‘Happiness is rather overrated’
‘Doc Martin’ actress Eileen Atkins tells Richard Barber why she never had children – and doesn’t regret it
She may now be 83, but Dame Eileen Atkins still works just as often as she likes. There are rumours of a West End role on the horizon and, in the meantime, she’s back in ITV’S feelgood series, Doc Martin, playing Martin Clunes’s irascible aunt, retired clinical psychiatrist Ruth Ellingham. If she existed, would Eileen like Ruth? “Oh, very much,” says Atkins, “although she might frighten me a bit.” That would take some doing. “I know. Everyone says that a lot of people are frightened of me, but I’ve no idea why.”
Well, she’s not someone to suffer fools. “That’s silly when I’m such a fool myself,” she insists. “I do admit, though, I have a tendency to blow up but then it’s all over for me in five minutes.” But perhaps not for everyone else? She chuckles. “Yes, I can leave people in pieces.” She was at her most combustible when the BBC decided to revive Upstairs, Downstairs in 2010. (Atkins and actress Jean Marsh had created the original hit series in the early Seventies.)
“That’s when I blew up outrageously,” she admits.
Initially, she didn’t want to be involved, but it was made clear they’d only go ahead with the revival if she agreed. She wanted to play the cook; they wanted her to be the matriarch. There were several rows and she lost. She was cast as Maud, Lady Holland.
This new series was written by Heidi Thomas, creator of Call the Midwife. “Heidi writes brilliantly for the lower middle classes,” says Atkins, witheringly. “But she simply cannot write for the upper classes. I was endlessly trying to change my lines, which must have driven her crazy.”
Atkins was also determined to make Lady Holland distinct from Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. “So I suggested Maud ought to have a pet monkey called Solomon.” Heidi Thomas was unconvinced. “If she’d said right at the beginning she hated the idea of the monkey, then I would have chosen another pet – a parrot perhaps.” But it had gone too far by that stage and
‘Everyone says that a lot of people are frightened of me, but I’ve no idea why’
Atkins, well, blew. “I said: ‘If you don’t get the f------ monkey, then you don’t f------ get me.’”
The Dame got her monkey. She’d won the battle, but not the war. She kept asking for the scripts for the second series, which finally arrived a matter of weeks before filming began. “I had about six lines in three different scenes – and in one of them I was wearing a gas mask.” It was time to quit.
She was quickly snapped up by Clunes for Doc Martin, where she and I meet on the set in Port Isaac, Cornwall, and then enjoyed much acclaim for her one-woman show about Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry. More recently, she graced Netflix’s global hit, The Crown, as Queen Mary. How does she explain all the Bafta nominations it garnered, and its failure to win a single one? “I think it was something called jealousy. People – by which I mean the panel – were envious of Netflix having such a big budget.”
Atkins loves her work. “Does it define me? Yes, I’d say it does. And I never had children. In fact, it was only when I turned 80 that I began to realise the point of grandchildren. I see other people with theirs and they seem quite sweet.” But motherhood just didn’t pan out. She got married the first time to actor Julian Glover when he was 21, she a year older. “By our mid-twenties, people began asking when we were going to have children. We tried, but nothing happened, and then Julian was told that no way could he ever become a father.”
As it happens, his second wife, actress Isla Blair, got pregnant almost immediately after they married. So how did Atkins react to the prospect of being childless? “To be honest, I hadn’t got married wanting children, and my career was then beginning to show signs of possibility.”
She and Julian applied to adopt: “It was what everyone did then. What’s more, we both had to agree that, if it came to it, we’d be happy to have ‘a child of colour’, as they were called.
“We lived in a flat on the top floor of a large house and there was no intercom. One day, the doorbell rang, so I went downstairs and opened the front door. On the step was a baby in a cradle, a little black baby.
“I stood and stared at it and my only thought was: ‘They’ve delivered our baby.’ And the feeling that swept over me was as if the blood was running out of the ends of my fingers.
“I remember thinking: ‘This is your life now, looking after this baby for the next 20 years.’ And then a woman appeared from the basement. She had left the baby on the doorstep while she went downstairs and she’d rung the doorbell so someone would keep an eye on it until she got back.
“I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I knew that moment was sent to me. It was a sign. The only thought running through my head was that I had to tell Julian I couldn’t ever adopt. And when I did, his instant reaction was: ‘Thank God, neither can I.’ As it turns out, his son Jamie is like my godson, a wonderful addition to my life.”
Divorced at 29, Atkins didn’t marry again until she was 43. “And there was no way I’d have chosen to be a single mother in the meantime. Anyway, I was having a high old time.”
So were there many illicit liaisons? “Well, there were some. It would have been odd if there weren’t. As it happens, I’ve been reading Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard and she had lots and lots of affairs. It’s made me feel quite virginal by comparison.”
Bill Shepherd was nine years Eileen’s junior, unmarried and without children, when they met. “I said to him early on that I was getting a bit old for motherhood and anyway I didn’t really want a child. But then nor did he. [Shepherd died in 2016.]
“I’ll never forget Miriam Stoppard saying to me, when I was about 50: ‘It’s a terrible thing not to have children. But I can help you.’ I said: ‘Miriam, please, I’m OK.’ I don’t want to sound like Edith Piaf, but being childless has never been a matter of regret.
“I believe I was put on this planet to act and it’s given me huge fulfilment. I feel I’ve realised my destiny and I’ve had a very, very good time doing it.”
Atkins believes “people look down their noses at the word ‘ambition’ – especially when applied to women. I know some people feel you’re not quite a woman if you’re ambitious. Not me.”
And she’s happy? “No, I’m content and I think contentment is rather underrated. I’m content to be an old woman. I’m vastly lucky that I can still work. And that makes me content, too.
“Mark you, I’m thinking of putting a contract out on Angela Lansbury. Still acting at 91? Utterly ridiculous!”
Doc Martin is on ITV tonight at 9pm