Crown star Claire Foy splits from her husband just months after he has brain surgery
THE Crown star Claire Foy has separated from her actor husband after only four years of marriage. The announcement by the 33-year- old actress, who plays the Queen in the hit Netflix drama, comes months after Stephen Campbell Moore had a life-saving operation to remove a brain tumour.
Miss Foy confirmed the couple had been apart ‘for some time’, but insisted that they would ‘continue as friends’.
The actress, who also starred as Anne Boleyn in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall, met her husband, 38, on the set of 2011 fantasy film Season Of The Witch before going on to marry him in 2014.
Seen as a golden couple of British drama, they have one daughter, Ivy Rose, aged two.
In a joint statement yesterday, the former couple said: ‘We have separated and have been for some time. We do however continue as friends with the utmost respect for one another.’
While the exact date of the breakup is not known, on the red carpet at January’s Golden Globe awards in the US the actress kept her ring finger hidden in her pocket as she posed for pictures.
And at this Wednesday’s premiere of her film Unsane, her wedding ring was noticeably absent. Friends of the couple said the split came as a shock but the relationship ‘simply wasn’t working’.
The second series of The Crown has followed the Queen and Prince Philip, played by Matt Smith, as they are plagued by rumours of the duke’s infidelity.
In one episode, the characters even discussed the prospect of divorce but agreed to soldier on and work on their marriage. Campbell Moore, who starred in the 2006 film The History Boys as well as the BBC’s The Child In Time alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, has had two operations to remove brain tumours.
Five years ago, doctors found a benign tumour on his pituitary gland and removed it.
But last year he began to feel unwell while in South Africa filming TV series The Last Post and discovered the tumour had returned and was more serious.
Speaking about having it removed in September, he said: ‘I have quite a thick skin. Even the first time I had the operation, it almost bounced off me.
‘They told me that it was a lot more dangerous this time, that there were a lot more potential problems. And then suddenly I was like, “Oh God, this is really killing me”.’ The tumour was discovered while his wife filmed The Crown’s second series. Campbell Moore admitted in an interview that life had been ‘eventful’ since his wife became a household name.
Miss Foy won a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe for her role. Her husband said: ‘Having a child, and her career becoming stratospheric, there have been a lot of things going on at one time. Yesterday’s normal is not today’s normal, it’s just what’s happening.’
He added: ‘I fell in love with her not knowing if she was a good actor or a bad actor, it didn’t make any difference to me. All of that stuff is just a bonus. It’s all very nice, but our life is completely separate from our profession.’
Miss Foy began filming The Crown’s first series only four months after giving birth to their daughter, meaning that she found herself juggling breast- feeding the baby while on set.
It proved to be problematic, she later told Vogue magazine, as she recalled a moment on her first day that saw her forced to go without feeding her baby.
‘ I found myself halfway up a Scottish mountain and no way of getting down to feed my baby,’ she said. ‘I had to ring my husband and tell him to give her formula. It was like someone had stamped on my heart and I felt I’d made the worst mistake of my life.’
In 2016 she told Marie Claire magazine that she found it hard not to talk shop about acting when she went home in the evenings.
‘I was incredibly boring doing [The Crown] because I’d learn so many amazing things about the Royal Family and go, “Did you know that in 1957...?” ’
Miss Foy has now left The Crown, with the role of an older Queen being taken by Olivia Colman for the next series.
‘Continue as friends’