It wasn’t just a deal. My son really is a love child, admits Imrie
Actress reveals romantic relationship with the actor who offered to fulfil her wish to start a family
WHEN Celia Imrie decided to have a baby in her 40s, she approached a fellow actor with a proposition.
Imrie told Benjamin Whitrow that she wanted to become a mother and would take sole responsibility for the child’s upbringing. “I laid out my terms”, she has said, and “we mutually agreed”.
It is a story Imrie told in her 2011 memoir and one that implied she and Whitrow were simply friends who had come to an unorthodox arrangement.
But in an interview for The Daily Telegraph today, Imrie discloses for the first time that the couple were in a romantic relationship. Her admission follows Whitrow’s death last September.
“His death was very tough. I’d lost a very darling friend and, childishly, I found it terribly difficult to accept someone you’d loved was not in the world anymore. I still feel like that.
“Angus [Imrie’s son] was devoted to his father and, though I’ve never really said it properly, Ben and I did have a romance. I wanted to have his baby before it was too late and he [Whitrow] was very, very honest with him [Angus] and he accepted that and was a wonderful father,” she said.
Whitrow, who died aged 80, was an actor known for his theatre career and his role as Mr Bennet in the BBC’S 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
In her autobiography, The Happy Hoofer, Imrie recalled her first meeting with Whitrow at BBC Broadcasting House. He sat next to her and asked if she was married.
“Lord no,” she replied. “I find this business and marriage doesn’t go.” But she also told him that she was desperate to have a child.
“Quite early on Ben and I walked on the beach one day as I laid out my terms … As long as he understood I would not ask for anything, I wouldn’t want to live with him, or marry him, would never ask for money for the child and I would be responsible for choosing and paying for the child’s education, accommodation, clothing and everything else.”
She added: “I was trying to be clear and true. Some people might say calculated, but I would say, knowing myself, I was being honest. If Ben could take all that on board, I said, then his offer to fulfil my wish for a child would be wonderful.”
She gave birth to Angus when she was 42. Whitrow, who was divorced with two adult children, did play a part in his upbringing. Angus, 23, followed his parents into the acting profession and can currently be heard voicing Josh Archer on The Archers on BBC Radio 4. Imrie has remained single, saying she considers marriage to be a “trap”.
Whitrow’s final screen performance was in Darkest Hour, the Oscar-nominated Churchill drama, in which he plays Tory minister Sir Samuel Hoare.
Imrie’s latest role is in Finding Your Feet, a feelgood comedy in the vein of her previous hit films, Calendar Girls and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
She worked with the late Victoria Wood for many years, and was stunned by her death from cancer in 2016. Imrie told The Telegraph: “I was in America and had no idea she was ill and I have to say I felt hurt that she wasn’t able to share it with me.
“But as time’s gone on I’ve understood and realised she didn’t want people to see her so ill.”
‘Angus [Imrie’s son] was devoted to his father and, though I’ve never really said it properly, Ben and I did have a romance’
When Celia Imrie received the schedule for her latest film Finding Your Feet, she found herself in a quandary. The filming started at exactly the same time as her eightweek run at the Old Vic last year, playing Goneril to her old friend Glenda Jackson’s King Lear. The only way to commute from the set to the theatre and make curtain-up was by riding pillion on a motorbike driven by a film company employee.
“I don’t know how I did it,” recalls Imrie, 65, sounding – characteristically – simultaneously refined and impish, in keeping with the persona of a Home Counties lady with an underlying mischievous streak that she’s honed to perfection in career highlights such as Calendar Girls and her work with Victoria Wood on Dinnerladies and Acorn Antiques. “The first day filming was after the opening night, so we had the first-night party, and the next day I filmed outside London. I then climbed on the back of the bike to drive 46 miles along the M40. The most frightening thing was I kept falling asleep, because I was mesmerised by the road. I’d do it again because both parts were irresistible, but blimey.”
Imrie’s gung-ho attitude perfectly encapsulates the gutsy, can-do theme of Finding Your Feet, in which a po-faced housewife, played by Imelda Staunton, leaves her unfaithful husband and moves in with her bohemian sister (Imrie), who persuades her to join her dance class. Feelgood and touching, with a vintage British cast that includes Timothy Spall, David Hayman and Joanna Lumley, it’s unapologetically targeted at over-sixties, those who flocked to see Calendar Girls and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. But, sitting in a London hotel, Imrie shudders when I use the phrase “grey pound”. “‘Grey pound’ is the most ghastly expression, as is ‘pensioners’. Anything with those labels attached should be renamed: it’s such a fuddy-duddy image, it puts everyone off.”
In any case she dislikes the film being ghettoised as fodder for elderly people, although she is happy it covers “all sorts of subjects” associated with growing old such as divorce and Alzheimer’s. “They would never have been touched upon 15 years ago, but what I like about it is we [characters] are the age we are on screen and that’s never talked about, it’s not seen as a specific issue.”
Many actresses bemoan how work dries up after 40, yet Imrie, the Guildford-born daughter of a radiologist, whose other hits include Absolutely Fabulous, Bridget Jones and Nanny Mcphee, appears to be going from strength to strength. “I don’t like being the age I am but Calendar Girls, Marigold and Finding Your Feet are all good examples of parts I wouldn’t have got if I were 25,” she beams.
She’s also more recently found success in the US, appearing for the past three years in the acclaimed FX TV black comedy Better Things, playing the eccentric mother of an actress (Pamela Adlon) who’s bringing up three daughters as a single mother. The fiercely funny show has been acclaimed for its edgy take on womanhood and Imrie is clearly relishing the experience.
“I wish I hadn’t waited quite so long to go to America,” she says. “Possibly England is more forgiving of an older woman, America is more wanting to be youth: in LA you so often see mothers and daughters who look exactly the same, which is extraordinary. So they have a bit of catching up to do. Having said that, in Better Things I’m expected to play my age, so I think things are changing and I’m going to keep on that optimistic line.”
Imrie spends about three months a year filming, but – having survived two pulmonary embolisms in 2005 (“I’m jolly lucky to be alive”), which can be brought on at altitude – she flies only if strictly necessary. Instead, she crosses the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2, then takes the train from New York to LA. “It takes altogether 10 days and it’s terribly glamorous,” she says.
In a cream silk blouse and blue velvet trousers, Imrie, who’s based in Notting Hill (her house bequeathed to her by her friend, the late author Hammond Innes), certainly appears a glamorous figure to me. “I’m not always,” she confides. “I very rarely wear make-up popping out to the shops. Sometimes I think to myself: ‘What would Joan Collins do? She would certainly not be seen out like you are now.’” When not acting, she’s busy pursuing a second career as an author: her first breezy, warm-hearted novel Not Quite Nice (a pun on the city) was a bestseller and her third, Sail Away, is out next week.
“When I was 20, 60 seemed so far away but now so much of the world is open to us we mustn’t be so hemmed in by our age any more,” she says. “I’m just grabbing every opportunity, I have a fervent desire to make the most of every second.”
This carpe-diem spirit was recently reinforced by the deaths of two of the most important characters in her life, the first being Wood’s, two years ago. “[Victoria’s death] was a real blow, I was in America and had actually no idea she was ill, and I have to say I felt hurt that she wasn’t able to share it with me. But as time’s gone on I’ve understood and realised she didn’t want people to see her so ill.”
Then last September came the death of actor Benjamin Whitrow (Mr Bennet in the BBC’S Pride and Prejudice), the father of Imrie’s 23-year-old son Angus.
Previously, Imrie, who has never married or cohabited – “marriage traps you” – has always implied that Whitrow, who was divorced with two adult children when their son was born, was merely a friend who volunteered to father her child. They had agreed she would have total
‘His death was very tough. I’d lost a very darling friend and childishly I found it terribly difficult to accept’
responsibility – “Yes, I’m rather proud of that” – for Angus’s upbringing. Yet when I mention Whitrow, her blue eyes fill with tears and she gazes at the ceiling. “His death was very tough; I’d lost a very darling friend and childishly I found it terribly difficult to accept someone you’d loved was not in the world any more. I still feel like that. Angus was devoted to his father and, though I’ve never really said it properly, Ben and I did have a romance. I wanted to have a baby before it was too late [she was 42] and was very, very honest with him, and he accepted that and was a wonderful father. So all became well. His family have been completely accepting of me, which is a huge thing.”
Angus, who’s spent nearly four years as Josh Archer in The Archers, recently left Lamda, the top drama school, and is playing Merlin in the forthcoming blockbuster about a young King Arthur in The Kid Who Would Be King.
Clearly, he’s the only person who can intimidate the strong-willed Imrie. “Angus is quite critical of what I say and of my work, which I rather like,” she confirms. Does she criticise him back? “I don’t know if I’d dare. We’ve promised we’re going to be honest with each other and I hope we will be.”
Imrie may have a cosy screen presence, but after spending time in her company, you realise quite what a maverick person she also is. In her personal life, she has had the boldness to dodge the convention of a nuclear family. Now, she seems to be making equally bold career choices: her next film, out later this year, is a horror film called Malevolent. “I’m playing someone not very nice,” she grins. “As much I love uplifting films and making people laugh I don’t want people to think I’m like that all the time.”
She certainly fooled me.