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Natascha McElhone: 'Eight years on from my husband's death and it's still just me and the boys'
In 1995 Natascha McElhone, 24 and not long out of drama school, was spotted in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park by legendary film director James Ivory, who cast her opposite Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso.
A stellar career on screens, both large and small, soon followed. She married her childhood sweetheart, the eminent plastic surgeon, Martin Kelly, and gave birth to their elder two sons. Theo is now 16; Otis 13. Hers appeared to be a charmed life.
And then tragedy struck. In May 2008, her “superfit” 42-year-old husband had just returned to their £2.5million Fulham home when he was felled by a heart attack. Feted for his work as a plastic surgeon rebuilding the faces of disfigured Third World children, he could not be saved. Natascha, filming in LA, was five months’ pregnant with their third child, a son called Rex, now eight.
She was “utterly devastated”. She muddled through as best she could, partially dealing with her loss by writing letters to Martin in the two years following his death. Eventually, they were published in a book she called After You. “It was important to me,” she says, “to have my own narrative of what happened to counter some of the inaccurate things written by people who didn’t know him. But I’ve never looked at it again. I think I’d wince if I did which isn’t to say there’s any remorse or regret about writing [it]. It also seems to have helped a few other people which is obviously an added bonus.”
None of her sons has read the book. “They can if they want to but we talk about him a lot. An actor once said to me about a year after Martin’s death that he, too, had lost his father when he was young. ‘But the funny thing,’ he said, ‘was that the loss is the basis of the best part of me.’ It really struck me that Martin’s loss wasn’t only a blight or a savage injustice in the lives of our children. It may yet end up being something of a springboard for them.”
Does she feel any pressure in the circumstances to be mother and father to the boys? “No,” she says firmly. “I’m their mum.”
It wasn’t always so. Immediately following her husband’s death, Natascha did flirt with the idea of radically changing her parenting style. At first, she tried to compensate for his absence by mimicking his role in the family: “With Martin, I always played the straight man and he was the clown,” she surmised two years later. “I thought, [the boys] couldn’t just have straight man; that would be so dull. So I tried for a while to do clown and straight man and they got really confused. In the end, I decided to stick to my original role. It was quite a relief.”
Natascha’s latest film role is in London Town, set against the backdrop of punk band The Clash’s popularity in the late 70s. She plays irresponsible Sandrine, a mother who abandons her two children and husband and moves into a squat with her grungy boyfriend. “It’s the polar opposite of my life,” she says, “but that was one of the reasons I liked it. I love playing against type.” She finds Sandrine’s behaviour almost incomprehensible. “Motherhood means you become the frame, not the picture,” she says, simply.
Modern parenting has changed out of all recognition, Natascha believes. Her mother, Noreen Taylor, was a rock journalist. “The idea that she’d be interested in what I or my brother, Damon, were doing didn’t really occur to her. I don’t blame her. She was a perfectly good mother. But there wasn’t the social pressure back then to overly involve yourself in your children. These days, it’s all about helicopter parenting, hovering above your children from dawn to dusk. Back then, children lived parallel lives to their parents’.”
Natascha’s parents separated when she was two. Noreen moved with the children to Brighton and later married journalist and media commentator, Roy Greenslade. “I love my stepfather,” she says. “Him and my blood father, Michael, were of equal status in my life. Roy was incredibly engaging and enthusiastic and playful, like a kid in many ways.” Michael, deputy editor of the Manchester Daily Mirror, died a couple of years ago. He was an alcoholic.
Indeed, it was booze, says Natascha, that induced the Alzheimer’s in his 50s which subsequently killed him. “It was a very gradual process but, for at least the last 10 years of his life, he had no idea who I was. I’d look at him and think: ‘You’ve got wet brain.’
“He’d been very loving, though, and he provided for us financially. He adored me and Damon and the two sons he went on to have with his Swedish second wife. But he lost control of his life. He was blameless in that alcoholism is an illness although you’d have to say that Roy saved the day, completely.”
Despite all the journalists in her life, Natascha wanted to be an actor from the age of three: “Don’t ask me why,” she says, “although I did always love old movies.” Resisting the suggestion, particularly from her stepfather, that she apply to university, she won a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
She’s a good actress with a distinctive, angular beauty but she cannot have foreseen her more or less vertical ascent into the Hollywood stratosphere. In 1996’s Surviving Picasso, she played Francoise Gilot, the artist’s lover. “I was all of 26; an absurd opportunity and gift starring opposite Anthony Hopkins, one of my drama school icons.” She was later in a huge hit, The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey (“and who knew how prophetic that film was going to be?”); Ronin with the “drily witty” Robert De Niro; and Solaris with George Clooney. “It’s no accident these guys are where they are. They’re magnetic, charismatic people.”
She only accepted a leading role in the 2007 TV series Californication, with David Duchovny, because it was shot over three months in the summer in LA so she could take her children with her. In the end, she and her sons returned to California for seven summers to film each successive series. For the other nine months of the year, she was back in the UK, “doing school drop-offs, pick-ups, lunch boxes, homework, all the usual domestic things”.
It looks like it’s a pattern that’s going to repeat – this time in Toronto – with her new hit TV series, Designated Survivor, in which she plays the First Lady opposite Kiefer Sutherland after a bomb takes out the President and most of the cabinet. It’s already pulling in 20 million viewers in the US, a further 22 episodes have been ordered and it’s available here on streaming service Netflix.
There has been no significant man in her life since she lost Martin. “But the truth is that I probably wouldn’t talk about it even if there were. At the moment, though, it’s just me and the boys. But yes, that could change, absolutely. I’m lucky. I’m good at finding happiness. I look forward with hope.”