‘Grief gives my work purpose’
Losing his twoyear-old daughter Maude has given his acting unexpected purpose, Jason Watkins tells Cara Mcgoogan
As the tinseltinged hubbub of Christmas fades, Jason Watkins feels the melancholy of the New Year period more acutely than most. It was early in the morning on January 1 2011 that the actor, best known for his roles in W1A and the
Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies,
said goodbye to Maude, his twoyear-old daughter, for the last time.
After a flu infection and streptococcus, she had contracted sepsis, a life-threatening condition where the body’s immune system attacks tissues and causes organ failure. The family took her to the GP, then twice to A&E, but Maude’s illness proved fatal. “Our lives stopped,” says Watkins, who has two sons from an earlier marriage, as well as Bessie, 10, and Gilbert, five, with Maude’s mother, Clara. “We were thrown into a very dark hole.”
Now, New Year’s Day has become one on which to remember Maude. Every year, a group of their closest friends and relatives walk from Camden to her memorial bench on Hampstead Heath, to which Watkins and Clara walk their dogs every day. “We all meet at our house in the morning and walk there and talk about her and everything else in our lives,” he explains. “Then we come back to the house and have a meal.”
Nearly seven years on, he admits that the pain “never goes away, it never ends. But the really awful, awful stuff, you find a way through that.”
He has channelled much of his grief through working with Missing People, which supports people who have disappeared and their families, and is a beneficiary of this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal.
Earlier this year, he met Kate and Gerry Mccann at a Missing People gala. “Our situation is obviously grieving and it’s awful, but as desperately sad as it still is, we know what happened and can deal with it,” he says. “Speaking to the Mccanns, you can feel that something extraordinary has happened in their lives. It’s obviously deeply traumatic, in the spotlight, and very discombobulating. It’s amazing that they have not only coped but are a part of the charity as well.”
At the gala, Gerry thanked Watkins for the Nativity film series, in which he plays a drama teacher. “Those films have really helped his children. It was something they could watch, laugh, enjoy and escape to,” says Watkins. “That was really moving. My work had a meaning.” So, too, did his Bafta-winning role as Christopher Jefferies, the man wrongly accused of the 2010 murder of Joanna Yeates. In the days before Maude died, Watkins and Clara had followed Yeates’s disappearance, along with the rest of the nation; her body was discovered on the same day as his child’s passing. Two years later, Watkins would have to re-enact the day his daughter died, but as Jefferies, rather than himself.
Despite the painful connections, he knew he had to play Jefferies as soon as director Roger Michell texted him to ask in 2013.
“It was an amazing opportunity, coloured by a real case and a loss. Someone had lost their daughter and I’d lost mine,” he recalls. “My application and the detailed work I did were fuelled a lot by grief, definitely.”
When he won the leading actor Bafta in 2015 for his portrayal of Jefferies, Watkins dedicated the award to Maude. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about his daughter’s death. “I’m going to share this with our daughter, whom we lost,” he said in his acceptance speech. “If there’s a reason why I’m standing here, it is because of our Maudie.”
Watkins is now keenly involved with a number of charities, including the Slow Group, Child Bereavement UK and UK Sepsis Trust.
“When we were broken and desperate, we met people at the Slow Group who were six months to 12 years on from where we were, and they all had comforting things to say,” he remembers. “When we finished those sessions, we’d have to go back to bed in the afternoon. You’re so completely shot, grief is exhausting.”
He co-hosts parental bereavement sessions and is constantly engaging with people on Twitter who have gone through similar tragedies.
“Once you open up, there are so many people wanting to connect and share. I try desperately to respond to everyone,” he says. “When something traumatic has happened, you’re immediately empathetic to many comparable situations of loss.”
With the sadness has come anger, too. On a short family holiday in Denmark this summer, he read about six-year-old Connor Horridge from Wigan, who died from sepsis after being prescribed rest and Calpol.
“It was almost a carbon copy of what happened to Maude,” he says. “There you are, you’ve lost your child in that way, and somewhere there’s another family about to lose their child because there isn’t provision for care and diagnosis. That makes you angry.” He is now lobbying the Government for a national public awareness campaign about sepsis, which causes around 44,000 deaths a year, and he hopes to get the Health Minister, Jeremy Hunt, on board.
Though Watkins’s personal life has seen its share of sorrows in recent years, his professional one has gone from strength to strength. Come 2018, he will appear in another series of Trollied, a new BBC One comedy, Hold the Sunset, and two films, The Children Act and The Man
Who Killed Don Quixote. He will also start rehearsing Frozen, a play about a missing child and a serial killer, in January. “The iron is hot, I have to keep striking,” he says.
“As you go forward, you can hold the loss, have it with you and have a full, happy life,” says Watkins. “You will be able to laugh again and not feel bad about it. You can’t feel guilty about being happy, because you have to be happy for your family and yourself.”
Missing People is a beneficiary of this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. To make a donation to this or one of the other charities supported in our appeal, please call 0151 284 1927, visit telegraph.co.uk/charity or see the advert on the opposite page