‘Grandmother? I only just gave birth myself!’
Actress Patricia Hodge talks to Daphne Lockyer about starting a family in her 40s and coping with the death of her husband
It is vanishingly rare these days for the famous to invite journalists into their homes for interviews, but Patricia Hodge greets you at her own front door, hanging up your coat herself and offering you refreshments. Though, aged 71, she looks uncannily youthful and, well, modern, in well-cut shirt and chinos – although there is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about her. Put it down to a combination of old-school good manners and the precise elocution – despite the Cleethorpes upbringing – of the classically trained actress that, of course, she is. Either way, Hodge strikes you as the kind of woman who, in another era, would have made The Empire great.
She is also rightly rather proud of the stunning, loft-style apartment in Barnes, south-west London, where we are meeting her today. She bought it as a project and had it painstakingly refurbished in the wake of her husband’s death in 2016. “I do love this place,” she says, looking around it now as if for the first time, “but it’s been two years of blood, sweat and tears to get here.”
The old family home down the road was sold and cleared – a difficult but oddly cleansing process – she says. But this new apartment, complete with river view, marks, if not a whole new life, then certainly a fresh chapter. “You don’t leave your old self behind,” she suggests. “You take yourself and all your experiences, good and bad with you. You absorb them and reform yourself around them.”
In the spirit of the changes that seem to have been coming at her in recent years, it seems fitting that we’re now seeing the actress in a role that required some drastic physical transformation. Normally renowned for playing svelte and fragrant upperclass women – think of her as the marriage-wrecking author Mary in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil or, more recently, Miranda Hart’s hilariously unreconstructed sitcom mother – she is currently playing the redoubtable but dumpy Ursula Thorpe, mother of one-time Liberal Party leader Jeremy, in the BBC’s darkly comic three-part drama, A Very English Scandal. Ursula comes complete with permed grey wig, winged spectacles, sensible shoes, tweeds and twin-sets. “But the look is very much an extension of her formidable personality and I do think of her as one of the Baroness Trumpingtons of this world.”
Hodge’s own memories of the Thorpe “trial of the century” remain vivid – especially as, she says, Seventies London “swung even more than the Sixties, if you ask me”.
She had just left drama school, and was making her way both professionally and personally: “It was also the decade in which I married my husband, so it was particularly joyful.”
She and Peter Owen, a music publisher, remained married for 40 years, although his last three were spent in care. Owen’s mind had been devastated by a dementia so severe, he was often unable to recognise his wife or their two sons, Alexander, now aged 29, and Edward, 26. “It was hard for us to bear, because he’d always been such a wonderful husband and dependable father. Dealing with his diagnosis and then death were probably the hardest years of my life.
“But you can’t dwell on it,” she says. “You have to get on with life and perhaps it’s true that, ultimately, the bad things and the difficulties do make you a better person. It’s in adversity that you truly find out about yourself.”
There have been good times too, she says. There was her inclusion, for example, in the 2017 New Year’s Honour’s List. “When the letter arrived, I thought it was a tax demand,” she laughs. “And when I opened it, I was so shocked I just hurriedly put it in the drawer and didn’t tell anyone about it.
“But then I realised it was a lovely thing for the family and the day itself was wonderful. I took my two sons and my very excited sister along and I now have a video of the event. At one point, we part ways in the palace corridor – they head for the family members seats, I’m joining the other recipients. But before I go, I say, to my sister, ‘You’re here to represent Mum and Dad’, and to my boys: ‘And you’re here to represent Daddy.’
“Because the truth is that, although I was the one being honoured, it’s as much for the people who support, love and teach you throughout your life.”
She was blessed, she says, with the happiest of upbringings, buoyed up by fiercely loving and supportive parents. Eric, her father, was a hotel manager, and Marion, her mother, a stay-at-home mother. “I lost my mum just before I was really having to face what was happening with my husband. So, it was a double blow.
“She was 90 and, logically, I realised she had reached the end of the road. But the grief I felt was just profound – unlike anything I’d previously experienced – because my mum had been in my life from day one. And I still miss her every day.”
Although the slings and arrows of the last five years have left a palpable sadness around the actress, she is, she says, “doing OK”.
“I’m very fortunate in so many ways. I have a job that doesn’t have a retirement age, a life that I’ve been able to disassemble and reassemble and I’m so lucky to have my boys,
‘Perhaps it’s true that, ultimately, bad things make you a better person. It’s in adversity that you truly find out about yourself’
too, who I might never have had.”
Indeed, after their marriage the couple struggled for many years to conceive, “And one of the reasons that I’m a patron of the Child Bereavement Charity is that during that time, not being able to have a child myself felt like a kind of bereavement. And while losing a child is not quite the same thing, it struck a similar emotional chord with me.”
Miraculously, she says, in her 40s, when she had almost given up hope, she became pregnant with Alexander and, then, when he was two, with his brother. “It happened so late that now when people ask me if I’m ready to be a grandmother I think, what are you talking about? I only just gave birth myself..!”
She certainly doesn’t look her age, thanks in part to her daily swim in the building’s communal pool. She watches what she eats, but believes firmly in the power of a good hairdo and a facial. In time, she could, surely, find love again. “Oh no,” she says, “I do think that part of my life is over. There are people who just don’t want to exist on their own and look for someone else immediately. But that just isn’t me.”
In her youth, were men ever so slightly intimated by her? “Not at all,” she laughs. “Back then, I’m sure I was much more eager to please than I am now. Much more compliant.” As she’s got older, Hodge says she has become feistier – “feistier… and more formidable!”
Ursula Thorpe might not have approved of the young Hodge, but she certainly would now.