Ruth Wilson’s secret family saga comes to light in ‘Mrs. Wilson’
NEW YORK (Los Angeles Times/TNS) – 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 three-hour production of King Lear 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 actress for her trickiest job: portraying her grandmother, Alison, in Mrs. Wilson, a Masterpiece Theater miniseries that premiered this week on PBS in the US, which she also executive produced.
“It was the most stressful thing I have done in my life,” says Wilson, laughing as she explains how she wound up with a thyroid issue because of all the pressure. “I need a week in a Zen monastery.”
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.”
Her grandfather, who died years before she was born, was even more of a mystery. “Dad never spoke of his dad. I had three grandparents, and that was kind of it. I found a picture of him when I was about 10 and rooting through my dad’s cabinet, and I said, ‘Who is this?’ ‘That’s my dad.’ No more discussion.”
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 World War II, 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 unraveling,” says Wilson, “and it keeps unraveling.”
Discovering her grandfather’s secrets, Wilson says, has “made sense of things that never made sense before,” especially her acting career, which once seemed “a weird and obtuse” choice in a family of jocks. “Then I find out my grandfather wrote 27 books and set up acting troupes with two of the families. His attachment to creativity and language and storytelling – that was what connected the dots for me and made me feel like not such a weirdo.”
Shortly after graduating from the London Academy of Dramatic Arts, Wilson scored the lead in the BBC’s 2006 miniseries version of Jane Eyre, adapted from Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic classic. She soon made an impression in Luther as charismatic killer Alice Morgan.
Her major American breakthrough came with The Affair, which told the Rashomon-style story of an extramarital relationship from multiple perspectives. She won a Golden Globe for her performance as (another) Alison, a Montauk waitress mourning the loss of a child when she gets involved with a struggling Brooklyn writer (Dominic West). Wilson abruptly left The Affair last year and firmly but politely declines to discuss her departure. But later in the conversation, she says she’s wary of committing to another ongoing series because “storytelling is hard over a long period, with an open end.”
Bringing her family saga to the screen was another thorny process. Any time she told people in the industry about it, the response would be the same: “You should tell this story.” But she found that everyone in LA wanted to focus on her grandfather – the kind of charming, enigmatic conman that Hollywood, and especially prestige TV, finds endlessly fascinating.
Wilson, however, was determined to focus on her grandmother’s journey. “The women,” she says, “are as deeply interesting in their connection to him and their capacity to survive throughout that and maintain a family.”
As Alison described in her memoir, about two weeks after Alec’s death, Jesus came to her in a vision. “She felt this warmth literally come up through her. I mean, to me, it reads literally almost orgasmic,” Wilson says. She converted to Catholicism, her late husband’s religion, took vows of poverty and chastity and essentially lived as a secular nun.
“People will interpret it as a breakdown,” Wilson says. “Whatever. It was a form of survival for her.”
Eventually, the BBC gave a green light to Mrs. Wilson, which aired in the UK in November and co-stars Iain Glen (Game of Thrones) as Alec and Keeley Hawes (Bodyguard) as his second wife, Dorothy. The three-hour miniseries is a detective story told through Alison’s eyes as she attempts to uncover the truth.
While Mrs. Wilson takes some license with the story, blending details from Alison’s memoir with revelations that came after her death, in her role as an executive producer Wilson didn’t shy away from the more unsavory details of her family history. She insisted on showing how her naive grandmother was complicit in Alec’s deception. “You must have some amazing capacity not to see things or to refuse to see things” to be duped so dramatically, she says.
“She basically said to me, ‘Anna, don’t sanitize it,’” says screenwriter Anna Symon.