Claire Foy suffered for her art... but the awards probably helped

It was minus 30°C up the mountain or plus 40°C down the mine. It was agonising gaining those 30lb and harrowing to lose 20. Actors’ complaints can all too often sound like the world’s smallest violin playing somewhere far away – from beneath something thick and heavy.

After all, they weren’t intrepid explorers or working-class men spending 12-hour days down the perilous pits and they weren’t, by and large, either fat loveless women or cancer survivors: they were pretending. And once they were done pretending, there would be someone there with a robe and a decaf soy mochaccino.

So my heart sank when I read that The Crown’s Claire Foy had given an interview to the November issue of Vogue bemoaning the fact that “on the first day of filming, I found myself halfway up a Scottish mountain…” It was only when I pushed on and read about her very genuine complaint – her “engorged boobs”, “broken breast pump” and inability to get down in order to feed her four-month-old baby – that I felt for her. “I rang my husband to tell him to give her formula,” she says. “It was like someone had stamped on my heart… I felt I’d made the worst mistake of my life.” There isn’t a flesh-eating bug or subarctic climate in the world capable of making you feel worse than a new mother does without her child. But I bet the Golden Globe helped.