Healing from the inside out

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The Californication star on talks about the death of her husband, her work and motherhood with her newborn

Sorry I'm late!” says Natascha McElhone, parking a pram in the corner beside me. “And I had to bring him because the childcare didn't work out.” The day we meet, McElhone, the British actress and star of Californication and The Truman Show, is on the front pages of some of the papers at her premiere of her new movie The Secret of Moonacre, a magical adventure story. It was her first public appearance since her husband died suddenly last May when she was pregnant, and she went with her three kids - including Rex, her newborn baby son.

“Yes, we all went,” she says. "You went too, your first outing!” she says in a baby voice into the pram and pulls out a smiley-faced baby with blue eyes. He lets out a huge grin on seeing us. The only phrase for him is “jolly fellow”. Rex, now three months, is in a zebra suit with ears and gives a delighted chuckle at the sight of his new surroundings. “I tell you what was so funny, it sounds ridiculous, but he actually watched the film,” McElhone says, getting out a bottle of milk. “I thought, I'll see if he chills and likes the fast-moving pictures, and for the last 15 minutes I took him out because he got a bit grumpy, but it was very stress-free.”

“I was so sorry to hear about your husband,” I say, and she nods, and lowers her face to Rex . We met once before, 18 months ago, and she appeared thoughtful, untouched-seeming and generous, with a glow about her. We spoke about how we had gone out with the same friend, years apart, when we were teenagers. It was, it tragically turned out, ten months before her adored husband, Martin Kelly, a facial reconstruction surgeon, died suddenly, aged 43, of a heart attack. He was at their home in Fulham. She was in LA, three months pregnant with Rex. Now, her face is thinner and seems faintly bruised, though beautiful as ever. Then she was dressed in flared jeans and a bohemian silk coat. Now she is in a patchwork jacket and patterned skirt.

I ask how she has coped. “I'm OK,” she says. “I'm really OK, through necessity I think. Do you know, I'm just terribly grateful for everything I have.” So she doesn't feel miserable all the time? “No, I don't think I have any right to feel miserable all the time. I don't know why, it's just happened to me that, aside from feeling utterly grief-stricken and bereft and devastated, the chinks and shards of light that shine through are so strong and so buoyant I can't ignore them.” Thank God for that, I say. “Thank God for that,” she echoes. ‘I don't know why that is - that they're so bright that they reach me. Thus far, anyway.”

I had wondered if she would be broken, despairing or angry. She really doesn't seem to be. Firmly out of victim mode, she is still living her life after the loss of her husband. Now 38, she met Kelly at 15, growing up in Brighton, and married at 25 after graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) and being spotted, aged 24, at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre by the casting agent Celestia Fox. James Ivory put her straight into Surviving Picasso, playing Françoise Gilot to Anthony Hopkins's Picasso.

McElhone and Kelly had been planning their tenth wedding anniversary when he died intestate; she has had to work through the legalities of his estate. She doesn't seem to mind talking about him, though the dark side of it is kept to herself, only delicately alluded to - “I was so glad when I saw it was you ,” she says. “I thought I can just about cope with that,” and later mentions with a fleeting hint of horror to how “a friend told me she had 'gays and strays' for Christmas and I wondered which I was!

“Everyone's been saying, 'I don't know how you can manage on your own, with the baby', but it's because of that in a funny way, it's been manageable. You can't hole up and not get out of bed.” But don't you have to let the grief out? “Well, I think you do. I don't sleep to be honest, so I do a bit of that at night. Or wake up at 3am and stay awake: that's it. But it's fine, it's fine,” she adds hastily. “My mum stayed up last night, which was really sweet of her, but when she does that I don't sleep anyway, so I feel really guilty, poor thing, that she's getting up at 4am, but I'm not asleep, so I may as well do it myself.” How does she cope without sleep? “Well, it's amazing how long you can go without. I didn't sleep after Martin died, at all. So it's been about eight months. With, obviously, the odd reprieve - the odd night where I just completely conk out.'

Kelly was found by a friend on the doorstep of their house; McElhone was at once surrounded by a wall of support. “Real love, real friendship. And on a very practical level, as well. Girlfriends coming round with food to freeze, you know - 'the last thing you need to do is worry about cooking for your kids' or, 'we'll take the boys out for an adventure; let's keep their lives fun'.” She gives a more genuine grin. “It got a bit excessive! I've got better about not being on this treadmill of activity.”

Theo is 8 and Otis 5. “We talk about Martin all the time,” McElhone says, “and he's very much still a figure in our lives, obviously. Theo particularly will make jokes about how he used to be. 'Do you remember when he ...?' And he howls with laughter. But then afterwards, occasionally, he might go, 'Oh. I really miss him'.”

We talk about bereavement. “I don't think I could have said goodbye,” she says. “Ever. To him. God, no. That would have killed me.”

She wants, it seems, to be treated as a normal person, not as a “grief-struck widow”. She had been making the new series of Californication in LA when Kelly died; and she went back to finish it. “I wrote a note to them all one day, saying, 'I know you're all incredibly empathetic people, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you haven't come up and given me lots of hugs and said how sorry you were because it helped me so much'. I think about how I treated people who lost people. I burst into tears!” She pulls down her mouth in a quick, horrified grimace.

I ask if McElhone is greeted by awful sympathy by the public everywhere she goes. “No,” she says. “No,” looking down at her lap, and I think again that her face is thinner than it was 18 months ago, and more weary.

Weekends are non-stop; she has only just taken on a nanny. “My kids always say to me, 'Can we watch TV?' I say, 'Absolutely!' because then I can get something done. But then they say, and I wait for it, 'But can you watch with us?' My moment of freedom vanishes. So not only do I not think TV's that great and I hate sitting in front of it, but I have to with them. The one thing about watching TV with them is that you can squidge them [she demonstrates by squeezing her baby's chubby leg] and they don't complain because they're so absorbed in what they're watching you can knead their legs. When they get older they get a bit more wriggly.”

McElhone has no time to exercise, read a book or even the newspaper. “Martin used to subscribe to The New Yorker and I guess he'd just renewed his subscription before he died, so we get that every week. I think, ‘Oh, definitely, I'm going to read that', but they've got the cellophane still on.'

Ironically, the birth of the baby has been a blessing. “At first, it was a devastating idea,” she admits. 'But he's such a source of constant joy for all three of us. He's so, I dunno. Just a funny little ... Yeah, you are,” she tells him. “I think he just knows he has to switch it on because in our house there's so much competition for my attention. He has to be supersonically radiating to get noticed, don't you? He has no idea that he has no dad. I guess when he goes to school he will.” Her face falls slightly. “But I'll cross that bridge when it happens,” she finishes stoutly.

After starring in several movies - Solaris with George Clooney, The Devil's Own with Brad Pitt, The Truman Show with Jim Carrey - and playing David Duchovny's sexy ex Karen in Californication, the Five TV series, McElhone has agreed to make Heaven and Earth. The film tells the story of James Miranda Barry, a woman who posed as a man to work as a British army surgeon in the 19th century. She has just flown to Cape Town with her boys for two months to start the filming. Work has been a huge support. “Nietzsche or someone said, 'If you stare into the abyss long enough, it will stare back at you'. I really believe that activity and productivity is everything.” She is also helping to promote the Heal gel for treating scars and burns that Kelly had launched days before he died to help fund his charity, Facing The World, which flies Third World children with severe facial deformities to London for medical care.

McElhone is already planning her next project after Heaven and Earth, a film called The Kid. It seems significantly darker than anything she has done up to now. “It's a British film, based on a book, one of those awful Baby P- type stories of child abuse. I'm really hoping it will happen. I think it's important for the public to know that people in that predicament cannot and will not cope without help, whereas with help they might make it.”

She rises to her feet and clasps my hand to kiss me goodbye. “I'm so sorry; I have had to rush,” she says. Gracious as ever, she lifts Rex into his pram, puts her head down and hurries off to collect Otis from school.

My perfect weekend:

Walk in the park or walk in the hills? Walking up a mountain

Glamorous party or night in with your closest friends?
Emphatically the latter

Yoga or Pilates?
I’ve only ever done yoga. I haven’t had the time to exercise lately. I would love to. I’ll get into a rhythm again. One day . . .

Pub or wine bar?
Neither

Full English or croissant?
Pancake

Takeaway or Jamie Oliver?
Nigella

What do you most like about the weekend?
What do I like about the weekend? No lunchboxes

Theatre or film?
I couldn’t choose one over the other. The only film I’ve seen for months was The Reader

Book or DVD?
They are two sides of my world, so I love both

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