How Thandie beat the bigots
Raised in 1970s Cornwall by a black mum and white dad, she won a place at Cambridge. Now she’s getting rave reviews in TV’s Line Of Duty
THERE are still people in Penzance who remember the day Nicky Newton returned home to live with his african princess bride and their two young children.
It was the middle of the Seventies, and the Newtons had moved into a grey six-bedroom Victorian house in St Mary’s Terrace, just a stone’s throw from the seafront.
It was here that three-year-old Thandie — Nicky Newton’s daughter — first realised that she didn’t look like other children at her Catholic primary school.
There was verbal abuse from a neighbour who told her to ‘go back to the jungle’, and unwanted attention as the family walked around the mostly white Cornish town.
and there was the day, aged just seven, she was banned by nuns from appearing in her school photograph because her hair had been plaited into corn-rows by her Zimbabwean mother, who added little green beads to the end of the plaits to match her school beret.
That would be preserved as a painful memory for a woman who is now, at 44, one of Britain’s most talented actresses, with a Bafta and a clutch of award nominations to her name.
Thandie Newton’s latest much-feted role is as DCI Roz Huntley in the award-winning BBC2 drama series Line Of Duty, one of the most successful detective series in British television history.
The actress, however, claims that being cast as the star in the fourth series is a rare opportunity in an industry overwhelmed by period dramas which offer few decent roles for anyone who is not white. ‘They’re not going to put a person with brown skin in any of those. That’s the fly in my ointment,’ she told the Mail during an interview to promote Line Of Duty.
‘If I could be in Downton abbey or Victoria, what would I be, a maid?’
Indeed, while on the outside Cambridge- educated Newton appears to have it all — beauty, undoubted brains, growing fame and a happy family life with her filmwriter husband Ol Parker and their three children — her ascent has never been straightforward.
In recent years, the star of hit TV series and films such as Westworld and Crash has become increasingly outspoken about the struggles she has faced to get where she is today.
Back in Seventies Penzance, Newton’s parents did their best to protect her and her younger brother Jamie from prejudice.
Her 73-year-old father, known as Nicky as a teenager and now as Nick, is from an old Cornish family which had connections to the mining industry. He was also, in the early Sixties, a West Country celebrity as bass guitarist in a rock band called The Druids.
a former bandmate told the Mail that he was regularly mobbed by screaming teenage girls at gigs across the South West. But when the group, made up of former pupils of Penzance Grammar School, disbanded in the midSixties, Nicky Newton moved to London to find more mundane work as a lab technician.
It was there that he met Thandie’s mother, Grace Nyasha Jombe, now 75. She is the daughter of a chief of the Shona tribe, from what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.
Grace moved to London in 1966, and was a nurse at Bexley Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Kent.
Newton’s parents now live in London.
Melanie Thandiwe Newton was born in London’s Charing Cross hospital in November 1972, but the first three years of her life were spent in Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, where her parents worked in a hospital until economic decline and political unrest drew the family back to Penzance.
They moved into her father’s childhood home, a large 1860s house with a basement which was later bought from the Newtons by Lord St Levan, whose family bequeathed nearby St Michael’s Mount to the National Trust. The property, opposite a subtropical municipal garden, is now worth around £750,000.
Former neighbour Jean Tremayne remembers Thandie as a ‘really pretty young girl’.
‘She was very academically minded and very bright,’ she says. ‘She was pushed quite hard by her mother to do well at school. The family were always very hard-working.
‘Obviously, the ethnicity of their mother set them apart in a predominantly white town like Penzance, but I just accepted them as they were.’
Thandie’s father, who is also a talented artist, worked in his own father’s well-known antique shop in Market Jew Street — the premises are now occupied by a bakery.
LOCaL resident Sonya Ward remembers Grace Nyasha as ‘strikingly beautiful’.
‘She was always immaculately turned out,’ she says. ‘Thandie has definitely inherited her looks from her mother. She told me that although she came from quite a privileged background in Zimbabwe, she didn’t have shoes until she was ten.’
Newton’s feelings about her childhood are mixed. ‘It was a beautiful environment but very backward when it came to racial politics,’ she once said. ‘The story of living in Penzance as the only black family would make a fabulous sitcom if there had been a little more humour.
‘It was Cornwall. I don’t blame people. I don’t think it was truly nasty, but there were comments.’
Her parents, she has said, worked hard to shield their children from unwanted attention, but her mother’s way of dealing with the problem was to encourage her daughter to keep a low profile at St Mary’s Roman Catholic primary school.
Newton has remarked of her childhood: ‘I was getting good grades. I was a really happy, sparkly child and she was aware that the more I was achieving, the more resentment there was from other people.
‘But I didn’t understand. I was only little, so it was almost like I couldn’t do enough to get her praise.’
She poured the insecurities she felt as a child into her love of dancing, attending a local ballet school and winning a scholarship, aged 11, to the arts Educational School in Tring in Hertfordshire. Once there, a back injury put paid to her dancing career, and she focused on acting.
Her first film role came at 16 when she was cast alongside Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts in the australian inter-racial coming-of-age film, Flirting.
But while her role as a Ugandan schoolgirl in a stuffy Sixties girls’ boarding school set her on the road to stardom, that early success was marred by what she would describe as a ‘traumatic’ on-off six-year relationship with the film’s director, John Duigan, who was more than 20 years her senior.
He’d cast her in two more films — The Journey Of august King in 1995, in which she played a 19th-century runaway slave, and, a year later, the romantic drama, The Leading Man.
Speaking out about their relationship years later, she noted: ‘although it was legal because I was 16, I was coerced. I was a very shy, very sweet girl. I wasn’t in control of the situation. But I can value myself now more for the way I got through it. I don’t see myself as a victim.’
By the time the first film came out, Newton had won a place at Downing College, Cambridge to read social anthropology and she studied there from 1992 to 1995. Contemporaries
remember her as having a strong social conscience and turning up to black caucus meetings.
She suffered bulimia while at Cambridge and embarked on therapy. ‘My poor ego had been created out of racial insecurity and shame,’ she later admitted — and they were confusing times for the young actress, who suddenly found herself much in demand but often for the kind of stereotypical black roles she lamented when she spoke to the Mail last month.
In 1993, she starred with Harvey Keitel in British crime drama The Young Americans. In 1994, she was in Interview With The Vampire as a Creole maid who became Brad Pitt’s first victim and, in 1995, she played a slave mistress opposite Nick Nolte in the Merchant Ivory film Jefferson In Paris.
At the same time, Newton was studying slavery as part of her undergraduate course and, in interviews she gave at the time, claimed she enjoyed the way her film roles helped to ‘flesh out these rather dry, clinical and historical tones’. She gained a 2:1 degree.
More recently, however, she has confessed that to get on as a mainstream actress, she was advised to play down race issues or, as one agent told her: ‘Be black, but don’t be too black.’
In early interviews she often minimised the racism of her childhood. ‘I always saw being black as something very useful, a mysterious element I could use to enrich my personality,’ she said in an interview 20 years ago. ‘Then I went into the arts, where difference is celebrated. So I’ve never really experienced racial hassle.’
For years Newton kept her inner demons well hidden. She clocked up roles with the likes of Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II in 2000 and Matt Dillon in Crash in 2004, for which she won a Bafta, and Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness in 2006.
She also embarked on family life, marrying film writer ol Parker — who wrote the screenplay for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel — in 1998. She gave birth to their first child in 2000. ripley is now 16, second daughter Nico is 12 and her son, Booker, is three.
She readily admits that she puts being a mother before her career and in recent years has become far more outspoken about what she sees as Hollywood’s culture of ‘abuse and exploitation’.
‘I am so grateful for all that “Zip it, Thandie! Zip it! Zip it!” because it made me more angry, made me want to talk more,’ she told the Guardian in September.
She often recounts the story of an early traumatic audition callback where she was asked to fondle herself while the director filmed her up close. She agreed, she said, because the role was a ‘sexy’ one and because a female casting director was in the room.
Years later, she discovered that the director, now in his 80s and who she has never named, was showing the audition tape to his friends after late-night poker sessions. She tells the story, she says, because ‘one person will read this and it will stop them getting sexually abused by a director’.
While she hasn’t ruled out taking the man in question to court, she said last year she prefers to put things right ‘by speaking out’.
Another bete noire is that despite a modelling career including being the face of olay Total Effects, she has never been asked to appear on the cover of Vogue.
‘It’s about ideas,’ she said last September. ‘Vogue is the ultimate. The ultimate. And I want little girls to see that. My little girls had seen me receiving a Bafta. And not just my little girls — every other little girl with brown skin had seen that. I know how much it matters because I remember being that little girl.’
Her hard work and determination to help those who will come after her are a far cry from the ruthless ambition of her current on-screen alter ego. Four episodes into the new series, it is clear that DCI roz Huntley will let nothing get in the way of her career prospects, not even the truth.
Newton clearly has very different priorities — but perhaps this cutthroat role will finally bring her the recognition she deserves.