Samantha Bond: ‘Being an invisible middle-aged woman is an absolute fact’
During the opening scenes of the first episode of her new TV crime drama, The Marlow Murder Club, Samantha Bond’s character, Judith, has a whisky at 6pm as is her daily custom. Then she walks down to her summer house, sheds her clothing and goes for a dip in the Thames. For a few glorious moments we see her swimming in the nuddy, luxuriating in the moment, blissfully content.
Was that really you? I ask Bond, in a hotel room in Soho. “It’s definitely me!” she says indignantly. “Well, most of it is me [she wore a flesh coloured wetsuit]. It was very frightening – they dumped me right in the middle of the river. Someone made the mistake of telling me there was 40,000 tonnes of water beneath me. At that point you become a little old lady who panics, frankly.”
It’s hard to imagine Bond panicking at anything. The stage and screen stalwart known to millions as Miss Moneypenny from the Pierce Brosnan era has the simultaneously prim and playful bearing of a rather saucy Girl Guide leader. Did she consider the moment her sexagenarian character merrily jumps naked into the Thames a joyous punch in the air for elder women’s sexual liberation?
“I didn’t really think about it, but I do love how independent Judith is. She’s her own person. A story that respects the older person is always welcome and there’s not a lot of that about.”
Except there is a lot of it about in the genre of cosy crime. The modern day twist on Golden Age detective fiction, invariably featuring an orderly plot, a sleepy setting and an amateur sleuth in the style of Miss Marple, is currently proliferating like knotweed across page and screen.
The Marlow Murder Club, adapted by Robert Thorogood from his own novels (he also created Death in Paradise), is a particularly ravishing example. Yet Bond is having none of it. “We don’t like the C word,” she says sternly. “We don’t call it cosy crime. There is a lot of ordinary life going on in the show. One character lives in quite a small house. Another works nights to make ends meet.”
Quite. But perhaps one need not criticise cosy crime in the first place. After all, it is staggeringly popular. “I do think that the thing that gets forgotten is why people watch what they watch. People like escapism. I’ve got to the age where I really can’t cope with violence. You go: ‘Another nitty gritty drama?’ I don’t want to see that, thank you very much. I’ve never managed to watch The Wire, for instance. Whereas I’m loving The Bear. Anyway, we also forget that the world in which The Marlow Murder Club is set represents an awful lot of the country.”
Including, it’s perhaps no surprise to learn, Bond herself, who lives in the plush riverside environs of St Margarets, not far from Barnes where she was brought up: her father was the Onedin Line actor Philip Bond; her mother Pat was a TV producer. Does she ever swim in the Thames? “God no. Although my husband does [she’s been married to the actor Alexander Hanson since 1989; they have two children ].
Bond is 64. Her career has been steadfast, solid and sometimes spectacular, if also a bit under sung. She has worked extensively with the RSC and notched up a Tony nomination on Broadway in the David Hare play Amy’s View, opposite Dame Judi Dench. She played the pleasure-loving Lady Rosamund in Downton Abbey and the batty Aunt Angela in Outnumbered, and continues to consistently crop up on the small screen. She brings an arch sensuality to every character she plays.
Still, in an era considered a boom time for older female actors, such as Lesley Manville, Dame Penelope Wilton, Dame Harriet Walter, Dame Helen Mirren and Olivia Colman, she considers herself one of the fortunate ones. “The idea that things are better for older female actresses very much depends on who you talk to,” she says. “I’ve been very lucky, touch wood, but I think the fact we are still talking about it means there is a disparity still. Being an invisible middle-aged woman is an absolute fact. That’s fine if you don’t want people pestering you, but that invisibility is also symbolic.”
She’s on a roll. “The other thing is, no one has ever used, ever, the words ‘a male-led drama’. But when I did Home Fires [the hit 2015 ITV show about the Women’s Institute during the Second World War], suddenly everyone is talking about a female-led drama. It’s so patronising.” And don’t get her started on the phrase strong women. “All women are strong by definition.” she says tartly. “You’d never think about calling a man that. Rubbish.”
Did her father ever attempt to put her off becoming an actor? “No, and anyway, he and my mother made it sound so entertaining it would have been hard to do so.” Certainly her childhood sounds very colourful. “My father was good friends with a group of actors, including Patrick McGee and Peter Bowles, and they would often go out for a Sunday lunchtime drink and appear rather later back at the flat rather worse for wear.”
All the same, as a child Bond wanted to become a ballerina. “When I was 15, I did puppy fat in a spectacular way, so when I applied for Rambert and the Royal Ballet, I didn’t get in. So I went back to my grammar school, and this amazing teacher said to me: ‘Oh, no ballet then?’ And handed me the script of Electra.” She began appearing in school plays, including productions that combined casts with pupils from the nearby Latymer Upper School. “At one point I was on stage with Nigella Lawson and Hughie Grant. By that point it had become clear acting was going to be the path. Then I went to drama school.”
Her first TV role was in Mansfield Park in 1983, alongside a very young Jonny Lee Miller . . She followed it up with numerous stage appearances in Stratford and the West End including a notoriously steamy Lady Macbeth opposite Sean Bean.
She was never interested, though, in cracking America. “When I started out 40 years ago, America wasn’t on the radar. I’m very proud to have played Broadway and got a Tony nomination ... But it wasn’t something that you dreamed about in the way the youngsters on Downton would have dreamed about. It was a very different time.
She and Hanson met through a friend and quickly had two children, Alex and Molly. How did they manage childcare while combining their careers? “Hands up, I got a Mary Poppins. I’m a great believer, and this will sound terribly old fashioned, that the baby comes to live with you and not the other way round.
She’s always been a formidable worker. “It seems like quite a long time since I had any spare time,” she agrees. All the same, her smallest ever role is also the one people know her for the most. Four years before Amy’s View transferred to Broadway, she and Dench were cast in GoldenEye in 1995, the first Bond film to star Pierce Brosnan, with whom she established a crackling chemistry.
She’s not a particular Bond fan and has no views on who ought to be the next one. “None whatsoever,” she says. “It isn’t really a curse except journalists 30 years later ask you about it. The blessing is that it didn’t end my career. Lois [Maxwell, who played Moneypenny 14 times between 1962 and 1985] was always furious because people thought Moneypenny was all she was. The big difference it made was the amount of charity work I found myself doing. The nation’s press would always come out for a Bond face, so everyone would ask me to open this or attend that.”
Prominent among her charitable obligations these days is The Prince’s Trust, for which she is an ambassador and through which she has known the King for many years. She is reluctant though to talk about him beyond saying: “I think they are all trying to move the family forward [in the wake of the ongoing Harry and Meghan saga and the death of Elizabeth II]. It’s not been an easy time.” Is she a monarchist? “I’m definitely not a Republican. When I look at the mess that is America, I’m extremely grateful that we have a sort of head of state that is neutral.” She has played the late Queen twice. “I last played her in a charming film The Queen and I [based on the 1992 Sue Townsend novel]. The whole process is very bizarre because of course you don’t look like the Queen, but then you put on the wig and the lip stick, and go, good lord.”
Does she worry about ageing? A few weeks before we meet she was on ITV’s Loose Women and appeared to be shaking, prompting viewers to take to Twitter/X to ask what was wrong. It turns out it was a frozen shoulder. “You do think about ageing. I’m aware, for instance, that I’m walking more slowly. And I realise I hate going down stairs because I’m frightened of falling. Then of course there is the discussion over whether you do or don’t tuck your face [she hasn’t].” Her approach is to accept the process rather than resist it.
Indeed. Here she is at the age of 64, playing a woman who is delightfully happy in her own skin, literally. She’s not a particular fan of nudity. “I’ve done it before, in [the 1995 BBC comedy drama Tears Before Bedtime] but I’ve not always been happy about it. I do think nudity can be an incredible distraction. If you can see my breasts are you really concentrating on what I am saying? Now you get a supervisor to make sure you are comfortable. Not in my day.” That scene at the start of Murder Club is, she points out, very different. “It’s not at all sexual. Instead, Judith is in that river in a way that simply feels very free.”
The Marlow Murder Club airs on Drama and UKTV Play on March 6 and March 7 at 8pm.
