Successful and prolific actress Samantha Bond has three programmes airing over the Christmas and New Year season on BBC1 and ITV. She has loved working on all of them but her resolution is to cut back on her commitments next year to spend more time with her children, she tells Phil Penfold
Despite a whole string of major TV dramas and dozens of acclaimed theatre roles, it was playing Moneypenny in the 007 movies made Samantha Bond an international star. No wonder that she keeps getting invited to help out at dozens of charitable fundraisers.
She laughs: “The only thing is that, when I go to any of those events, I always dread the moment when they shove a microphone in my direction and ask me to speak or to introduce someone. Acting is one thing, that’s getting up in front of an audience and being someone else, which I can do quite cheerfully, it’s my job, after all. But I am no way a presenter. That’s being myself and I get terribly tongue-tied. If I don’t have somewhere to put my notes, it can turn into a disaster as I can’t see to read them if they are on a table a couple of yards away.”
She ruefully reflects that she has been trying to give up her soothing prop of a pack cigarettes for at least two years and has been finding hypnotherapy useful. “Except that the very delightful lady who does it for me is away for a fortnight and I regret that I have fallen victim to the fags again.”
She grew up in a very theatrical household. Her father is the actor Philip Bond, her sister is actress Abigail Bond and her older brother Matthew is a journalist. “There were always actors and agents and other theatricals popping around, so wanting to be an actress oneself wasn’t considered at all precocious, it was just part of joining the family firm. At first she wanted to be a ballet dancer and then, in her early teens, puppy fat hit her ambitions. She went instead to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company and began a long slog in repertory, learning her craft.
But perhaps the big break came when she was cast by Kenneth Branagh to play his Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in 1986. Bond has never looked back.
“The funny thing is that I always seem to get cast in very serious, very thoughtful roles,” she says. “Hard women, ones who are very driven. Provocative material. I hardly ever get cast in a comedy and I’d love to do more of that.”
She has three new TV projects soon to air. The Murder Room, a two-parter for BBC1 to go out at Christmas, is based on the PD James novel and is one of the author’s Inspector Dalgliesh mysteries. Headed by Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh, the impressive cast includes Bond, Jack Shepherd, Sian Phillips, Kerry Fox, Anthony Calf and Lesley Vicarage.
“It’s a real ensemble piece. My husband Alex and I sat down and watched the tapes the other evening and I have to say that he hadn’t got a clue as to whom the murderer was, not until the very last moments. It’s a thoroughly gripping, very watchable bit of drama, where all the characters have a reason for the series of murders that happen. Everyone has a past and a secret.
Bond plays Caroline Dupayne, a “very frosty old cow of a woman, who has a terrible secret”. She is a member of a very strange family who want, at all costs, to hang on to a museum founded by their father. The museum contains a room which displays exhibits of some of the nastiest murders of the last century. And then some copycat killings start.
“Why are people so fascinated by murder? I really have no idea but it’s nothing new, is it? Good old Shakespeare managed to weave a good few killings into his plays and then last century there were a whole array of writers who had tons of bestsellers with their books on the theme of murder. Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers. One wonders why so many of them were women? But PD James is one of a glorious kind, I think”.
Then there is ITV’s Donovan - in which she stars with Tom Conti - and the new six part comedy-drama series Distant Shores for the channel.
“And that is at last a piece with a bit of comedy in it,” says Bond with a huge grin. “I’m Lisa, the wife to Bill [played by Peter Davison] who is a prominent and very successful, if extremely arrogant, plastic surgeon. She persuades him to uproot and, for the sake of their staying together and their family, to move to a remote fictional island called Hildasay. When they get there, things do not run as smoothly as she had hoped. For a start, she has a bit of a fling with a very dishy and very much younger cow-hand.”
What her 12-year-old son Tom will think of that particular scene, she says, is anyone’s guess. Tom was horrified to see his mother snogging James Bond in Die Another Day!
“We shot the series up on the magnificent Northumbrian coast,” says Samantha. “We started work back in April of 2004. If you remember, we had a beautiful late spring and early summer and then it all changed. The conditions at times were unbelievably bad. Once we were hailed on with pieces of ice the size of 50 pence pieces. But it never ever stopped that bit of coast looking stunning, every moment of the day. There are times when you look at the sea and you think ‘that is just the azure blue of the Mediterranean’ and then an hour or so later you look again and you think ‘oh, no, Madame Sea has had a total change of mind’. I managed to get out to see a lot of the local sights and loved the whole experience.
“But I am extremely pleased that, if the series goes again, which we’d all like very much, it won’t be, hopefully, until the middle of 2005. Because both my children are at a very difficult age, one where you need to be there as parents. When they were younger, Alex and I arranged it that one or either of us would be doing the caring and we also had a remarkable nanny for ten years who was a godsend. But now both of them are going in to their teens and I think that that is a time that many kids find very strange and when they need support and back up very much. So filming hundreds of miles away is not an option at the moment… not for six months on end, at any rate. Alex agrees with me totally on this one, so it will be share and share about for our getting involved with anything major, work-wise.
“Sadly, that also means that I won’t be accepting any theatre work that might take me away too far from home and yes, I do really want to get back on the stage again, I really do. I think that I’m now a bit too long in the tooth for Hedda Gabler, maybe, but I’d love to have a crack at playing Cleopatra before it is too late. And very kind people keep on telling me that I really ought to be in Stratford for a while, so…
“I remember when Tom came to see me in the last thing I did on stage, which was Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance at the Theatre Royal, in the Haymarket, in which I played Lady Arbuthnot, which is pretty emotionally draining. When he came around to the dressing room afterwards, so that we could go home together, he said ‘When are you going to do a play where you don’t cry, mummy?’
“Funnily enough, Maggie Seed and I were doing a radio play for the BBC the other day, playing a pair of really demented old sisters. I genuinely forget what it was called but it was great fun, I love radio. And when we had finished the recording, both Maggie and I agreed that we would love to do pantomime, playing the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella. We thought that we could knock the spots of a bloke in drag, any day.”
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