A wasteland? Never!
Tara Fitzgerald on life at 50
Tara Fitzgerald is reliving a recent encounter she had in her local west London cake shop. While contemplating the croissants, she was approached by a young Game of Thrones fan who recognised her from her most starriest recent role, as Selyse Baratheon, the unhappily married queen. “He hugged me, lifted me off the ground and swung me round, saying: ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’,” she laughs. “It was one of those amazing sweet moments that I didn’t expect to be having at this stage in my life.”
Fitzgerald recently celebrated her 50th birthday “with a big bash and a bit of a boogie”, and is from a generation fed the line that actresses of a certain age shouldn’t hope for anything interesting career-wise. Least of all roles in series such as Game of Thrones.
“I remember being told that around the 50 mark, I’d be in the wasteland and I’d have to wait until my 60s when, if I was lucky, I’d get granny roles,” she says in the trademark, posh, husky tones it has taken half a century to fully grow into. “But, actually, I’m finding the older I get, the more interesting my career becomes – which is rather wonderful, isn’t it?”
Certainly, Fitzgerald’s CV is enjoying something of a late blooming, including a newfound passion for directing. She already has two short films under her belt and a third feature-length movie, about an affair between two women who meet up after a 30-year gap, in development. She hasn’t given up her day job either, and we’re meeting today in the café of London’s British Film Institute, following the launch of the BBC’S new psychological thriller series, Requiem.
It’s one in the eye for the ageists – but, then, so is the way she looks today: lean, unlined, brown hair flowing down her back, cheekbones
– two plump, sculptured apples. There’s also her outfit – let’s call it “art student manqué” – tweedy flat cap and dangly beaded earrings, a little Chanelstyle brocaded jacket on top of a bright geometric print tunic.
“I do love creating a look and dressing up in general,” says the actress (“please don’t call me ‘an actor’…”). “But then my parents were both artists, and even now my mum is flamboyant and loves to express herself through clothing and jewellery. Of course, I’m just the same.”
In Requiem – a gripping six-parter that will draw inevitable comparisons with Broadchurch and The Missing
– she plays an antiques dealer in a small Welsh town where a little girl went missing 23 years ago, and who may know more about the disappearance than she’s letting on.
“One of the things I loved about the drama is its ambiguity, the fact that you’re never sure who’s telling the truth, who’s lying. Essentially, it’s a story about identity and discovering who we really are – which, perhaps, we can all relate to.”
The background that shaped Fitzgerald’s own identity is colourful and complex. With her younger sister, Arabella, she spent her early years in Barbados. When she was four, their mother, the Irish portrait photographer Sarah Fitzgerald, split from Tara’s father and married the Irish actor Norman Rodway, later giving birth to another daughter, Bianca. The family had a nomadic existence, living briefly in Dublin, Glasgow and Stratford-upon-avon, before that marriage also ended and the three sisters ended up with their mother in Clapham, south London. Then, four years later, Tara’s natural father died in what she believed was a car accident – but it was only eight years later, at the age of 19, that Fitzgerald learned he had actually committed suicide. It turned her world upside down, although these days, she says, she barely thinks about it, unless it comes up in storylines she’s working on. As viewers of Requiem will discover, her latest project has two suicides at its centre. “I have been thinking recently that my father’s death took certain things away from me, but it gave me certain things, too. As a young actress, I lacked a lot of confidence. I had no real sense of autonomy or belief that I had a right to be where I was. And maybe, in part, that was a legacy of my dad’s suicide. On the plus side, though, I think it gave me a real sense of empathy for other people. In the end, bad things happening can teach you good things.”
She has had plenty of “vicissitudes” – one of her favourite words – to deal with. Among the brickbats, Fitzgerald has had to deal with her inability to have children. At the age of 19, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy, losing an ovary and Fallopian tube in the process. “Later, I did try to have a child, although I realised I’d be unlikely to conceive. But it didn’t work and so I came to the conclusion that it probably just wasn’t something I was here to do. But, then, I’ve often been able to be philosophical and accept things, and I realised there were lots of other gifts I’d been given, other things to be getting on with.”
She’s fortunate to have clan of nieces and nephews – seven in all – “and we are still such a close family, and I’m able to watch them all growing up, which has been such a privilege”.
Although she has had a chequered relationship history, including a brief marriage to US actor and director, John Sharian, which ended in divorce, she now seems happy and settled with her partner, property developer Edward Cartwright. “And one of the lovely things is that he has young children, too, and they have arrived in my life at a wonderful time.”
Usually a seasoned solo traveller, she recently went to Disneyland Florida with the family. “Having kids was the perfect excuse to go there and we had a brilliant time. As with all actors, I never have to dig too deep to find my inner child,” she laughs.
The inner child is one thing, the outward appearance of youth, another and, although beautifully “un-tweaked” herself, she is not immune to the pressures on actresses to look a certain way.
“Sometimes I think: ‘Maybe I should do something. And then I
‘I lacked a lot of confidence. Maybe, in part, it was a legacy of my dad’s suicide’
think: ‘No, not yet.’ I know people who’ve had good work done and it’s transformed their lives and their self-esteem. And I don’t judge them at all. But at the same time, I’d worry that it would never be enough for me. I’d do one thing and then have to do another. The upkeep would be terrifying.”
Watching yourself ageing on giant screen, she adds, is not for the faint-hearted. “And yet, at the same time, I want to be authentic and I want to play women of my age. It’s a bit of a dilemma.”
The pressures exists for men in the business, too, she says, although she acknowledges that it has never been a level playing field. She applauds Oprah Winfrey for her recent “Time’s Up” speech at the Golden Globes – a clarion call to end not just sexual abuse and harassment of women, but also the inequality between the sexes.
“I’m so touched by the courage of women who have stood up and told their stories,” says Fitzgerald. “But I can remember when the feminists of the Seventies started attacking the new wave of feminists in the Nineties. It wasn’t good.”
Then she adds: “Being 50 now means I’ve seen this stuff before.”
Requiem begins on BBC One on Friday, Feb 2