Beale: I still miss my mum

10 April 2012

It was the phone call Simon Russell Beale had been dreading. His mother, Julia, had been in the operating theatre for seven hours. An earlier scan had revealed cancer of the pancreas. Only by opening her up, she'd been told, could the full extent of her condition be determined.

"I'd worked out that, if I called my brother, Andrew, in the interval of that day's performance of Candide, he'd be in a position to tell me what the surgeon had discovered." Beale made his way back to his dressing room at the Royal National Theatre and picked up the phone.

Andrew Beale, himself a consultant surgeon, did not mince his words. "He told me Mum's condition was inoperable. The cancer was terminal. She had, perhaps, six months to live, which, as it turned out, proved to be pretty accurate. Horrible, horrible. My head spun. And then I had to walk out on stage again for the second half of the show. It's amazing how your brain copes. Somehow, you can compartmentalise different demands. I remember nothing of the second act. I was on automatic pilot."

At 41, Simon Russell Beale is considered by many to be the leading actor of his generation. He spent almost 10 years at the National, winning an Olivier in 1996 for his performance as Mosca in Volpone, considerable critical acclaim as Iago in Sam Mendes's production of Othello, and another Olivier for his portrayal of Pangloss in Candide. His most memorable small-screen role has been as the upwardly mobile Widmerpool in the 1997 adaptation of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. And then there was his Hamlet in John Caird's production for the National, an interpretation that garnered Beale more or less every major award last year and a performance (as we shall see) that was as much to do with his innate ability as with the death of his beloved mother.

We are sitting in Beale's modest dressing room in the Gielgud Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, where he's currently appearing alongside Felicity Kendal in the successful transfer of Charlotte Jones's bittersweet comedy, Humble Boy. It is almost two years since Julia Beale died.

"Mum's still with me pretty much all the time," he says. "When someone you love dies over a period of five, six months from a fairly grim disease, what keeps flashing through your mind are all the bad bits. The hope is that all of that will gradually recede and all the nice memories will begin to surface. All I can say is that that hasn't happened yet.

"I still see her in pain. I still see her suffering. I had a wonderful letter from Julian Fellowes (who wrote the screenplay for Gosford Park). He talked about the arc of grief and the fact that, sooner or later, happy memories would begin to predominate. I'm sure he's right. But I'm still waiting."

His parents, Peter Beale and Julia Winter, met in their early twenties at the now-defunct Westminster Hospital as postgraduate medical students. They appeared together in a college spoof called Wind in the Pillows, in which Peter played Ratty and Julia his girlfriend. They married at the beginning of the Sixties.

Simon was born in 1961. As an army surgeon, Peter Beale spent many years being posted with his burgeoning family around the world. Simon's twin brothers, Andrew and Tim, appeared the following year in Hong Kong. Then came Katie, now a GP like her mother before her, Lucy, and, finally, Matt, an opera singer.

When Simon was seven, it was decided he should board at St Paul's Choir School while the rest of the family moved to their latest posting in Singapore. But when she was four, Simon's sister, Lucy, had to be brought back to Britain and admitted to Great Ormond Street. Born with a missing chamber in her heart, her condition had deteriorated sharply. Lucy eventually lost her battle. Simon was called out of the classroom to be given the news before returning to his lessons. "I was 11. I didn't really know how to feel. I wrote a letter to my parents. 'Dear Mummy and Daddy, I'm well. I hope you're fine. I'm so sorry to hear about Lucy's death. It must be awful for you who knew her so much better than I did.' It seems so bald to my adult eyes but it was the truth."

When Simon was 15, his parents bought a house in Wiltshire, their travelling days over. "Mum built her practice as a GP and she was, by all accounts, remarkable. I would describe her as very imaginative in her compassion. Like my sister, Kate, she had the ability to see problems from the patient's point of view. She treated so much more than the mere condition."

But in 1999, Julia Beale began complaining of stomach pains. "I can't prove this but I'm pretty sure, being a doctor, that she had a fair idea of what was wrong with her and pretty sure, too, being a doctor, that she chose to ignore what was happening." When her condition proved terminal, Simon would spend as much time as he could spare at her bedside.

"She was very calm most of the time, although I'm sure she was deeply distressed inside. I realised, though, that there was no point my trying to be strong in front of her. I remember, at one point, sitting beside her bed and being unable to stop myself from crying. Mum was absolutely fine about that. She never tried to stop me. She gave me permission, as it were, to express my feelings in front of her."

In February 2000, Simon won an Olivier for Candide. "Mum was in hospital in Hammersmith by this stage. So I took it straight from the ceremony to show her. She was thrilled." She was also delighted when she discovered the National had agreed to him tackling Hamlet.

"It is a role I'd wanted to play for so long that somehow it became our joint ambition. In fact, after she died, I received a letter from one of her patients. 'The last time I saw your mother,' it said, 'she told me your Hamlet was on the cards.' So, clearly, it had been very important to her. It became a matter of honour to her that she would survive to see it. "I'll be there on the first night," she'd say.

But it was not to be. Julia Beale died two months later, in April, not long after Mothering Sunday. "She'd come home to Wiltshire and then went to live with my sister who could care for her - bathing her and so on - before finally being moved to a hospice outside Swindon.

"The last time I saw her, she was obviously very, very ill but I didn't know I wouldn't be seeing her again. But then, why would I? I'd never seen anyone die before. My father and my brother, Andrew, are both medical men. They must have known. I was poleaxed when my father called and told me Mum had gone. It was the oddest feeling in the world. I would never hear her voice again, never again see her writing. I couldn't take it in. She was 64. It's no age, is it?"

Rehearsals for Hamlet began weeks later. "It never crossed my mind to duck out of doing it. Far from it. Playing that part was my gift to Mum. In my head, my performance was dedicated to her. And, of course, it was supremely appropriate that this was to be the next role I tackled.

"With Hamlet, I was immersed in grief. And I'm certain it had a much more profound effect on the grieving process than I edged at the time. If, every night, you're taking the stopper out of the bottle for three-and-a-half hours of grief - albeit fictional - my God, that's an opportunity to release some of what's inside."

But it was tough. "There are four or five moments in the play when Mum would come directly into my head. At one stage, Hamlet has to speak of death, 'the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. That was a challenge every time. But then so was the moment when the ghost of Hamlet's father disappears. 'Adieu, adieu,' he says, 'remember me.' Mum was so much a part of my being at that point that she was inextricably there with me. After the first night, my brother, Matt, said to me, 'That was as much to do with Mum, wasn't it, as it was to do with you?' And he was right."

Mothering Sunday yesterday held no special fear for him. "I never acknowledged it when she was alive. It was probably just me being stupid and contrary, but she knew I thought it was much too commercialised. But I was a great sender of flowers at other times - on the anniversary of Lucy's death, for instance. I'd send yellow roses, another perversity of mine because I knew pink were her favourite. There were yellow roses on her grave and I remember my sister saying, 'Oh, those must be from Simon.' I can't really explain it. It was just our own little private joke."

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