A love that’s survived little dalliances — by him AND her
WITH his pukka background (Harrow and the Coldstream Guards), plummy vowels, fondness for perfectly cut suits and friendship with the Prince of Wales, it would be easy to make the mistake of thinking actor Edward Fox is a conventional man.
However — as proved by his comments this week about men and their primal need to ‘play the field’ and ‘spread their seed’ — that would be quite a blunder.
In truth Fox, 78, is a bohemian eccentric who holds a selection of rather startling views, particularly when it comes to relations between the sexes.
‘Women can be wantonly savage to men. Men will never understand women,’ he has said.
Why is his outlook so unconventional? One might look to his own father, Robin, a theatrical agent who was famously and continuously unfaithful to his wife, for an explanation of why he has no regard for the accepted rules of monogamy.
It is also true that Edward had a deeply upsetting matrimonial experience which perhaps persuaded him there was no point in hoping for a faithful happy ever after.
His first wife, the actress Tracy Reed, captivated him to such an extent that they were married when he was just 20.
Described as ‘beautiful, funny and very naughty’, she was a cousin of hell-raising actor Oliver Reed, was shown briefly nude in the film Dr Strangelove, and narrowly missed out to Diana Rigg for the part of Emma Peel in The Avengers.
But in 1961, after three yearss together, she left Edward forr another man — and went on too marry three more times.
Their daughter, Lucy, said: ‘Thee marriage was doomed from thee start, but they never stopped being ng close friends. They really loved each other so much.’
He mourned her deeply and attended her funeral following her death in 2012. Indeed, for many years he didn’t marry his partner, the actress Joanna David, and it was said this was because he hadn’t the heart to try again after the bitter failure of his first union.
He and Joanna have been together since 1971. However, he has never made any pretence of being entirely faithful to her, nor has he expected her to be faithful to him. In fact, he told a rather surprised interviewer recently that she certainly had not.
‘She was naughty and a flirt,’ he said of her apparent indiscretions.
Ms David, who played the Duchess of Yeovil in Downton Abbey, has always firmly declined to discuss the topic whenever asked.
She has simply said: ‘We’re not going to go into that; we just won’t touch on that. I think Edward and I understand each other. As you get older in a relationship, you have to accept each other as you are and get on with life.’
So what drives the grand, complicated man whose flaws — and virtues — she has decided to accept?
Born in 1937, Edward is the oldest of the three sons of theatrical agent Robin Fox and Angela Lonsdale. His younger brothers are James, the actor, and Robert, the film and theatre producer. They were raised in Chelsea and East Sussex in a rather colourful milieu.
Robin Fox had announced that he had ‘no intention’ of being faithful while Angela was pregnant with Edward. ‘I shall sleep with whoever I like,’ he declared.
There was a long affair with his secretary, Ros Chatto, and also a liaison with Marina Duchess of Kent. Angela noted: ‘He left me often but not for long. He was always home on Friday.’
Edward went to Harrow — despite failing the entrance test — because his father had been there.
He did not enjoy the experience. ‘I wasn’t expelled but I left early,’ he admitted.
Afterwards he did two years of National Service and then took a job at Marks & Spencer before joining Rada. Determined to plough his own furrow, he again left early.
Then came the marriage to Tracy Reed. The year after his divorce camecam through, he started an affair withwit theatrical titan Dame EileenEile Atkins.
ThatT ended when he was cast oppositeopp a young Joanna David in a production of Sheridan’s The RivalsRiv in 1971. Blonde, petite andan ten years his junior, he pursuedpu and won her.
FoxF later admitted this caused his affair with Atkins to implode — ‘violently, as these things usuallyus do’.
DameD Eileen later revealed: ‘He‘H believed that a woman’s placepl is in the home. A job came up for me in America and he said sato me that if I took it then we would be finished. I took it and we finished. It was six m months before we talked again. I love him dearly.’
During the early days of his and Joanna’sJ relationship, Edward was at the peak of his fame, owing to his role in the 1973 smash hit film The Day Of The Jackal.
The couple set up home together in Little Venice, North London. Family holidays were taken in Dorset, and eventually they bought a second home there, to which they have now retired.
In 1974, when she was 27, they had baby Emilia, now the star of Silent Witness.
At first, Joanna gave up her promising career to raise Emilia. As Fox said, he could never have married a ‘real actor wife like Vanessa Redgrave, who was so dedicated that work was the be-all and end-all’.
Happily, Joanna agreed: ‘In a relationship where you’ve got two actors, somebody has to be running the ship, otherwise it’s chaos,’ she said.
Fox has hinted that it was during this period — with one young child — that he was unfaithful. He says that he had other lovers — plural — but has never revealed any names.
As to the impact on the marriage, he says that it was never truly threatened by the infidelities.
‘Endangered, possibly, and there’s been trouble along the way for sure,’ he said. ‘I think the minute a woman feels her husband or lover is attracted by someone else, she always feels that he may leave a note on the breakfast table, saying: “Darling, I never want to see you again.”
‘That’s natural, but I’ve never come near to writing the note.’ He said that his wife — who worked in plays during term times — accepted his foibles and had a dalliance of her own.
Their second child, Freddie, now an actor and model, was born in 1989. There followed a debilitating health crisis for Joanna, who required an operation in 1993 to cure a brain condition that damaged her spinal cord and put her in a psychiatric hospital for a month.
And this, it seems, changed everything.
Joanna said: ‘The operation was 100 per cent successful, but it was ghastly afterwards because I got post-operative depression.’
Emilia added: ‘Mum’s breakdown was a big thing in all our lives . . . For Fred, Dad and I, it took almost losing Mum to realise how precious she was.’ Joanna slipped back into
‘Joanna ... she was naughty and a flirt’ ‘He believed a woman’s place is in the home’
depression in 2001 after contracting Meniere’s disease, a rare disorder of the inner ear. ‘It did leave me in a terrible state,’ she said.
Soon after, in 2004, to the surprise of family and friends who were not invited, she and Fox married.
Later, she said the ceremony had been arranged because ‘the vicar, our dear friend the Reverend John Slater, was terribly ill and, in fact, died two weeks later. We wanted him to marry us; that was the impulse behind it’.
Despite his unconventional attitudes, it is clear Edward Fox is sustained by an intense religious faith.
He once mused: ‘I’m not a real gentleman at all. Really no one is a gentleman. Jesus Christ was one, but one falls far short of that.’
You can see why his family declare him ‘virtually a long-buried fossil’ and say they struggle to bring him into the 21st century.
Indeed, he has claimed he would prefer 19th century life. ‘I just feel more kinship with the way things were then. Modern manners are a funny, hurried thing.’