On the Couch- Natascha McElhone

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Over the past year and a half, Natascha McElhone has tried to avoid being pigeonholed as a widow in the depths of despair. It’s a reasonable position, as the bereaved are routinely misunderstood.

For starters, they’re expected to be inarticulate in their grief. But when her husband of 10 years, the cosmetic surgeon Martin Kelly, died of a heart condition after collapsing at their London home on 20 May 2008, McElhone, who was filming Californication in LA at the time, flew back to the UK and penned a deeply moving tribute that appeared in a newspaper days later.

‘It was a timeless, surreal place that I was in,’ McElhone says now. ‘I’d just come off the plane and was five months pregnant with Rex (the couple’s third son). But I felt it was so important at that moment in time, when something is very raw and real. I wanted Martin to be known, and for him to leave an indelible mark.’ The bereaved are also expected to be inconsolable. But McElhone’s eulogy celebrated a life lived at ‘breakneck speed’ rather than mourning a life cut short. She expressed humble gratitude for the years they’d enjoyed together. Most affecting was her honesty. ‘He was too good to be true,’ she wrote. ‘There was never a day when we didn’t say, “It’s ridiculous how lucky we are. Look how blessed our life is.” I frequently felt undeserving of this; he, however, never.’

‘In a funny way, grief is like a state of grace,’ she says. ‘You become terribly honest in a way you’ve been afraid to be before.’ Of course, there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. And in her most private moments, McElhone may well be inarticulate and inconsolable. Grief is traumatising. Mind and body go into shock.

And yet the 37-year-old actress I meet at a London hotel couldn’t be less insular or closed off. Serenely beautiful in the flesh, she’s dressed casually in blue jeans and a frayed tweed jacket, her shoes kicked off so she can sit cross-legged on the couch while checking her laptop for emails. It’s a telling moment, a few seconds snatched between commitments and put to good use. One gets the feeling McElhone doesn’t have a surplus of idle hours, what with a successful career and three young boys – Theo, nine, Otis, six and Rex, one – to look after.

I wonder what her sons have inherited from their father. ‘Their brains are very much like Martin’s, thank God,’ she says, her eyes widening, ‘because he had an extraordinary brain. Theo has a fascination for science and how things work. He’s a little chess fiend, and Martin was an avid chess player. Otis has a lust for life, a contagious energy that was very much Martin’s. And the baby,’ she laughs, getting up to grab a photograph, ‘I think he looks like Martin, but I’m probably projecting wildly.’

She hands me a photo of Theo and Rex, their heads almost touching. It’s an intimate moment elegantly captured. ‘Theo loves Rex, he’s obsessed with him, as is Otis. He won’t get out of the car in the morning until he’s given Rex a kiss.’ She looks at the picture. ‘I mean, they whack one another as well.’

Raising sons

Hailing from a family of men – her siblings and cousins are all male – McElhone has witnessed her fair share of boisterous behaviour. Consequently, she relishes being the mother of three sons. ‘What I can give my boys is a sense that I’m not a mystery to them.’ The problem, as she sees it, is when your parent of the opposite sex is inaccessible, ‘and that carries on through your life’.

While she’s proud her boys haven’t been socialised along rigid gender lines – they’ve no problem wearing pink, she says – her belief in the power of social conditioning took a battering when she became a parent. ‘I used to have conversations with my stepfather (the journalist Roy Greenslade) about Marx and how we’re all capable of being anything if we condition ourselves. I thought, I’m a terrific product of that. He’s my stepfather, he raised me, and it’s him I identify with. I feel far less connected to my biological father. I believed in nurture over nature every single time.

‘And then, when I had my first son, I just couldn’t understand the obsession with wheels.’ She laughs. ‘I mean, what were little boys obsessed with before the wheel was invented? Horses’ hooves, probably; something to do with speed, velocity, motion. It’s a very male dynamic. And there it is, right from the word go.’ Even her one-year-old will interact with a toy car careering across the floor. ‘But you do the same to my god-daughter, it goes right past her. She observes the movement but doesn’t have to become part of it. Little girls sit for hours, drawing and talking, whereas boys bounce off the walls.’

She talks of ‘doing everything’ and being ‘a sole provider’ and wonders if that will encourage her boys to see women in a way they otherwise might not. ‘I’m happy their experiences of women so far are that they’re active and competent. I’m not saying I am,’ she adds hurriedly, blushing slightly, ‘but the women I surround them with are all people like that.’

How is she nurturing their inquisitive minds? What do they talk about? ‘Everything,’ she says. ‘I’m not the focus. I’m the frame and they’re the picture and that’s how it should be. The movie we’re watching is their life. Kids take parents for granted and I want them to take me for granted. I’m happy to be their wallpaper for as long as they want.’

By ‘wallpaper’ McElhone means a constant presence in their lives. She is aware that their loss is one for which there can be no replacement – ‘their world for now has been halved, I cannot become him,’ she wrote in her tribute – but it must be tempting to try. Her work output certainly hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s gone up a notch.

Challenging roles

As well as the third series of Californication, she has a new film, The Kid, in the pipeline. In the former, McElhone plays Karen, the on/off partner of Hank, David Duchovny’s philandering writer. McElhone’s character is notable for the civilising effect she has on Hank. Without her forgiving nature, he would be entirely irredeemable. ‘Acting with David is like playing great tennis with a Wimbledon champion, although why I’m saying that I’ve no idea, as I don’t actually play tennis,’ she laughs.

Her role in The Kid couldn’t be more different. ‘She’ll be reviled by the audience, and rightly so,’ says McElhone of her character, an abusive mother of six with an alcoholic husband. ‘She doesn’t have the resources, so she turns to violence.’ Her reason for doing the small-budget film, she says, was to show middle-class audiences ‘there but for the grace of God, that could be me’.

McElhone is energised by the questions the drama raises. She acknowledges that society is much harder on women who perpetrate violence against children than men. ‘The idea is that we nurture them at all costs, at the expense of ourselves.’ That said, she defies any parent to say they haven’t, at some point, reached their wits’ end with a child and simply wanted to ‘check out’.

‘I wonder how differently I would do it,’ she says. ‘If I had my character’s background (of mental illness), no support, a drunk husband, and six kids who didn’t love me very much. The answer is, I just don’t know.’

Finding happiness

McElhone is also the face of Unicef and Pampers’ Give The Gift Of Life campaign, which provides tetanus vaccines for mothers and newborn babies in developing countries.

She recently spent a week in Angola with Unicef workers, and rails against the notion that Africa is a pit of despair. ‘The kids we saw in Africa were loved.’ She is wary of the word ‘charity’: ‘that patronising notion that I’m privileged and better than you, therefore I’ll give you a little of what I have. I don’t feel that at all. My Angolan trip was a gift. It was very beneficial for me.’

The conversation returns to Kelly and the enormous hole he has left in McElhone’s life. ‘Martin is such a part of me now,’ she says, ‘and me a part of him. For example, I could never do an impersonation of him, whereas I could impersonate anyone else outside my family.’ Even Kelly’s mannerisms, as exhibited by his sons, are lost on her. ‘It’s only when someone comes in from outside and says, “Oh God, he looked just like Martin when he did that”.’ That must be a strange feeling, I venture. ‘I see them every day, so it’s hard for me to be objective.’

But here’s the strangest thing of all. McElhone appears to be genuinely happy. If grief has taught her anything, it is that expectations cause the most misery. ‘In the West we’re raised to believe we should be happy all the time. And actually, if you let go of that, you’ll be more happy so much more of the time than you ever expected to be.’

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