Joanna David: theatrical matriarch to Downton duchess

When Joanna David makes her grand entrance tonight in Downton Abbey, it will be a high-profile return to Sunday-night television for the theatrical matriarch who has had a difficult time of late.

Still girlish-looking at 66, with round pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, there is nothing duchessy about her in real life. Joanna’s actor daughter, Silent Witness star Emilia Fox, once affectionately described her and her father Edward Fox as “my down-to-earth and unworldly parents” – which is perhaps why I seem to have been admitted into the Fox family’s lair on washing day, with a laden clothes horse in the hall and the family help, Fatima, dashing away with the steam iron behind us.

“I screamed down the phone to my agent when she told me Downton wanted me,” says Joanna. “I was so thrilled.” She plays the Duchess of Yeovil, an old friend of Dame Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess, who comes to Downton for a party at which the great Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sings up a storm in the role of the Australian soprano, Dame Nellie Melba.

One of 16 new characters dipping their toe into Downton this series, Joanna is hoping she’ll be invited back for the fifth season next year. But for now, the chance to appear at all is “the cherry on the cake”, having spent some of the past two decades living with depression.

“I would hate it if I didn’t have work as a stimulus in my life,” she begins, “I would be very lost.” Although you would never guess it from her sunny manner, she has now suffered two debilitating bouts of the condition. The first was 20 years ago, the result of an operation to cure a brain condition that had damaged her spinal cord and put her in a psychiatric hospital for a month.

Alarmingly, she found the depression returning more recently after she contracted Ménière’s disease five years ago, a rare disorder of the inner ear that affects balance. “I suffered a seizure and was rushed to hospital where they diagnosed Ménière’s, which can give you vertigo. I had trouble walking straight and kept falling over. I was scared to work in case I had another seizure, so I had to come out of a play I was doing.”

Having told herself the more recent episode was just a “hiccup” and that she “didn’t want to make a meal of it”, she now admits that it had dreadful knock-on effects. “Unfortunately, the experience made me so terribly anxious. I had to be treated with antidepressants for about two years.

“Thank God I seem to be over the Ménière’s, thanks to medication that I still take, but it took a bit of time, I have to say. Wonderful doctors and my family got me through a rather bleak time, but it did leave me in a terrible state.

“For a while, I couldn’t work. But it’s good to be able to say to anybody else in that situation that there is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s important that people should know you can get well from depression.”

Last year, Emilia talked about how looking after her mother during Joanna’s recuperation had made the whole family “much tighter” – as did the birth nearly three years ago of Emilia’s golden-haired daughter Rose, whom Joanna now looks after once a week to give Emilia and her nanny a break. Rose is Joanna’s first biological grandchild, although she has played granny for more than two decades to Harry, the son of her stepdaughter Lucy, now Viscountess Gormanston – Edward Fox’s 53-year-old daughter by his first wife, the late Dr Strangelove actress Tracy Reed.

Over the years, daughter Emilia, now 39, has given the family more than enough cause for concern, with a chequered romantic history that Joanna once described, diplomatically, as “not an enviable one”: it includes a brief engagement to the comedian Vic Reeves, a three-year marriage to Mad Men star Jared Harris, and a similarly short-lived relationship with Rose’s father, the film-maker and peace activist Jeremy Gilley, which ended two years ago, leaving her a single parent.

Joanna, however, refuses to fret. “Whether Millie gets married again is so out of my business. As her mother, all I can hope for is her personal happiness.” Admitting her fondness for Emilia’s ex-husband (“I adored Jared”), she also says she is relieved that, though separated from her daughter, “Jeremy is a much more supportive dad, thank goodness, than mine ever was”.

Joanna’s childhood effectively ended at 10, when her businessman father John Hacking was declared bankrupt and vanished, leaving his wife Davida to bring up their three children on her own. To Joanna – who took the stage name of David as a tribute to her heroic mother, who died of bowel cancer – “family has been everything” ever since.

While Edward, whom she met in 1971, immortalised himself on screen in The Day of the Jackal and Edward and Mrs Simpson, she put her career on the back burner. “Ed didn’t insist on it, but someone had to be at the helm of the home,” she explains. Joanna eventually made her name at the BBC in 1979 as the heroine of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a role later also played by Emilia.

But her career began much earlier, 50 years ago, as a 16-year old chorus girl, the youngest of the Laguna Lovelies in Clacton-on-Sea’s end-of-the-pier show with a young Roy Hudd. The role required her to wear fishnet tights, feathers and silver high heels, and, she says, gave her an upright dancer’s posture – perfect for rocking those grand frocks in Downton Abbey.

The set of Downton must have been quite a home-from-home for Joanna, who appeared in Monarch of the Glen alongside the series’ creator Julian Fellowes, and who has been friends with Maggie Smith for more than four decades. “I’ve known Maggie ever since her two sons were tiny,” she says. “She was a close friend of my mother-in-law, which is how I first met her.

“Maggie and I had several scenes together, but of course we were catching up on all our family news in between takes. She has always been great fun, so she’s a big giggler, though she always stops well before the cameras roll. She’s extremely professional on set.”

As for her own Downton character, she says that the Duchess of Yeovil is “not at all snobbish”, and at one of the parties thrown to lift Lady Mary’s spirits, she takes a shine to former chauffeur Tom Branson: “She rather hopes she can comfort him in his bereavement by asking if they have mutual friends in his homeland of Ireland.”

Her own experience of depression has taught Joanna to be philosophical about human frailty. In spite of Edward’s public admission of sexual dalliances with other women, she married him in 2004 after 33 years of living together – and for highly pragmatic reasons. “Edward never asked me to marry him,” she admits, “but I think we eventually did it because the accountant or maybe the solicitor said: 'You really ought to sort your life out and get married before you kick the bucket.’

“I don’t cosset or worry about him – we live with our heads in the sand,” she says, almost cryptically. “But I believe that every single thing that happens to you is a bonus, in a way. It makes one grateful to be well and working every day. Riches and material gains are nothing compared with one’s health.”

She pauses and grins. “I do hope I’m not sounding pompous.”