Legalising drugs, the tragedy of her mother’s cruelly early dementia... and ‘coming out of retirement’ for a new life on stage
OF ALL the places you might expect to find Trudie Styler – at a fundraising gala, or a Hollywood screening – Ipswich High School’s changing room is not one of them. Yet that is exactly where the movie producer and wife of Sting ended up while touring in a play about Dr Johnson, author of the Dictionary Of The English Language.
‘Oh yes, I loved it,’ says Trudie, throwing her head back with a throaty laugh and now back in the capital seated in the more familiar surroundings of her Georgian townhouse across the park from St James’s Palace.
‘Of course there was no dressing room so I had to go into the girls’ changing room, where there had just been a very lively game of hockey. The girls were finishing showering and dressing while I was pulling my 18th century frock on.
‘I though “it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this”. But it was such fun, this sort of troubadour mentality, I found myself laughing all the way through.
‘My life has changed enormously, I live such a privileged life, but becoming an artist again had huge meaning for me.’
Nowadays Trudie wears so many different hats – environmentalist, campaigner, film-maker and A-lister – it’s easy to forget she was once an actress who played with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In fact when she and Sting met in the summer of 1977 she was the more famous one, having appeared in the hit BBC series Poldark while The Police were still a year away from signing a record deal.
Two years later, however, they were a global phenomenon. Sting left his then wife and mother of his two children, Frances Tomalty, and the deluge of negative publicity made Trudie too notorious to cast.
Not that she necessarily felt the loss at the time.
Instead, she toured the world with the band, enjoying the fortune that
At the MRI I saw whole areas of her brain were blacked up
came with her husband’s success and befriending the rich and powerful. Bill Clinton, Madonna, Tom Cruise and Elton John are in her iPhone contacts list.
Little wonder she leaves some people envious – but in the flesh Trudie is candid, smart and not afraid to show her mettle, recently re-launching her theatre career at the age of 60.
Last autumn she performed in Chekhov’s The Seagull in New York to great acclaim and tonight she will take part in a gala reading of the play at London’s St James Theatre alongside Sir Ian McKellan.
For Trudie the return to the stage is especially poignant. She has had small parts in TV and film over the years but stopped working in theatre after developing stage fright, which she believes was tied to losing her mother Pauline to Alzheimer’s in 1984.
She explains: ‘I was playing at the Lyric, Hammersmith, but I noticed that my fear began to really increase each night. Bit by bit, I was not having such a good time. Then it went into this, “how do you memorise these lines?”’
Pauline, a school dinner lady, died aged 60 but in truth she was lost to her family from the age of 54 when the disease was first diagnosed.
It was on a visit to the family home on a council estate on the outskirts of Stoke Prior, in Worcestershire, that Trudie first noticed something was wrong. ‘She wasn’t functioning at all. She was putting her arm through her coat the wrong way, could no longer lay the table and was obsessed with washing the same cup and saucer over and over.
‘No one had really heard of Alzheimer’s in the 1980s. I think my Dad thought she’d had some kind of breakdown. When I saw her like that I said, we’ve got to go and get this sorted out.’
Trudie and her father, Harry, who worked in a lampshade factory, took Pauline to London. Two days later they watched her MRI scan.
Trudie says: ‘I saw whole areas of her brain which were blacked up. The doctor called me in afterwards and said she’s got advanced Alzheimer’s and I said, “What’s that?”’
Pauline had weighed 17 stone but slowly became unrecognisable.
Trudie drops her head and twists her hands in her lap as she says: ‘It went from there being a bit of a difference to someone who was not in any way shape or form my mum.
‘For a start, she’d always been very big but she became really thin. And she would be quite violent sometimes. I would go and see her and all she’d want to do was go walking, she’d want to walk and walk and walk... walk away from it. It was almost as if she couldn’t find any peace within herself.’
Trudie saw her mother the day before she died. ‘Dad cared for her at home but about six weeks before he’d had a cataract operation and couldn’t cope. I went to see her and I’d just had Mickey [her daughter with Sting]. She was sitting up in her chair thinner than ever.
‘I had Mickey in my arms and she had a pacifier and it dropped onto the ground. My Mum straight away went and lifted it up and said, “Here you are, Mickey.” That was the last lucid moment that she had.
‘She seemed so present but when I left to go back to London she went into a coma and died the next morning. That was the goodbye. It was perfect that it was with the child.’
Mickey is now 30 and an actress. Sting and Trudie went on to have Jake, 29, a model, Coco, 23, a musician, and Giacomo, 18, who wants to be an actual policeman. It’s an irony not lost on Trudie, even if her son doesn’t appreciate the joke.
‘I don’t think he’s connected the two,’ says Trudie. ‘The Police had broken up by the time he came of age and he’s not terribly interested in his Dad’s music.’ Despite their