THE MEMORY OF MY SISTER INSPIRES EVERYTHING I DO
Talking to the actress Juliet Aubrey in her trailer during a break filming this summer’s must-see drama, The White Queen, you can’t help but notice that despite the period regalia – the corset and brocade, the bodice and headdress edged with pearls – there is a pair of Nike trainers peeping out from beneath her gown.
The trainers are hardly surprising: the 47-year-old runs three miles a day, and dreams of completing a triathlon to raise money for her favourite charity, Women for Women International. When we meet, she has just finished the Great River Race for the same charity, rowing with seven others along a 21mile stretch of the Thames.
“Just feel my hands,” she says, placing palms, as calloused as a navvy’s, in mine.
The row, she says, had been both physically and emotionally challenging. They had taken part not just to raise money for the charity, which cares for and supports women suffering from violence in war and conflict zones. They were also honouring Aubrey’s older sister, Sian Hurd, who died after falling 60ft from the roof of a four-storey Manhattan townhouse, two years ago last week.
Before her death, Sian, the wife of diplomat Thomas Hurd and daughter-in-law of the former home and foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, had been an active campaigner for the charity.
“Sian was part of a group of women who managed to get a UN resolution passed to have violence against women in conflict zones recognised as an official war crime,” says Aubrey. “Her husband, Tom, had worked for the Foreign Office so she had been to lots of different countries with him and been horrified by the treatment of women in war zones – the way that rape, for example, was used against them as a weapon.
“She started campaigning first for the women of the Sudan, but that broadened out to include so many other places in the world where women are beaten and mutilated, intimidated and subjected to sexual violence. She was heavily involved each year in V-Day – when women march across bridges, dance together and generally unite to end the violence that exists against women the world over. She was a really remarkable person.”
Since Sian’s death, Juliet has been raising money and awareness as much for Sian as for the campaign she supported. “When we were rowing, it was almost as if there was a ninth member of the team in the boat, especially when we hit some incredibly choppy water in the Thames. It was like she was in the boat driving us on.”
It is all the more poignant that the sister she loved and admired so much should have died in such tragic and bewildering circumstances. Last November, the coroner recorded an open verdict, being unable to rule out the possibility that the mother of five, who had taken an overdose of sedatives after suffering a sudden nervous breakdown in 2007, had committed suicide. This despite the fact that no note was found, nor was she known to be suffering from depression at the time.
“Sian and her family were due to come home from New York three days after she died,” says Juliet. “She was so excited about it and looking forward to it. Plus she was a brilliant mother to five children that she adored...” she adds, her voice trailing off.
What hurts, of course, is the not knowing. “Why she was up on the roof? We can’t be sure. Maybe she just couldn’t sleep.” Sian was, indeed, known to be going through a period of insomnia. “Maybe she just went up to the roof to smoke a fag in the middle of the night,” she continues; and there were certainly cigarette butts found at the scene.
“Perhaps it was wet and she slipped. We’ll never know what happened, and that’s the worst of it because you do want a rational explanation. But all that aside, the most important thing has been helping the children get through an unbelievably difficult time, because an experience like this does rip a family to shreds.”
Aubrey, married to production designer Steve Ritchie and mother to two daughters, Blythe, nine, and Lola Blue, seven, has become an essential part of her nieces’ and nephews’ lives. Aged between six and 15, they now live not far away in Clapham.
“All of them come around at weekends. Hannah, the youngest, is closest to my two daughters in age and they get along brilliantly. Ben, the eldest, was one of the rowers in our boat. He raised nearly £6,000 in sponsorship on his own. His mum would have been incredibly proud of him.”
With just two years separating Juliet and Sian, the two sisters had grown up close. Raised in Hampshire, they were the daughters of Sylvia and Roland Aubrey, a family doctor.
While Sian became a diplomat’s wife and a mother – with a sideline in aromatherapy and reiki healing – Juliet was a free spirit who travelled and worked in Italy for a while before getting a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
Aubrey, who won a Bafta for her role as Dorothea in the BBC’s Middlemarch, was 37 when she married Ritchie, whom she had met five years earlier on the set of the Catherine Cookson-adapted drama, The Moth. “Old enough to know my own mind,” she says.
Maturity, she adds, and experiences – the bad as well as the good – have shaped her as a person and as an actress. “As you age, you have this vast cauldron of experience to draw from. Some of the experiences are great, some of them you wish you’d never had. But all of them shape the work that you do and the person you become. It’s just inevitable.”
She is grateful, then, to find herself in a drama such as The White Queen, where the parts for women are not just for ingénues but for seasoned actresses such as herself and the impressive Janet McTeer. Based on Philippa Gregory’s best-selling historical-novel series, The Cousins’ War, the lavish, 10-part drama is packed with battles, beddings and beheadings. It tells the story of the War of the Roses and its aftermath from a distinctly female perspective. While the Houses of York and Lancaster slug it out for power, the background manipulations of these women affect the course of history.
“I think that writers coming through now want to represent women of all ages, and The White Queen is a classic example,” says Juliet. “So maybe, just maybe, the tide is turning.”
‘The White Queen’ begins on BBC One in June