Jenny Agutter

Jenny Agutter walks across the floor of an old, atmospheric house, let out for location work – all artful peeling walls – in South-East London, with the bearing of a dancer that she once trained to be long ago when she was sent to board, at the age of eight, at Elmhurst Ballet School. She is sixty-five and looks close to it on the television screen as wimpled Sister Julienne in Call the Midwife, but younger in person. In fact, with her hair pulled back in a bun, delicate features and natural grace, it is easy to imagine her – the years rolling right back – tying the ribbons to her pumps, as one of Degas’s tutu’d “little ballerinas”.  

She is a curious mixture of no-nonsense and skittishness, sentences that start often don’t finish, as she talks rapidly and at length – determinedly, without pausing for breath –  phrases giddily layering on top of one another, making it tricky sometimes to disentangle. Being with her can make you feel like a pedestrian waiting at a railway crossing gazing patiently at a train that never stops.

For many of us, the actress was an indelible part of our growing up – as Bobby in the film adaptation of the Edith Nesbit novel, The Railway Children, crying “Daddy, my Daddy”, heart-wrenchingly, as she was reunited with her father. As the schoolgirl in the Australian deep Outback in Nic Roeg’s Walkabout; Fritha, with Richard Harris, in The Snow Goose for which she won an Emmy.

Her voice is redolent of an earlier era – crisp enunciation – it has depth and fullness, with a slight catch in the breath. There is no trace of twang from her 17 years living in the hills of West Hollywood in her early twenties. Perhaps because of their itinerant life as an army family – always on the move, never staying anywhere longer than three years – her parents didn’t make a fuss about their daughter taking off to live on her own, at the age of 21, in Tinsel Town. “My mother never said ‘Do you really think you should?’ or anything to put me off going. It was just total and complete support for whatever I wanted to do,” she says. “And that made me really comfortable about going because I always knew I could come back.

“I remember one time getting terribly upset and my parents just came over and picked me up, like that,” she snaps her fingers, “in a moment. So I’ve always had that support emotionally which is why I’ve always wanted to work with the charities [more anon] where people haven’t had that – because I feel extremely lucky in that way. Families can fall apart for many, many reasons.”

I ask her what it was like, with such a close family, being sent off to boarding school so young; her parents far away. “I remember being picked on because I went out to Cyprus for holidays, I had lovely things… It was exotic and I didn’t want for anything – so it seemed like I was a spoilt little girl.”

The chief bully was the daughter of a doctor and she and her gang sent Agutter to Coventry, as the silent freezing treatment was called. “The interesting thing is I saw her do that to some girls and they would fall apart. But I couldn’t care less. I think I was pretty tough and I was very good at – and this is actually good and bad – seeing systems. So I saw the way things worked at the school.

“Basically what you learn to do is to separate yourself which isn’t good but it does stand you up well for a lot of things in life. It’s not particularly healthy because I don’t think one should just create a barrier between oneself and the world. But that’s how you learnt to deal with everything – to separate yourself from it and just go – [flicks invisible dirt off her fingers] – pah! – and that’s all right.”

The actor’s father, Derek, died at the beginning of 2018 – which still chokes her up as she describes his funeral on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. Agutter’s parents, Derek and Catherine – who had met in Egypt, where Derek was in charge of putting on entertainment for the forces – had moved to be close to their daughter and her Swedish hotelier husband, Johan Tham’s holiday house, and chose to move there fulltime about 20 years ago.

“Because of where it was, we actually got to carry my father’s coffin, walking across the road from his flat to the graveyard and the church. The community – the people were very giving and it was good to feel part of something more than just being alone and by ourselves.”

Going through his things, she discovered an eight-page letter she had written to her parents which her father had kept in a box. It described everything she was experiencing being feted in America, as a nineteen-year-old, despatched to pick up her Emmy for best supporting actor in The Snow Goose. “I would never even have realised I did so much without finding that letter,” she says, with her radiant smile. “I was uber excited!

“For the Emmy, I wore Gina Fratini – and I still have it. It was very floaty with feathers hanging off it – and I did nothing with my hair which was tied up in a knot on top of my head and my face looked completely free of make-up.” 

Her late mother, one of ten Irish Catholic children born in Liverpool with a big smoker and drinker of a mother, was terribly keen on fashion and had a natural refinement about her: “Much more than myself, she was very keen on dressing correctly and getting things right – and she was rather surprised by me not showing so much interest.”

For the record, Agutter looks incredibly elegant, in a cream silk blouse, skinny trousers, and sculptural burnished gold earrings that wrap around her lobes in an intriguing way. There is no doubt that she has paid attention to her appearance.

“I was in in the public eye, of course, and I remember someone sending £5 in the post to me and saying, ‘Why don’t you go to the hairdresser!’” A big laugh. “It was the period when one had one’s hair long and rather fine with your ears sticking through. So I really didn’t bother much.”

While she finds it a relief that for her role as Sister Julienne there is no make-up or glamour involved – “it is liberating because you’re not thinking all the time about the way you look” – this is not to say she is unvain. She clears her throat, “I think as an actor there’s always a certain amount of vanity because you want to present the best part of yourself physically. And it’s partly expectation – I mean, no-one wants you to look like a sack of potatoes all the time. I watch things like weight and keeping fit partly out of vanity and partly because as an actor I am expected to – but I’m not overly vain.

“If I go out shopping – and I don’t always take the time to make myself look good – I realise I am vain because I don’t want people to take photographs.”

By 1975 she owned her own flat in Marmont Lane, where she lived for eight years. “I was about parallel with the sixth floor of Chateau Marmont – when I bought my place, they pointed to that floor and said ‘Oh, that’s where Andy [Warhol] paints when he’s here’. I was 23… I know!” she grins, acknowledging how far-fetched it sounds.

When she moved to LA, Agutter was in a relationship with Patrick Garland who directed her in The Snow Goose; there was a seventeen-year age gap between them (he was 36 to her nineteen). Since she was so young and he was in a position of considerable power in the work place, it’s the kind of blurring of boundaries that would certainly raise eyebrows in today’s climate.

Agutter has no problem with it, then or now. When I talk about how young she was and how much older he was, she says, pleasantly: “Yes, but he was a very nice person”. Do you look back on it now and think “Well, perhaps that was a bit odd”? “No, not at all. It was a very important, very good relationship. He was very interesting and it went on for a good length of time for that age – it must have been a good couple of years.”

As for the #metoo movement, she says: “I can never fully understand the people who got themselves into problems. In the States, there were occasions when you might be asked to go to a private screening or someone’s place and you just didn’t do it – unless you find the person very attractive, in which case you do do it! But if they’re not really attractive, there’s nothing to be gained from it, because it’s obvious what you’re indicating by going.”

This sounds too much to me like the women being blamed when, surely, it’s the men who are abusing their power? “It’s terrible that anyone would use their power in that way. That’s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong – there’s no question about it. What is sad is to be in a situation where you have to negotiate it and you shouldn’t have to do that. I was very lucky never to have to negotiate it.”

So, despite your youth and looks and the era (the Seventies) when this behavior was so prevalent, you never had to deal yourself with a Towelling Bathrobe Situation? “No, because apart from anything else, in the States I went out with someone who was actually in the studio system – a producer – and because of that I was a little bit protected. No-one was going to hit on me, with him there! It was a bit like having the mafia around you.”

But if you had found yourself in a hotel room for what you thought was a business meeting and the man started his sleazy shenanigans, what would you have done? “Back out of the door rather fast! Because there isn’t any part that’s worth that – and I think there’s an arrogance in me a little bit as well – which is, ‘if you’re not casting me because I’m right for the part, then why are we in this situation?’”

Onto more pleasant subjects: the series that Agutter has been starring in since 2012, is now entering its eighth year. She is delighted to hear some feedback from actual midwives I know who say that Call the Midwife is more emotionally authentic for them than the reality TV shows which deal with birthing. 

“Everything is really quiet when you have real babies on set,” her voice drops to a whisper. “Everything is very calm. In fact, Shelagh’s [Laura Main] baby [in the finale of season six] turned out to be called Jonathan like my son and I got terribly emotional about that! The little baby was somewhere between eight and ten days old and it took me back to Christmas Day when my Jonathan arrived.” Jonathan is now in his twenties and a doctor at the great London teaching hospital, St Thomas’s.

The new series will be exploring social issues such as inter-racial adoption, as well as cot death and sickle-cell disease. Of the latter, she says: “it is in the black community and the Jewish community and was something I came across in the States because I used to work in a school at Watts there.”  

Watts, which attracted world attention in the sixties because of the riots, remains one of the most impoverished and dangerous neighbourhoods in Los Angeles. It is commendable that Agutter was prepared to leave her world of Hollywood privilege to venture into such a challenging environment to try to do something worthwhile. But in fact, this is a pattern of her life. We spend some time talking about prisons, as we have a mutual interest (I co-founded a charity called Liberty Choir, which creates choirs in and out of prison and is there for the graduates when they re-enter society). Since 2012 the actor has been the patron of St Giles Trust, which supports former prisoners as well as other disadvantaged people.

She is really enthusiastic about this work: “The thing about getting involved with anything like that is that it keeps one’s feet very firmly on the ground and it introduces you to people that I have loved being around. There are other worlds, you know?”

Her preferred mode of transport is the bus “because I’m a people watcher and also I love having my Freedom Pass now!” Politically, she and her friends are Democrats and she is very pro-Europe. Agutter didn’t go on the People’s Vote March last October because she was abroad but she did post about it on her Facebook page: “It’s a kind of work Facebook page but I wrote: “Hurrah – excellent – does everyone know about the march and the People’s Vote and here we are and we’ve got a chance to take hold of our future’ and so on.

“I cannot tell you how many ghastly comments came in as a response to that. I was called a fascist and ‘You shouldn’t get into politics – just get back behind the screen’ and all the rest of it…” Was she surprised by the vitriol of the response? “Completely shocked.”

During the time that she was living in the States, Agutter came back regularly and appeared on stage for the RSC, and at the National Theatre. That, she says, is where she really learned how to act. She still sometimes misses the weather and the dear friends who don’t travel, as well as a certain kind of openness that we Brits lack. But she says, “I knew I would never retire at the Golden Crest Retirement Centre on Sunset Boulevard, where all the old actors went,” a gentle laugh. “I didn’t quite see myself living that life. And I’m British but what I really am is a European, actually.”

And with that, Jenny Agutter – with her feet most definitely placed firmly on the ground – walks off into the rain.

Radio Times