‘Like being an alcoholic, anorexia is always there’
With a new film role, Jenny Seagrove tells Richard Barber why she never had children or married the man she loves
It is startling to tot up the years and realise that the ethereal Jenny Seagrove, probably best known to television audiences for her long run opposite Martin Shaw in Judge John Deed, has been working consistently on stage and screen for nearly four decades now.
We meet in central London, where the still-beautiful, blue-eyed actress is borderline evangelical about her latest film, Another
Mother’s Son, in which she stars alongside Boyzone singer-turned actor Ronan Keating, John Hannah and Amanda Abbington.
The 59-year-old plays unsung heroine Louisa Gould – a real-life, spirited – not to say stubborn – Channel Islander, who took in an escaped Russian prisoner of war during the Second World War (having lost one of her own sons in battle), and paid the ultimate price.
“Louisa was a deeply religious woman who thought God would look after her,” says Seagrove. “She also thought Winston Churchill would come in and save them all.”
In the event, she was twice let down: first watching British planes fly over occupied Jersey to bolster Allied forces in France, and finally perishing in the gas chambers of Ravensbruck, after being betrayed by a neighbour.
It was hard, Seagrove says, not to take Louisa home with her. “She was almost obsessively tidy, which I’m not. But I found myself being extra neat, which pleased Bill because he’s an extremely tidy person.”
“Bill” being theatre impresario and Everton chairman Bill Kenwright, with whom she lives in London’s Little Venice. He has produced a number of vehicles with Seagrove in a starring role: revivals of Coward’s Fallen Angels and Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves on stage, and this latest film set on Jersey although not, it transpires, shot there (“sadly, too built-up these days”), with Wiltshire and Somerset acting as stand-ins.
“We make a good team,” Seagrove says of their 24-year partnership, before pre-empting the next question. “I used to have this parrot on my shoulder saying, ‘Everyone thinks you’ve only got this part because of Bill’. But I like to think I’ve proved my mettle and anyway he wouldn’t cast me in something if he didn’t think I could do it.” She takes little prompting to praise him to the skies. “Bill’s a force of nature, larger than life. He’s wonderful. It’s a privilege to live with him. He’s got the biggest heart of anybody I’ve ever met. He’s made me a better person. I’m naturally quite shy and I could have been what I call a mini-person. But Bill’s ebullience has rubbed off on me. He’s given me a generosity of spirit.” So the love of her life? “Oh, yes. But I’d also like to think I’m quite good for him. A check and a balance. I think I’ve made him feel safe, given him the confidence to dive off that high board.”
Born in Kuala Lumpur in 1957 – she’ll be 60 in July – the second child of a father who ran an import-export company and a mother who suffered a stroke at just 32, giving birth to a boy who didn’t survive, Seagrove was sent to boarding school in Godalming, Surrey, aged nine.
It was there that the headmistress, Miss Hiorns (“an inspiration”) introduced her to verse speaking. “I was a shy thing, wearing specs, so I really enjoyed taking them off and losing myself in a part like the Prince in Sleeping Beauty.”
She went home to Malaysia only once a year, in the summer holidays. “It was an experience that taught me survival, resilience, adaptability. I became a sort of gypsy – perfect grounding for an actress.” But at her mother’s insistence, she took a detour first: a three-month course at Mrs Russell’s Three-Star School of Cookery in London.
“I was living in a hostel in the Boltons run by nuns. I got £21 a week social security. I was having drama lessons – this was before I was accepted for a place at the Bristol Old Vic – which cost £11 and left me £10 to live on.” It was during this period that she developed an eating disorder she won’t be drawn on today.
“In my early twenties, I woke up one day, asked myself whether I wanted to live or die and slowly took back control of my life. But it’s like an alcoholic. You never stop being an anorexic.”
With that, the otherwise-voluble and chatty Seagrove hauls the conversational drawbridge up. She had early success with the film Local Hero, and television productions
of Woman in White and A Woman of Substance. But there were then professional longueurs. She kept her nerve. “I came to realise that this profession is a marathon, not a sprint. And I’m still standing,” she says, breaking into song.
Her first marriage, to Indian actor Madhav Sharma, was a challenge. “He was quite a controlling man although, that said, people will only try and control you if you allow them to. I realise now we were co-dependent. It’s a flaw I still recognise in myself, that I’m capable of enabling people to take me over.”
He’d accompany Jenny to work, then try to direct her in whatever role she was playing, which didn’t go down a storm with any official director. “He wouldn’t do so on the open set but it was clear he was telling me what to do behind the scenes. It meant that, if you got me, you got him. My career stopped at that point.”
When they divorced in 1988 after four years, Jenny went to a Jungian therapist for 12 weeks. “And it really did change my life. What he said was that I must learn to love myself. I said, ‘But that would mean being selfish’. He explained that no, they were two different things. It was about knowing who you are, accepting your faults and loving yourself for the goodness in you. It taught me self-esteem.”
There followed an unlikely four-year romance with the flamboyant film director Michael Winner. “He made me laugh,” she says, by way of explanation. “But I tend to see only the good in people, which means making excuses for their behaviour. What I saw was a little boy desperate to be loved.”
Seagrove has no children of her own, though Kenwright, who was first married to interior designer Anouska Hempel, has a daughter by actress Virginia Stride and two grandchildren.
“I was in my thirties when we first got together,” she explains. “We did discuss it at one point but I’d never been hugely maternal and I loved my lifestyle as it was.
“I also have my horse charity. It would be trite to suggest that they’re child substitutes but they none the less fulfil a need to nurture.”
Seagrove, a vegetarian, has loved animals for as long as she can remember. “I am totally distraught at the modern planet. We are so cavalier towards the natural world and the creatures we share it with.”
She’s the founding trustee of Mane Chance, a charity that looks after 30 rescue horses in a sanctuary in Surrey.
“It’s relentless. We have to raise £280,000 a year to keep the enterprise afloat. It’s my life’s great passion. The way I describe it is that I take time off to make movies.”
She does manage to watch quite a bit of football, though. There was a rumour it was Seagrove who suggested to Kenwright that David Moyes might make a good manager of Everton. “It’s true. Very good he was, too, and then he went off to Manchester United. But Bill gives me credit for spotting him.”
Given the pair make so good a team, why have they never made it official? She smiles her slightly crooked smile. “We’d both been married, neither of them particularly happy. If we ever did, the fear is we’d feel differently but in a bad way. Would I suddenly feel trapped? And yet, it’s been almost a quarter of a century and I’m with the man I love, someone who’s my best friend. Illogical, isn’t it?”
‘I’ve never been hugely maternal and I loved my lifestyle as it was’
Another Mother’s Son is released nationwide on March 24. For more information about Jenny’s charity: manechancesanctuary.org