Actor turns family secret into PBS drama
NEW YORK — It’s nearly lunchtime on a Friday in downtown Manhattan, but Ruth Wilson is just sitting down to breakfast. Her meals are all out of whack because she’s starring every night in a 3 1/2-hour production of King Lear, in previews at Broadway’s Cort Theatre: “You’ve got to work out how to eat,” she says cheekily, “or you’ll be farting everywhere.”
Wilson, who plays doomed Cordelia and the Fool in Lear, has also depicted a psychopathic genius in the BBC’s Luther,a woman clouded by grief in Showtime’s The Affair, a 19th-century governess who falls for her brooding master in the BBC’s Jane Eyre, and a submissive wife torn between her brutish husband and neurotic sister in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Yet none of these intense, enigmatic roles prepared the actor for her trickiest job: portraying her grandmother, Alison, in Mrs. Wilson ,a Masterpiece mini-series on PBS, which she also executive produced.
Alison was a fixture in Wilson’s childhood, living around the corner from her family in the London suburbs, coming over for lunch on Sundays and often picking up Wilson and her three older brothers from school.
But she was also emotionally distant, introverted and devout — not “the warm granny who gave you a hug,” Wilson recalls. “You never felt that comfortable around her.”
When she was 16 or 17, Wilson began to understand her grandmother’s detachment. That’s when Alison shared a private memoir with her family that revealed a secret she’d kept hidden for decades: Her late husband, Alexander, a spy novelist and intelligence agent 25 years her senior, was a bigamist who had never actually divorced his first wife. They’d met during the Second World War, when Alison was a secretary at MI6.
Alison discovered the truth after his sudden death in 1963, but chose to keep it from her two sons until they were middle-aged men with families of their own and relied on her faith to cope.
And there were more revelations to come.
After Alison died in 2005, the family learned that Alexander (known as Alec) actually had two more wives and seven children in total, meaning Wilson had dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins she’d never met. Even his career at MI6 has been cast into doubt. The Wilsons remain unsure whether he was a chronic fabulist who was fired from the intelligence agency, leaving Alison and their sons destitute, or, as he claimed, a secret agent committed to an especially elaborate cover.
“The story kept unravelling,” says Wilson, “and it keeps unravelling.”