’d given so much to, he embarked on the affair that led to the end of the marriage.
‘Tina and Bobby were the first celebrity footballing couple so it’s a fascinating story,’ says Patsy, who’s now 48. ‘ The atmosphere on set was amazing and Michelle and I became very close. I met the real Tina too, and she’s warm and lovely and still very glamorous. She told me her mum was very beautiful and well dressed, and she was so excited about me being cast. To have had the life Tina’s had – to be the toast of the town but know there might be another couple along to steal the limelight any minute – and embrace all that, she had to be a very strong woman. The joy for me of being cast as Betty is that everyone believed in me, it wasn’t about me looking a certain way.’
Some of the best lines in Tina & Bobby are Betty’s, allowing Patsy to demonstrate some impeccably comic timing. She was a woman ahead of her time, according to Patsy. ‘She was a force of nature. She married and divorced Tina’s father and remarried a man who was there in body, but not really there for her. Their relationship didn’t last. In those days, with separation and divorce being frowned upon, it was very brave of her to decide to live alone.’
Patsy drew huge inspiration from her own mother Margaret to play the role. An iconic 1960s character who was married to Patsy’s father James ‘Jimmy the Dip’ Kensit, an associate of the Kray Twins, Margaret died of breast cancer when Patsy was 23 after many years of ill health. ‘There are so many parallels between Tina and Betty’s relationship and the one between me and my mum,’ says Patsy. ‘Tina and Betty could have been sisters, they tell each other everything, but Betty also has a boundary, just like my mum did. My relationship with my mother was very co- dependent, if co-dependency means loving someone so much. She was the biggest love of my life and losing her was very painful. Those emotions and feelings were very easy to access.
‘My mum was so proud of me and my brother Jamie, she was a very proud woman. She worked in the press office for Christian Dior, and both she and Betty were obsessed by fashion. They used to buy Vogue and make up Vogue patterns of say, a Dior dress, with fabric bought from the market. There’s one black dress I wear in the show that’s very similar to one my mum made from a Vogue pattern. When I was working as a child actress my parents never touched a penny of my money, but as I got older I liked to go shopping with my mum and treat her to something lovely to wear.’
Patsy says that some of the costumes on set were harder to wear than others. ‘We had to stuff cotton wool in our bras to get the 1950s pointy breast look,’ she laughs. ‘Although towards the end of the
‘Losing Mum was painful, she was the biggest love of my life’
period we were filming in that look went out of style and it became a much smaller silhouette. It was very odd and not attractive at all.’
Tina & Bobby marks another stage for Patsy in a long and varied acting career that spans over 40 years. Her first TV role at four years old was in an advert for Bird’s Eye peas and within a year, thanks to a friend of her mother’s who was setting up a casting agency, she landed a part in The Great Gatsby alongside Mia Farrow and Robert Redford as Daisy
Buchanan’s daughter Pamela. ‘I was only a baby really, but I remember so much about it,’ she says.
The film that was to really launch her was Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners, an adaptation of the Colin MacInnes’ novel about romance and racial tension in late-50s London which also starred David Bowie. Patsy, then 16, played the love interest to Eddie O’Connell’s young photographer Colin, and although not a box office success the film redefined the rock musical. Recently she recalled
what it was like working with Bowie. ‘He was playing an ad man called Vendice Partners, and he only said hello and goodbye to me on the set. But then one day he came into the make-up room, picked up a brush and started doing my hair – it was the most erotic experience I’d ever had!’
Patsy’s profile was now so high that she was cast as Linda Washbrook in Michael Winner’s movie version of Alan Ayckbourn’s romantic farce A Chorus Of Disapproval with Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons, Prunella Scales and Richard Briers, before branching out into mainstream TV with roles as blingedup blonde Sadie King in Emmerdale and Faye Morton in Holby City. ‘I was a child actress and then a young leading lady and I’ve managed to navigate my way through the business and work every year of my life since I was four,’ she says proudly. ‘ But it was a conscious choice to slow down and say yes to less.’
She reached that turning point eight years ago after tiring of rushing between film and TV sets and her home in north London. ‘I was working on Holby and I loved it but I had to stop because I wanted to be a fulltime mum,’ she s ays . ‘ I wa s struggling to get home i n time for the boys. My eldest son was about to turn 15 and one evening I just thought, “This has got to stop.” I was missing out. I’d get to their football matches or parents’ evenings but I was always late and I didn’t want to be late any more. So we downsized our lives and I decided I would only say yes to jobs that didn’t take me away from home. I’ve always worked – I still do lots of voiceovers and I have a radio show on Magic FM – but I’m also there to cook dinner for my boys now.’
It’s all a far cry from Patsy’s wild child days in her 20s when her tumultuous love life was as likely to make headlines as her work. She went through three husbands before she reached the age of 33 – Big Audio Dynamite’s Dan Donovan, Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr and Oasis’s Liam Gallagher – with a fourth marriage, to DJ Jeremy Healy, that lasted less than a year when she was 41. All four were musicians, cementing her reputation as the archetypal rock chick. The first came when she was 19, in the same year that she had two top 20 hits with the band she fronted, Eighth Wonder. She then married Kerr in 1992 and they had son James in 1993 before divorcing in 1996. The following year she married Liam Gallagher, who was at the height of his fame with Oasis, but although she gave birth to Lennon a year later she has claimed she cried every day during the three-and-a-half year marriage. Her final toe in the water was the short-lived marriage to Healy.
Now that James and Lennon are older, she says she’s ready to get back to work. ‘Now that they’re more independent I have more freedom to work but I’ll be able to look back in a few years’ time and know that I did everything I could for them, I was there. I would have struggled with that if I hadn’t made that decision.’
When she isn’t working, Patsy leads a very grounded life at home. She started meditating six years ago and gets up at 6am every day to practise before heading off for ‘a run/ stagger’ on Hampstead Heath. ‘My knees are starting to feel it, so I try and run on grass now,’ she laughs. ‘I’m very health-conscious and disciplined. I’m trying to cut down on sugar, I eat three meals a day and I enjoy a glass of wine at the weekend. It’s important to me because I want to be able to run after my grandchildren and be fit and well for them. I want to be a grandma on the go! But that’s a long way off... I hope! Motherhood is the best thing I ever did.
‘I’m at a time in my life that’s proving to be really great,’ she says. ‘Bring on 50! I’ve got girlfriends in their 30s who are panicking about getting older but the beauty of being in your 40s is that you stop caring. I don’t care what anyone thinks of me any more. I spent way too many years worrying and wanting people to like me. I’m a very straightforward person, I don’t like drama, and I now feel very calm and happy. I’ve learned that if I’m fearful or scared, I should face those things head on. I’ve learned so many lessons over the years.’
She has no idea what she’ll be doing after Tina & Bobby. ‘I’d love to do some theatre and I’d die to be on Coronation Street,’ she says. ‘I’d give my right arm for that, I’m such a fan. Michelle was in it of course, and we chatted about it a lot on the set and had a lot of laughs. Every day I was sorry that filming was over and that’s not normal. Usually I’m running to get changed into a tracksuit to head home. It was great to play a proper character-driven role and this is what I want to do from now on.’
‘I’ve learned to face things head on if I’m scared’
Tina & Bobby continues on Friday at 9pm on ITV.