Through to the private Ward

10 April 2012

Towards the end of my little encounter with Sophie Ward we argue about whether or not she is argumentative. I've asked after her partner, Rena Brannan, whom Ward married in all but the legal sense at a ceremony in the Groucho Club last summer. Is she as sharp-tongued and argumentative as she is?

"You don't think I'm argumentative, do you? I've been very, very agreeable," Ward replies. The beautiful English actress, dressed in a thin, red silk skirt and schoolgirl's jersey, is tucked into the other end of the sofa we are sharing in one of the Groucho's Soho rivals. "What do you mean?"

I say that I sometimes detect an edge in her voice. Given notice, I'd cite the brevity of her answers, her laughing at my questions, and the moment she chucks back my foolish but spontaneous "Ooh, you do look nice" when Dillon, our photographer, suddenly bathes her pale face in artificial light. Also, it is as if she wants to prove she's cleverer than me, when, even before she plops Alan Greenspan, the Japanese economy and Moral Rearmament into the conversation, that's obvious. She thinks I want to catch her out. I want to draw her out, because I think her story is rather remarkable.

"You don't look very relaxed, Andrew," she says, and I realise I'm hugging my chest so tight I'll crack a rib, and that this is daft, because I warm to her, really I do.

"But," she finally concedes, "we are both very argumentative, yes." Eighteen months ago, Rena and she made a small feature film together, Chinese Whispers. The collaboration was such a test for them that they had a dry run at writing a screenplay first. The relationship survived. And the film? At present, she says, it feels like a child who is failing to thrive.

She met Rena (pronounced Renee), a writer and poet from Illinois, at a friend's in Los Angeles in 1994. They were friends for a year before Sophie left her husband, Paul Hobson, a vet, for her and Rena moved into the family home in the Cotswolds. Pre-empting Press exposure, Ward gave a frank interview to the Daily Mail in December 1996, admitting that even before Rena she had had, with her husband's agreement, lesbian affairs. Shortly afterwards, she arrived at the premiere of Madonna's Evita with Rena on her arm.

The papers were doubly excited because a year back she had starred in a TV adaptation of Joanna Trollope's lesbian romance, A Village Affair. For a while, journalists camped outside her home and doorstepped her parents - the actor Simon Ward, still best remembered for Young Winston in 1972, and Alexandra Malcolm, an actress turned Jungian analyst. But the coverage was surprisingly generous. Last August their "wedding" was spread across 16 pages of OK!, which paid good money for helping normalise the idea of lasting homosexual partnerships.

Now Ward is in the West End in a No?l Coward play, Semi-Monde, set in the Paris Ritz in the Twenties. Written in 1926, it was never staged in Coward's lifetime because it eavesdropped on a world where male and female homosexuality was a given. Here, the greatest virtue is to remain "frightfully broadminded" - Ward's character, for instance, ends up with her husband's lover's father. For these indolent Brits, the Ritz is an alternative reality and they bemoan having one day to "creep back to the usual refuge of codes and pretences" in London.

Ward explains: "Gertrude Stein was once asked why she stayed in Paris and she said it was quite simple: they are who they are, so you can be who you are. There was a huge artistic and creative community in Paris during that period who just were who they were and were allowed to live how they wanted."

Have we got to that stage in Britain today? "No, I'm not saying that it's easy for people to be who they are, but it is possible. Obviously, I speak for myself, but I don't think it's easy. There are people who disapprove of the choices I've made. They are entitled to their opinion, but that lack of approval was very tough."

She's probably the bravest person I've interviewed for ages. "It's sweet of you. I don't think that's true, though. Why would you think I was brave?" Because she is a public person and because she was married and had two children. It was a really serious decision. "It was a very difficult decision, yes. As regards the public-private thing, I'm not sure that makes any difference when it comes to choosing how to live your life, although you might make a career-decision or a commercial-decision [to come out or not]. I think that the real issues are about making a decision for yourself and for your family and friends. That's the hard part."

Telling her parents was certainly hard, partly because she felt she had half-told them already and, it turned out, they had not uncoded her coded remarks. "We hadn't sat down and had that conversation and, of course, looking back, I wish I had." In the end her husband, who had known about her bisexuality before they married, made the difficult phone call.

"But I was most concerned about my children and how it would work out for them. Those were the tough things." And how has it worked out? She looks for some wood to touch. "It's worked out very well." Her boys, Nathaniel, 11, and Joshua, seven, stay with her and Rena but see their father, who now practises in Cricklewood, all the time.

I ask how long it took her to make the decision. "You could say all my life, couldn't you? In terms of really knowing it was a decision, probably three years."

A lifetime may be no exaggeration. Reading the pre-out cuttings about her, you realise there was something troubling about the progress of the daughter Young Winston told the Press was "a little angel who came from Heaven to bless all our lives". For one thing, his angel was resolutely uninterested in eating and remained underweight until she was 15, at which point she resolved to "be a bit more together" and converted into the kind of vegetarian who ate a lot of cheese omelettes. (At 35, she remains, despite the excellence of Rena's cooking, remarkably slender.)

This is not to suggest her parents made her unhappy or forced her to follow them on to the stage. Both counselled against it, but the pressure from her contemporaries who had joined the Anna Scher theatre school in Islington was strong. At 10 she was on TV in a JB Priestley adaptation and by 15 on the books of Models One, showing off Emanuel frocks. When she fled to New York, having, despite her voracious reading, failed to pass the Oxbridge entrance, she became a cover girl for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and was hailed as The Face of the Eighties. Yet she was never enthusiastic about modelling and stubbornly forbore to develop a fashion sense of her own.

More surprisingly, she had little confidence in herself as an actress. Although at 19 she was cast in Spielberg's Young Sherlock Holmes as Elizabeth, the pubescent detective's girlfriend, by 21 she had determined to give up and, broody already, trained as a Montessori nursery school teacher. The offers kept coming, however, and they were the sort it was hard to refuse: a film with Liv Ullmann in Rome, another by Franco Zeffirelli. "Suddenly, it was two years later and I was still working as an actress."

Her mother has said that Sophie carried around "that little English rose image for an awfully long time but inside she felt it was never her". Playing parts such as the befrocked little orphan Elizabeth cannot have helped. Even ITV's A Village Affair, 10 years later, played on her persona as a docile, middle-class English beauty. Alice, who wore an Alice band even in bed, conducted her affair with high seemliness - much to the disappointment of anyone who rents the video hoping to see sex romps with her co-star Kerry Fox (the nearest the programme comes to naughtiness is having Alice sing to her children: "She'll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes").

By the time of A Village Affair, her marriage to Hobson was all but over. They had married in 1988 when she was 23. In interviews, she later described their wedding as "ghastly" and "exceedingly hypocritical". I invite her to compare it with last summer's ceremony, in which, spectral in a sleeveless white dress by Ghost, she entered arm in arm with Rena, whose Rubenesque figure spilled from her satin gown (Simon Ward looked on stiffly).

"It was a different feeling. I don't really want to talk about my relationship with Paul, in that sense. It was made with love, that ceremony, so I don't want to take that away from it. But I'm not religious so there was an issue about getting married in a church. I think I sort of got swept along with it and I was pregnant and I was very, very happy to be pregnant but ..."

And this time? "Oh, it was an extraordinary day. I was so nervous. I was really nervous about how it was all going to work out, would it be OK - no pun intended. We'd written the ceremony ourselves and decided how it was going to be. We weren't following something that we'd been to before or a prescribed way of doing it. And it was amazing. It was a really fantastic day. It went beyond what I thought it could be."

She doesn't pretend inviting OK! was pure altruism on her part. But making her commitment public in a mainstream magazine was a political statement too. "Obviously, it's a ceremony I'd like to see legalised in Britain. I felt quite strongly about that."

I say Ken Livingstone agrees with her. But I'm from the Standard, so she thinks I'm grubbing around for a London angle.

It seems remarkable talking to her now, but a few years ago she says she would look in the mirror and see a bland person look back. In 1995 she said: "It is as if I'm waiting to have an image put on me. That's how I feel when I'm between jobs, which might be great as an actor, but I don't think it's very healthy to feel that way as a human being."

I ask if she still feels like that. "No I feel differently now. I feel I have something to bring as me."

Is that a result of being public about her sexual identity? "I don't know if it is about being public. It is about knowing it myself, just knowing about myself and not being frightened knowing about myself. Now I know that is me and, OK, so some people may not like it. Whereas, before, I was scared people would not like things about me. I have faced that and it is OK. Not everybody can like everything about you. I can develop things about myself that might be a little more contentious and bring those to my work."

Making her a better actress? "I hope so. There is always room for improvement. Seriously, I do think that makes a difference. That's the big difference between modelling and acting. You are just a palette if you are a model. Although some of the great ones have a huge amount of personality, they assume specific forms, and that is different. As an actress, of course you want to slip into your role, but if you can bring some life experience to it and not be frightened that is good. Perhaps, before, I was a bit frightened."

This is a revealing answer but it comes right at the end, after Dillon has taken her portrait and I've admitted that I'd hoped we'd get on better. "Oh," she says to Dillon, "look at him. There's a line in the play: 'Startled fawn, very hard [to do].'"

If we were in Semi-Monde, and I was debonair in white-tie and she was diaphanous in her black-and-gold evening gown, I'd languidly reply: "Thanks." "Oh, did you take that as compliment?" she'd say, arching an eyebrow. "No," I'd reply, "merely as a contribution to the conversation. I was duly grateful."

But this is London 2001 not Paris 1926, and no one writes dialogue like that any more. On stage, however, the argumentative but likeable Sophie Ward delivers such lines so naturally it is perfectly possible to believe she has found her voice at last.

MORE ABOUT

P Funk

Through to the private Ward

Read More