How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Dame Harriet Walter - ‘I wish I’d had all this attention when I was 40’

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Olivier and Emmy-award-winning Dame Harriet Walter must have acting in her blood: her uncle is the legendary horror star Christopher Lee, she turned down a place at Oxford in favour of drama school, and began her career at the Royal Shakespeare Company. On screen you’ll know her from Killing Eve, Ted Lasso, The Crown or as Lady Caroline in Succession - plus films including Sense and Sensibility, Atonement and The Last Duel. On stage she’s embodied everyone from Prospero to Elizabeth I. Her failures include failing to master the piano or music theory, failing to get roles that she auditioned for, and finally failing to cook. I absolutely loved talking to this unbelievably smart and astute woman. Enjoy! She Speaks by Harriet Walter is out now. Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Lawrence-Tickell Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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enter the promo code FAIL on the checkout page. Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that firmly believes that failing better can help us succeed better too. Before we get to my wonderful guest, just a reminder about my subscriber podcast Failing With Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and offer advice on some of your failures too. Here's a bit of Dame Harriet to pique your interest. Probably the best way to conduct yourself at the party is to ask other people about themselves and then they sort of don't notice you because they're too busy talking about themselves. That's one way of doing it. S1AIA KLAR Or they'll find you incredibly charming.

Harriet Walter Yeah, they'll love you. S1AIA KLAR Do send your failures in to get advice from one of my esteemed guests. Follow the link in the podcast notes or look out for my call outs once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Thank you so, so much. When Harriet Walter was a young woman, she was so curious about other people that she once trailed someone in the street, followed them into their house and got trapped in the cupboard under the stairs. Her insatiable interest in others is arguably what makes her one of our finest actors. She's the recipient of a clutch of awards, including an Olivier and five Emmys, as well

as a Damehood. Determined to act from a young age, it was perhaps in her blood, her uncle was the horror star Christopher Lee, she turned down a place at Oxford in favour of drama school. She began her career at the Royal Shakespeare Company. On stage, she has embodied everyone from Prospero to Elizabeth I. On screen, she has acted in films including Sense and Sensibility, Atonement and The Last Jewel. And most of the Anglo-American Emmy-worthy TV sensations of the past decade have included a stellar turn from her. You've probably seen Dame Harriet in Killing Eve, or Ted Lasso, or The Crown, or

as the emotionally dysfunctional matriarch Lady Caroline in succession. She is also an author, and in her latest book, She Speaks, Dame Harriet cleverly imagines what Shakespeare's female characters might have said had they been given half the chance. In Dame Harriet's hands, Ophelia does not actually drown but escapes to a nunnery. And Lady Macbeth rhymes dagger with nagger. Now in her seventies, Dame Harriet says, I wish I'd had when young, the fuck it all confidence I have now. The paradox is that you get more confident at the point where the parts have run out. Dame Harriet, not in your case.

Well, I'm still crossing my fingers. It can all peter out anytime soon. But welcome to How to Fail, first of all. Thank you. What a wonderful introduction. I didn't know I'd done so much. I love that story about you ending up on the stairs. This guy was loading his car. They were going away the weekend. I snuck into the house and then sort of had to hide under the stairs. And it was a totally useless exercise because of course, because they were loading the car, they were going away. So I wasn't going to be able to eavesdrop on a conversation. I think, you know, I'd intended

to sit there and listen to a dining room conversation or something. But of course, they were going out. So, you know, I sat there and then I thought, my God, they're going away. They'll lock the door and I'll be here for life. So I had to find a way of sneaking out again, which I managed, you know. But it was, I sort of thought about it three minutes afterwards and collapsed in giggles at what I'd just done and how useless it was. But you're right, it was to do with being curious about other people. I had this combination of nosiness and curiosity about what other people were like and what

made them tick, alongside such ridiculous shyness that I could never have asked anybody what makes them tick. So the only way I could sort of find out about other people was by getting into their skin and you know imagining I was them, which is very inadequate because you really only ever interpret people through your own filter. You don't really find out what they're really like and that's the frustration of acting. I can try and figure out what it was like to be Lady Macbeth but ultimately it'll be Harriet Walters Lady Macbeth. Anyway. Well, that is a seamless link into what drove you to write She Speaks, this desire to give voice to the things that have been silent or are incapable of being communicated in

some way. And I mean, you cite this extraordinary fact that when Shakespeare's characters are put in order of the number of lines they're given, only 15 women's parts fall into the top 100. And Lady Macbeth comes in at 138. I know, I know. But she has huge impact. And people project onto her and have done for centuries. You know, people talk about someone being the Lady Macbeth, the power behind the throne, the evil women that make men do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's almost impossible to dent that kind of story that people have written. That was partly what I set out to do. I thought, gosh, now I can act all these parts. I can express

myself through all these other people. I can, gosh, now I can act all these parts. I can express myself through all these other people. I can find out what these other people are like. The job of acting is that you do spend an awful lot of time preparing, thinking, imagining, writing notes about them, analyzing them, answering questions in interviews about them. You've worked out this elaborate backstory and this elaborate psychological pathway and yet nine times out of ten, you don't have the stage space or the screen space to express it. Out of habit, one has been building up these pictures inside oneself that haven't really had a proper outlet. Without without my realising it, that's what fuelled this book,

was really just sort of all the years spent thinking about people that I hadn't actually had the time to express them or the stage space to express them. LF Which of Shakespeare's women did you find most frustrating in that respect to perform? MS I suppose Lady Macbeth is one that, you know, I feel a through line and I've worked out a through line. And no matter how much, it's not that I apologize for her, but I explain her inside myself and still people project the same old thing onto her.

And that is very frustrating. When you say that you imagine how these women might speak, what you fail to say is that you do so in verse. It's actually so extraordinary and such a talent. And we were chatting before we started recording about how a lot of that came quite naturally because you're so accustomed to Shakespearean rhythms. It's quite a strange thing because I suppose so many lines come into your head. I'm not very good at remembering lines. I'm rather awful about it. I mean, I'm fine when I have to do the job, but I forget them and scrub the tape as soon as I've done it. Whereas I know people who can quote huge chunks of Shakespeare and I can't really. But I know

that the rhythm of a thought or something that is very moving, it's almost like a piece of music that's a phrase and that it sort of stays in your skin, it stays in your mind like a piece of music. So my subconscious was always throwing up these phrases that were in Shakespearean rhythm because that's how I had thought and spoken those characters. I didn't set out to say, I'm going to write verses. It sort of came that way. Now, I don't want to sound mystifying, but it basically came from the fact that I'd thought in those rhythms and felt in those rhythms as those characters and therefore that's how they express themselves to me. Do you have bad dreams where

you forget your lines on stage? Yes. Because I do and I'm not an actress. I can't imagine how much more terrifying that is if you do act. Yeah, it's more that you know you've got to go on in an hour you do act. Yeah. It's more that you know you've got to go on in an hour in some play you did 12, 13 years ago and you can't remember it and you know you can't remember it. And you're not given any time to practice. All you need is to look at the book and go over it in a quiet room. But what happens is you can't find the book, nobody's giving you any peace. And all the time you're going, I know I've got to go on in an hour in this play that I haven't had time to look at. So it's more that really.

It's something getting in the way. Yeah. And if you want to be Freudian about it, there is that sort of people pleasing aspect that, you know, if somebody comes up, you know, not asserting myself and saying I need a room with the book, please leave me alone. And I never do that in the dream. I just get drifted along into these other situations where I'm sort of smiling and yakking and being sociable when I actually should be sitting in a room on my own studying. And that is the story of my life. That's very interesting because I read somewhere that I think it was your grandfather who said,

well, Harriet's mad to want to act. Even though your uncle obviously made a great success. Yes, they were on different sides of the family. And so that was significant, I think. I think my father's father thought that my mother's family was sort of histrionic Italians. I mean, we did have Italian blood and we did have a line of other performers in the family. I think he regarded them as unreliably foreign. One of my regrets is that I didn't get to know. Now, we have partly, because it's the profession I'm in, but partly it's the way things are now. There's much less of a barrier between old and young, and you can have very good friendships with people who would be

your grandchild. I was born into a time when there were rigid structures about age, and I would never have asked my grandfather anything personal or revealed anything personal about myself. So he knew me very little. He hardly knew me. But he did know my school reports and I'd sort of been quite academic and he thought I should do something academic. And that by its nature, the acting profession was totally unacademic. And what I've lived to find is that the two sides of me can come together. More and more, my brain has been researching, analysing, doing whatever I'd have done at university in order to do my job well.

Before we get onto your failures, I want to ask you about intimidating women because you are so profoundly brilliant at playing intimidating women on screen. Yet you said earlier that you had this crippling shyness and someone like Caroline in Succession who has that emotional cauterization and yet you're able emotional cauterization and yet you're able to, because of your acting and the writing, see through to some sort of vulnerable core of her. I imagine it's a fascinating process to play, but tell me why those sorts of women appeal to you? MS. It's funny, I don't think, it's not that I proactively go out looking for those parts, it's that they come my way because like it or not in the acting profession, you are cast according to how you appear. And by fault of biology, nature, whatever, I look probably much more intimidating than I am. And therefore, people think, oh, she can play that.

And I can because I would say not because I am like that, but because I've observed people like that, if you see what I mean. I've got this feeling that this sort of thing I've had since a child of looking across the tube train and going, I wonder what they're thinking. I wonder what their day is like. If that person then catches your eye and you sort of feel, gosh, I've been looking into your soul and I shouldn't have been doing that, you feel this sort of terror on the receiving end. I think there were teachers at school or friends of my mother or people that came into my sphere who behaved like Lady Caroline to me and I was intimidated by them. So I observed,

so sort of like cat and mouse, the mouse gets very familiar with how the cat behaves. So it's not so much that I'm frightening as that I know what it's like to be frightened and what it is that frightens me about those people. And I became very good at reproducing that. And then having to find out what, because that's what I like to do, getting inside that person and seeing why are they like that. And in every case, it's a different story. And that's what I get slightly frustrated that they get lumped together when actually they're all very different. But they're lumped together because they all look like me. And what can I do about that except change my wig, and change my accent slightly or change, you know, I hope change my demeanor. But some people just

lump them together, which is the frustration is you're trying to break stereotypes. And some people resolutely maintain their hold on those stereotypes. Before I get into the meat of this interview, which is the failures, please indulge me and talk to me about succession if you're not sick of it. Did you know when you were acting in succession that it was going to be what it was going to be? Did you feel that you were in the presence of something special? I suppose I did. I mean, I didn't know it would be that special because to get your head above the parapet when there's so much out there now, so many reams of stuff out there, to

get any show up above that parapet is extraordinary. I don't even think that the writers involved have full understanding of why that of all shows should have risen above so many others. But I saw the pilot. I had that advantage. They sent me the pilot. They'd shot one episode and they said, do you want to be part of this? Well, forget it. Of course I did. It was already sharp, witty, extraordinarily well acted, just a sphere of life that I had no idea about. But at the same time, as it grew, you became more involved in the people and you started to actually find you were pitying some of them or rooting for some of them. That is something to do with its power. Suddenly being parachuted into this family that was ready-made and I was part of what

had made them the way they were, was rather, but at the same time, you know, exhilarating. It was exciting. And although I knew I was surrounded by great actors, with a brilliant script, I thought it would be good, but I didn't know it would be sort of above good. Yes. As a viewer, who's your favorite Roy? Roman, I still think of as my baby. Although in fact, I got that wrong. I think Shiv is the youngest. So I should know, shouldn't I? But it's rather characteristic of Caroline that she doesn't even know which is the child she had last. But I think of him as my baby because you can't really mother, which is the child she had last. But I think of him as my baby because you can't really mother Shiv. She's very hard

to mother. And just physically, she's so unlike me that I imagine she's very much her daddy's girl. And Kendall is so messed up. I love Kendall. I love Kendall, but as a mother, I always think he's going to accuse me of being a terrible mother. He's the one who's sort of, he's been to, there was a tiny bit that was cut that would have been very useful to me in season one, where he says, you know, I've been seeing someone a therapist and I want you to know that I forgive you. And in an improv, which Jesse said he wanted to keep in, I said, have you

forgiven your father? And I thought, why should it always be the mother who gets the blame? And also in the scene that a lot of people quote where I say, let's talk about it over eggs tomorrow morning at breakfast, and then I'm not there, to say in her defense, she thinks he's going to give her another great whole harangue about what a dreadful mother she is. She doesn't know he's just in a terrible tis because he's caused the death of a young man by drowning. She doesn't know that. So she's not being insensitive as in, I know you need to talk about that and I'm walking out on you. She thinks she's going to be given a whole sort of mother what you did to me when I was a child and she can't be bothered to go through all that again.

Let's get on to your failures. So your first failure, and I share it, is your failure to master the piano or music theory. When did you attempt to try? As a school kid, I did piano lessons when I was really young. And I'm going to sound pretentious here, but I have a deep, deep love of classical music, of complicated music. It can be modern, but complicated. I love what it does to the brain to have to follow several strands of music that are emotional and intellectual. My first impulse as a child was to dance to music. That was my first sort of look at me, look at me thing. So I got very familiar with Chopin's etude and this, that and the other. Then I'm

going into a class and I'm going da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, bing, bonk, you know. And I can't, and the distance between what I've heard and what I'm playing is just giant. And nobody really understands that, Harriet, if you practice that every day, one day you might be able to do that. And I couldn't bear the difference between what I heard and what I was doing. And so my big regret is that I'm blaming other people, that nobody actually said, this is what you do, you practice so that your fingers learn how to do it. It's not just in your head. And I think it was

partly to do with a sort of story of my school life was that there were lots of things that came very easily to me that I didn't have to work hard at. And then when I was 20 onwards, I've been trying to catch up. Do you think you had an innate resistance as a child to doing things that you weren't good at? Yes, I think I did have that. There were enough things that I was good at that I sort of sailed through exams. Well, you did your A levels two years early.

I know, ridiculous. I mean, that is ridiculous, but very impressive. Well, no, it's partly because I was born in September. So I was, you know, you were either in a form where you were the oldest or you were the youngest and I was usually the youngest. And they got us through our A-levels school sort of 17, but therefore I was 16. And you know, then what was I going to do for a couple of years? Because I was at boarding school, I couldn't wait to leave and get out there and join the swinging 60s rather late in the

day. That was really all I was interested in. I'm very fascinated by your family. Your mother, I believe, did something top secret with the Admiralty during the war. Yes. I mean, she was junior, but she was working on the ultra secret. The Enigma machine had cracked the German codes and we were trying to pretend we didn't know them. If you sunk a U-boat, you had to pretend there was a plane flying over at the time that spotted it.

You couldn't say, we knew that U-boat was there because we've tapped into your codes. So it was a very complicated operation, which she was a minion in, I'm sure. And she worked in that building that's all disguised by Ivy next to the Admiralty Arch, which was known as the bunker or the citadel. I can't remember anyway. I wish I could have talked to her more about it. But there was such, not only were my parents of that generation and that ilk that didn't talk about themselves, but they'd gone through a war where you never talked about what you were doing. So that culture of secrecy and untouchableness and you don't probe, you don't ask questions, it was very frustrating now

when I look back and say, God, I wish I'd asked them. I wish I'd known more what they were doing. But she was vaguely connected to Ian Fleming and Peter Fleming, who was Celia Johnson's husband and Ian Fleming's brother was high up in that department of Admiralty. Celia Johnson, the actor? Yes. And Ian Fleming was connected to my mother by steps. I mean, my mother's stepfather was Ian Fleming's mother's brother. Got it. Okay.

So they were cousins by step cousins. And I think that's how indirectly she got that job. And she was just a sort of secretary shoving things around on a board, you know. But I then much later, I did a TV play written by Ian McEwan called The Imitation Game, long before the film. And it was about a woman working as a minion interpreting the coding. It was written by Ian McKeown. In his screenplay, she discusses it with a friend and then gets caught marshalled. Of course, I asked my mother, I said, was this what you were doing? She said, you would never, ever, ever have talked to your best friend about it.

Numero uno, that is unbelievable. It wouldn't have happened. And of course, in fiction, you have to sort of go with things that didn't happen. Honestly, for almost a year now, I want to say I've really been taking my health and wellness journey seriously. You guys have heard me talk about it a ton on here and on my Instagram. And I have to say, I've seriously never been as consistent with my workouts. And every day I've been making it a point to prioritize my protein intake. There are so many ways for us to hit those daily protein goals.

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of your parents splitting up, which they did when you were quite young. Yeah, I was 12 going on 13 or 13 going on 14, that sort of age. I wondered if it was ever spoken of. You did not ask. And I remember sort of saying to my mother, why did daddy leave? And she said, darling, you better ask him. So I wrote him a letter saying, why did you leave? I think actually I did find it amongst his things. Years later, he'd actually kept it. And he wrote back to me a very sweet, but totally unenlightening letter. And I almost think he doesn't know why he'd done it.

That generation had almost a sort of taboo about self-analysis, looking into themselves, asking questions about the very opposite of how we are now. They would hate this podcast. Absolutely. They would hate this podcast. They would spin in their graves. He came back with a few platitudes about, I still love her, but we can't live together

kind of thing. I wondered whether it was a midlife crisis on his part. He was 53 or something when he left. So that sort of rings a bell and he always had lots of girlfriends. Not during the marriage, I don't think, but before and after. Do you think that part of your desire to get under the skin of other people is because you want to get to a truth that you weren't allowed to ask about. Exactly that. As I said, it's sort of a mixture of curiosity and shyness. So you leave school,

you have this place at Oxford which you turn down and then you apply for drama college and you get rejected five times, which must be another sanitary experience in not having been good at something. I mean, that you turn out being fantastic at, but that must have been difficult. That does fascinate me. I got into Oxford to do modern languages and I just passed my 17th birthday. I mean, and I had to wait to go. It wasn't my desire to go to university. It had come down from my grandfather, who was actually, I now see, I learn now, a champion

of women's education. My father was not pushy, was very laid back and said, oh well, if you don't want to go, never mind. And somehow I was able to say no to something I knew I could do and say, I've got to pursue this thing that after the decision about not going to Oxford, I then tried to get into drama school. So it wasn't like I got into drama school already and therefore turned down Oxford. And I found a diary, this sounds so self-indulgent, but I wrote a diary the year that I was trying out for these drama schools. And I found this entry saying, four names were called out, mine was not among them, went home with the other losers,

but I know I'll get there in the end. And I don't remember thinking it and I cannot think where I got that thought from. Gosh. How influenced were you by your uncle, Christopher Lee? Sort of not very. I mean, he was in this very glamorous film world and I was going into fringe theater. Our lives didn't cross over until much later. Although I say that, but it was films that I first wanted to do because I saw Hayley Mills on screen and she was a little bit older than me, but the same sort of person. The camera was focusing on someone of my age and saying they were important, they were effective, they could make things happen,

they could have adventures. That was very influential, I think, in where I wanted to be. There was that feeling of the duality, which I still still have of feeling very unimportant and wanting attention and wanting to count and wanting to matter because I was the youngest in my family and it was a family that already didn't say everything you do is important. I was actually small. I wasn't tall like I am now. So that feeling of somebody small and supposedly unimportant was on the big screen in close-up. I think that was probably quite selfishly, that's what I wanted. I wanted attention. You were right.

Your diary self was completely correct. You got into Lambda. You became the phenomenal actor that we all know and love. And your second failure is your failure to get roles that you audition for. You say too many to enumerate. Who knows where any different path might have led, but this is the norm for any actor. Absolutely. But getting used to that kind of rejection must be challenging. It's almost like a tightrope walker goes through the fear of falling to their death. It comes with the job. You hear people say, I wanted to be an actor, but I couldn't face the rejection.

And you go, oh, there are some people who really can't deal with that. Well, you sort of have to. Is there one failed audition that particularly haunts you? Helena Bonham Carter knew me. She'd seen me on stage quite a lot and we'd met through mutual friends. She was about to do Howard's End and she said, you must audition to play my sister. You'd be very good. My agent wasn't very powerful at the time. The answer came back, they're not seeing anybody over 30, which I was, although I looked much younger. The part went, Emma Thompson and her life

took off. Also, I'd worked with Anthony Hopkins and he said she's all right to the director. Everything was all set to pass. I never even got to meet the director, James Ivory, because I was too old. That's the one thing where I go, would my life have been different? Or we all know Emma Thompson's a genius and she went the way of all geniuses and perhaps I'd have just been an okay actor. You never know. You would be an fantastic role. Have you ever played an E.M. Forster? No, no, I haven't.

Dare I say it, this sounds a bit generalized, but quite a lot of the great writing for women has come from homosexual men who were not able to write about what they really felt. Like Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, Tennessee Williams, all those writers write sympathetic women from the inside, almost as though they know what it's like because they're actually projecting themselves into the female role and the enforced falls into that category. You're so right that repression, the inability to be who you feel you are or to be seen as you really are, particularly when those writers were writing, does dovetail so exactly with the experience of being a certain kind of woman.

Yes, it really does work. And then when we got the liberation of, you know, post-war, you know, John Osborne, Kitchen Sink, Arnold Wesker, they were very male. And the woman was doing the ironing and laughing at the jokes of the man. Do you know? It wasn't an advance in lots of ways. Thank goodness we live when we live now. Oh, God. And women are writing. Yes. That was the big revelation when a lot of women playwrights came along, women screenwriters.

Do you think you've ever got a part that you shouldn't have gotten, that you feel you were miscast in? Well, quite honestly, I don't usually accept a role if I know how I'm going to do it. Usually, I'm taking on a role that I think someone else would do better. But what would be more interesting would be for me to go on the journey to try and do it. How interesting. So if you do know how you would do a role, you tend to say no. Yeah, I mean, if it's obvious and there's not much to explore, why do it? Or if I've done it before, and you do get lots of offers that are basically wanting you to repeat something you've done before, but usually aren't quite so good.

What was it like playing Elizabeth I on stage in Mary Stewart? That was amazing. I read lots and lots of books about her, but of course it's Schiller's Elizabeth I. It's not the real Elizabeth I, if you see what I mean. What I found fascinating about playing somebody who actually existed was that I suddenly got this moment when I was reading about her where I thought there was once this one person who inhabited this one body and had this voice and this destiny, and she did actually live and she was. Because that individual gets replicated in images, in stories, in different historical takes on her, you forget that there was just one

person who was five foot something, who had red hair and tinkly voice and piercing eyes and had lived that experience. When you think of that one individual that you wish you could stand in front of and hear from historical reality. You realize that everything that you read and everything you've heard comes from other people and that you've got to synthesize all that and choose what aspects are relevant to tell the story of this play and that is to narrow it down. But it's just your imagination wants to hear her voice and wants to talk to her and you can't. You can only see her or read about her through other people's opinions, which vary hugely with Elizabeth I, obviously.

And I want to come back to Elizabeth I, but you're about to play Margaret Thatcher. Yeah, I have actually played her. Right. And that must be a slightly different, I mean, similar but slightly different feeling because there's so much footage of her and we all grew up experiencing what it was like living under her rule. What was the balance like for you there? That was different, you're right. Partly because I know people can just go to YouTube and see how different I look. That's one of the things I was worried about because I do look very different from her. And we had a terrific team giving me blue eyes and blonde wig and big tits and whatever. We had all that going

for us and people did a brilliant job. But within that, I've always felt sort of the nearer you get to somebody externally, actually the more it throws into relief how distant you are internally. And again, I thought, here's this woman who really was a person, for all the images of her and reports of her. There was this one woman who closed the front door and went to bed at night with her curlers in talking to Dennis, having a hot mug of cocoa, whatever it was, and who is that woman and what did she think as she went to bed and what did she think when she got up in the morning. And you'll never get close to that. So it's a sort of vicious circle where the nearer you get, the further you get. But I was again, rather like Elizabeth the first

case, I was honing down to what was necessary to tell the story of that play. It was not a biopic. It wasn't attempting to embrace everything there was about her. So that got me slightly off the hook. So this is, it's a James Graham TV screenplay, isn't it? And it's called Margaret and Brian? It was called Brian and Margaret, now it's called Brian and Maggie. Okay. And it's about a TV interview that she did with an interviewer called Brian Walden. Did you end up liking Margaret Thatcher more having played her? I can't say I liked her in the sense that if I imagine sitting next to her at a dinner party or something, we would have zero to talk about, I think. But

I did start to understand her more. What a lot of people have said and I've discarded because I just didn't want to hear anything I wanted. I so disagreed with her politics that I found it very difficult to think of her as a sympathetic human being. Then I had to for this job. I think what I did really embrace was this wall of white public school men that she walked into every day with gray suits on and suits and ties who were going to their clubs that night and who might be saying awful things about her behind her back or not. And how she just had such sureness about herself and not so much about herself but about her ideas. She was

so sure that her ideas were right and that the world should go in her direction, that she was willing to go up against that. I just thought of her as a woman amongst men and that gave me great empathy and admiration that I had heard other people say. But I'd gone, yes, she's a woman, but she's not really a woman. She doesn't represent us. She's not like a woman. She didn't help women. She didn't help women to come up the ladder. She didn't really like women. That was my image of her. Then I watched various bits of YouTube that showed a little bit of a different softer side of her, but basically, she was an economist and a practical woman. She was not, as far as I know, interested in the arts very much.

She would have thought of me as a wet. , She would also have hated this podcast probably. , She would have hated this podcast. Before we get onto your third failure, that phrase, a woman amongst men, brings me back to Elizabeth the First and the fact that you met your husband whilst playing her.

Yeah, he was one of the grey suited men. And I wonder if I could ask you, he is your second husband and I want to approach this with sensitivity and you don't have to talk about it. But I know you lost your first husband to cancer. And I wonder if I could ask you about that, about how you feel that terrible loss has informed you and what you think about love. Well, first of all, I have to just correct that we weren't officially married, but I'm glad to call him my husband because we were going to get married. It's always so difficult to explain to anyone that you've lost your partner or you've lost your lover. It doesn't sound as cataclysmic as losing your husband, but it was losing my time. I mean, I think about him nearly every day, and my

current husband is super sympathetic and good about that. I don't have to apologize for that. I don't make comparisons, and I love my husband and I love my life with him now and he's very secure of that. But I suppose there's a part of me that doesn't want the first one to vanish because basically all we are is hot air. When we stop breathing that hot air, what are we? That's what I find confrontational about everything. The performances I've done on stage have vanished into air, into thin air, as Prospero says.

Our lives have vanished into air when we die. I just got this fight to keep him alive in my head because he wasn't super famous. He was very private. He didn't have millions of friends. It's not like, you know, Maggie Smith dies and everybody has a story about her or a treasured memory about her. I have to keep him alive somewhere. So I sort of resolutely think about him. Do you know what I mean?

Beautiful. But he's not a threat to my current marriage at all. But I do think, God, I'm now older than he was when he died. His name was Peter. Peter Blythe. And he was a lovely actor and a lovely man, but he had a family. It wasn't easy to get married because he was still officially married, etc., etc. But I think his daughter and his grandchildren considered me, you know, to be married. And so he was my family. I'm so sorry, Harriet. Well, yeah, it was dreadful when it happened. And I think I got through it through friends. And that's proved me. And when I got married now to my current husband,

Guy, who I've been with longer than anyone now, almost twice as long as I was with Peter, I still cultivate and keep up my friendships in a way that he doesn't really understand. Well, he does understand, but they helped me get through that time when I didn't have anyone. And so I'm not going to dump them now. I don't want to dump them. I love the variety of friends I've got. But in many ways, I could live just between our front door and the walls, looking inwards at our very happy relationship. This is going to sound like a strange question, but it's rare. It shouldn't be rare, but it's rare that I get the chance to ask it. I'm in my mid-forties now and don't have children

tried, failed. One of the things that scares me, if I'm being really honest, is the idea of being older and not having anyone to look after me or to be with and that fear of loneliness, the sort of existential loneliness. Did you ever experience that fear and is it okay? I absolutely have experienced that fear and I call it the L word, loneliness is the thing we don't speak about enough. Absolutely woven into the experience of being old is the fear of being alone. Trying to develop that muscle of self-reliance and self-love and self-caring because you think I'm going to need that. I know people who would answer me saying, well, I can't rely on my children to look after me. I know children who have abandoned their parents and not looked after them. I know people who would rather be looked after by

people whose job it is to look after old people than put their loved ones through that task. There are various ways of looking at it. No, I don't have children. Maybe I wouldn't want them to feel obliged to look after me. Maybe that's not why we should have children. I think loneliness is something that it's experienced at every stage of life. I think there are lots of very lonely young people. I also know there are some very lonely old people. It's very hard to – sometimes you just want to go up to an old lady in the street and talk to them. I'm not brave enough to do that or to give someone a hug without them being offended or say,

you know, call me anytime to someone, which I do say that. I say call me anytime, midnight or whatever, you know, if you need to talk to my friends. But physical loneliness is a terrible thing. I think as people get older, just not being hugged, not being touched, I think those are things I'm very frightened of. What can you do to prepare yourself for that? Very little. Grab hold of the wonder of having it now, having companionship now, and try and cultivate some kind of self-reliance, which is harder to, you know, if you're physically disabled in any way, that's much harder, obviously. But emotionally, try and be your own best friend, your own companion. Talk to yourself. Don't we all

talk to ourselves when we're alone? That's my best friend. Me and I are very good friends. Somehow to cultivate that without feeling this awful sense that I think one of the reasons we don't talk about the L word is because there is a sense of failure. There is a sense of I'm on my own, and I'm lonely because nobody likes me, and nobody wants to be with me, and I've done something wrong. I'm uncool, and I'm needy, and someone's going to see through to that neediness and be repelled by it. So I'm going to put up on this front that I'm absolutely fine when I'm not. by it. So I'm going to put up on this front that I'm absolutely fine when I'm not. And actually, we're all moving around pretending to be absolutely fine when we're not. So let's

drop the mask occasionally, you know? Yes. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With audio erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what.

Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Clear your schedule for U-time with a handcrafted espresso beverage from Starbucks. Savor the new small and mighty Cortado, cozy up with the familiar flavors of pistachio, or shake up your mood with an iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso. Whatever you choose, your espresso will be handcrafted with care at Starbucks. Your final failure, because I'm getting so carried away just talking to you, is that we have one more

failure to go through, which is your failure to cook. Yep. Miriam Margoly has had the same one. Really? Yes. Really? Yeah. I've got this mad relationship with food, which lots of people have.

And I got mildly anorexic for six years when I was in my twenties. And I've had friends whose daughters are going through it and they want me to help. I cannot really get to the root of that. But one of the remnants is that I don't like being in a kitchen around food. I don't like preparing it. I'll come to the kitchen table and eat and I'll do the washing up, but I don't like being around a lot of food. It's a weird thing. I don't like food shopping. I know it comes from that fear of overeating or whatever it is, losing control. There's a bowl of crisps, I'll finish it and then I'll fill it up again and finish that, which I used to suffer from.

And now I just will go and do something else. And then I won't have that temptation. LARLEY Right. That makes such psychological sense. ANNA Something like that. LARLEY Because, thank you for talking about your anorexia or how you experienced it. Because when I read about it, you said exactly what you just said, I can't explain it. I can't help someone going through it. All I know is you went to a GP and the sort of response was, well, eat something. Go eat, have a good meal.

Which is so, I can't imagine how difficult that was to hear. And so dismissive. But you said what got you through in the end was work. So again, it's a sort of distraction technique. Yes. Yes. And I think probably there is nothing wrong with distraction techniques. I believe in distraction. I really do. I think a lot of life is about distraction and that's fine. And I wish I could find the quote, but in Arthur Miller's Time Bends, there is something about words to that effect, that that's what we do and that's what we're allowed to do. A lot of creativity comes out of it and a lot of survival techniques come out of it. We can't be sitting there in the center core

of our distress all the time. We'd be very unproductive. I intuit that the anorexia is about control, about emotional control, about being able to control your needs, which are expressed through your need to eat, but actually your need for love, your need for attention, your need for everything else. And to be distracted from that need like a baby. You see babies wailing and then you sort of go, look at that bird over there and they go, oh, and they stop crying. It's distractions fine. LARISA Do you feel that that need for attention that you started off this interview explaining that you experienced as a child, do you feel that it has been sated now or do you still want it?

KS That's a very good question because it's been sated ages ago. That sort of reason for doing the job has sort of moved, really shifted. And I feel that that was my driving force to acting. And then sort of melted away and was taken over by something else, which is to do with it away and was taken over by something else, which is to do with expressing stories to the world, working in an ensemble, doing my job well, traveling, communicating with people. And now that I'm actually getting a very belated, if you like, high profile, I'm going, oh, go away, I don't want the attention. It's embarrassing. I love it so much, but I don't want it. I shouldn't want it. It's far too late in life to be getting this. It's not real. So there's this strange thing where I'm going, I wish you'd given me all this

attention when I was 40. And yet, it's very nice to get it at all. Of course you like it, but it's kind of embarrassing as well. It's like some hot spotlight being on you and you're squirming that the hot spotlight that you longed for when you were 17 has now arrived. Well, Dame Harriet Walter, I'm so grateful that that spotlight is on you, no matter what discomfort it causes you. May you long carry on trapping yourself in people's downstairs cupboards. Thank you.

And thank you so much for coming on How To Fail. and trapping yourself in people's downstairs cupboards. Thank you. And thank you so much for coming on How To Fail. That was great. Thank you. You're going to stay and answer listener failures on Failing With Friends. I can't wait to hear what you have to say. We heartily recommend you follow us to get new episodes as they land on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do tell all of your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.