Dynasty star: My rape ordeal
Stephanie Beacham, the British actress who starred in the American blockbuster Dynasty, has disclosed for the first time that she was the victim of rape in the early part of her career, and that the assault continues to have a huge impact on her life.
STEPHANIE BEACHAM, the British actress who found fame in the American blockbuster Dynasty, has disclosed for the first time that she was the victim of rape early in her career that “screwed up” her life.
She said the rape, more than 40 years ago, led to the break-up of a relationship with a man she was in love with and whom she should have married. In an interview with The Sunday Tel
egraph, Beacham said she had been assaulted in the early Seventies when she was still in her 20s. She declined to say who her attacker was but said it was not an actor.
Beacham, who is now 69, said that when she was a young actress trying to break into the profession she was constantly “on my toes” for fear of being molested.
“I can remember avoiding rape several times and a couple of times not,” she said. When pressed on details of those occasions, she revised her position. “No, I will, for my own brain, be more specific and say once, and it was very early Seventies. And that is fact.” The perpetrator, she added, “was not a theatrical person”.
She admitted that her failure to speak about the traumatic event until now had caused lasting damage.
“I didn’t know that that’s what was causing it [trauma] at the time,” she said, “It caused me to break off a long-term relationship that probably should have been my marriage, because I couldn’t admit to it, I felt it was my fault. No, it screwed up my life, definitely.” She added: “It doesn’t matter. The person I’m talking about – I hardly know that it’s me.
“I’ve had so many traumas since, I sometimes feel I’m this wonderful vase that if you drop it it’ll bounce because there’s so much Araldite on it.”
Beacham made her big screen debut in 1970 and a year later filmed The
Nightcomers with Marlon Brando. She went on to star in the BBC’s Japanese prisoner of war drama series Tenko and then as Sable Colby in both The Colbys and in Dynasty, in which she starred opposite Dame Joan Collins.
The lavish dramas were watched by millions and made her a household name. She recently starred in the BBC sitcom Boomers alongside Alison Steadman, June Whitfield and Russ Abbot.
‘I knew at a certain point, I had to leave a party otherwise I would get into trouble and it would be my fault’
Beacham married the actor John McEnery in 1973, which lasted six years and produced two children. The timings would suggest the rape took place between 1970 and 1972 prior to her marriage when she would have been between 23 and 25 years old.
She said, in comments that may draw criticism from activist groups, that victims of sexual abuse could sometimes have avoided sexual predators. “I don’t think I’m quite politically correct for modern times,” she said, “I just knew that, at a certain point, I had to leave [a party] otherwise I would get into trouble and it would be my fault, not because I had asked for it but I could just see that there was almost a feeling that if you aroused a man it would be your fault.”
Olivia Colman made her name in television comedy, and has the sort of smile that makes you feel instantly better about the world. Which, in many ways, makes her an unlikely poster girl for domestic violence awareness.
But ever since her award-winning turn in Paddy Considine’s 2011 film
Tyrannosaur, in which she played a survivor of domestic abuse, Colman, 42, has been increasingly involved with projects relating to the cause.
“It’s become something of an obsession,” she admits. Having joined the prevention charity Tender in 2013 as its patron, she has now narrated a ground-breaking documentary,
Behind Closed Doors, which airs on BBC One tomorrow. As one of Britain’s busiest actors, not to mention a mother of two young sons and a sevenmonth-old daughter, she surely can’t have much time on her hands: so why this subject, and why now?
“I’m not an expert. I’m just an actor,” she reminds me, “but experts aren’t listened to. It’s ridiculous: all I do for a job is tart around in someone else’s clothes and say someone else’s lines. But this is the world we live in. Stick an actor or someone off the telly on to something, and maybe there’s more chance people will watch it.”
Behind Closed Doors, shot over the course of a year, with unprecedented access to Thames Valley Police’s domestic abuse team, is an extraordinary piece of observational filmmaking that offers rare insight into the most common violent crime to take place in the home. “It follows three incredibly brave women, Jemma, Sabrina and Helen, who waived their rights to anonymity and allowed the filmmakers to show what it’s like, from the moment they dial 999 through to when their case finally gets to court,” Colman says. “It contains eye-opening footage: you actually see what these women have to endure in their own homes, and how brave they are to stand up to their attackers, who in most cases are men that they still love.
“It’s heartbreaking. It’s awful. Yet people are closed to it. I often think there’s a sense of ‘It can’t really be that bad’, like people don’t want to know. But it’s 25 per cent of us! Twentyfive per cent of us will go through domestic abuse at some point. And that’s not really good enough, is it? It makes me really angry.”
It is a subject that is absolutely in the ether right now. The chilling psychodrama between the emotionally abusive Rob Titchner and his pregnant wife Helen currently playing out on
has become a national talking point and raised more than £50,000 for domestic abuse charities. Over 1.4 million women suffered from domestic violence last year – with two women a week dying at the hands of their current or former partners – across all cultural and class divides. Police record an incident of domestic violence on average every 75 seconds.
Tomorrow’s documentary, produced and directed by Anna Hall, whose previous work has won her a Royal Television Society award and Bafta nomination, is also expected to sharpen focus around the issue and highlight many of its complexities.
Unless you have suffered from domestic violence, says Colman, or been close to someone who has, it can be difficult to understand why a woman doesn’t simply walk out on an abusive partner.
“Before I started looking into any of this, I was probably one of those people who would have gone: ‘Why don’t you just leave? You can’t possibly love someone who hits you!’ ” Colman says. “Now I know so much more. In those situations, you’re not strong enough to know what love is, or to think you deserve proper love. And it’s all so horribly secretive.”
Colman has not been a victim of abuse herself, nor did she believe any of her friends or family had suffered; but after making Tyrannosaur it emerged that a close girlfriend of hers was in an abusive relationship.
“It never came to physical blows, but I watched her just diminish: she didn’t believe in herself, it was psychological damage, which in some ways can be just as great. And she didn’t want to ‘let him down’ by talking about it with anyone. That’s one of the ways in which the perpetrators have such power over their victims. After 10 years of being told, ‘you’re ugly, you’re no good, nobody could ever love you or want to be with you’, you start to think: ‘God, how fortunate I am to have someone love me and want to be with me at all.’ ”
Colman, rather than furnishing me with the sorts of slick sound bites beloved of the celebrity charity patron, appears properly affected. “As I say, I’m not an expert, I’m just an actor. But it’s very complicated.”
Colman has previously described herself as “having no armour” when it comes to directly witnessing other people’s suffering. Given the number of charitable organisations that must be beating down her door after the success of Broadchurch, The Night Manager, Twenty Twelve and Peep Show – to name just a handful of her projects – why did she decided to support Tender? “It offers such a positive approach to this whole issue, and has had some wonderful results,” she says. “It’s about giving young people useful, positive tools to lead a happy life.”
The organisation, which was founded in 2003 with an aim to prevent future domestic abuse by educating young people about relationships, runs age-appropriate workshops in schools, youth centres, offices and clinics. “I went on a training day recently and it’s incredible,” she enthuses. “Imagine a world where the prevention of abuse is possible, where all of our children have lessons about these issues, rather than where we are now. If any of the women we see in the film had had these tools, perhaps their stories might have been so different. Prevention is so important. But it’s about as glamorous to the media as the Green Cross Code.”
There’s a devastating moment in the film where a father of one of the abused women, visibly harrowed by his powerlessness to protect his child, says simply: “You don’t bring them into the world to have this happen.”
Has motherhood made Colman even more determined to use her influence? “I don’t want my children to grow up in this sort of world. My daughter’s still so tiny at the moment, she’s just a sweet little meaty thing. But of course, you always think about what you want for them, don’t you, and like any parent I want my children to be happy, more than anything. So, yes: let’s try and put something in place, to make it more likely that our children will have healthy, loving relationships.
“My children are lucky enough that, unlike the ones in this film, they don’t see violence at home, but what about those children who do witness violence? I don’t want them to think this is how it is, this is how the world works, how relationships work. I want all children to be empowered, to know that they can break the cycle. I want everyone to know what they deserve in relationships: that they can demand equality and kindness. Because everyone will have a relationship at some point in their life. It’s what we all do, every day, and we need to know how to do it. At the moment, the odds aren’t great that it’s going to be great, and that’s not good enough. Not for my children. Not for anybody.”
‘I don’t want my children growing up to think this is how relationships work’