Madly star Juliet to wed boyfriend of 30 years...

DISTINGUISHED actress Juliet Stevenson is determined to give her family a reason to smile again after they suffered a terrible tragedy last year.

I can reveal the Truly, Madly, Deeply star is to wed her boyfriend, the anthropologist Hugh Brody, after almost three decades as a couple.

‘I want to stand up in front of the world, even if there are only six people in the room, and say: “This is my person, and we’ve been through a huge amount, and I love him more than ever,”’ she declares.

Brody’s son, the film-maker Tomo Brody, died suddenly last November aged 37.

‘Tomo was one of the most beautiful human beings who ever walked the Earth,’ Stevenson said after his death. ‘He was amazingly good at love. Losing a child, it’s so frightening. So much of the year has been about survival, the whole country watching these terrible statistics nightly on the news. But the young people were supposed to be OK.’

The couple, who met at a mutual friend’s supper party, live in North London and have two children, Rosalind, 27, and Gabriel, 20.

Olivier Award winner Stevenson, 64, who’s appeared in everything from Bend It Like Beckham to hit Sky drama Riviera, has previously been sceptical about the institution of marriage, musing earlier this year: ‘I grew up seeing what incredible restraints marriage imposes on women in certain situations. I felt my mum sometimes metaphorically beating at the walls.’

She added of Brody, 78, however: ‘I’m ridiculously soppy about him, and it would be amazing to say that to the world.’

Having different careers, she thinks, has helped their relationship endure. ‘I’m very glad to be with somebody who’s not in the industry because I’m a bit of an obsessive.

‘I get very submerged in a piece of work, and if I lived with another actor, it would be a bit suffocating.’