Nicola Walker with the Best Actress in a Supporting Role award during The Laurence Olivier Awards in 2013. Photo / Getty Images
She was too short to play femmes fatales, but when she hit 40, her career suddenly soared.
When Nicola Walker was in her twenties she was given a warning. "Older actresses would put a kind hand on my knee and say, 'Work as much as you can now because when you turn 40 it gets really tough,'" she says. "They told me that parts are few and far between, and if you have a child you might as well call it a day."
Walker is now 51, with a 15-year-old son, and she is being offered more parts than ever. "The last ten years have been the best of my career," she says, sounding surprised. "I didn't see it coming."
Ever since she played the poised MI5 analyst Ruth Evershed in Spooks, Walker has inspired a particular kind of devotion, with a string of hits from Last Tango in Halifax to Unforgotten. She specialises in women holding it together despite inner turmoil.
There are parallels with Olivia Colman's career. Both went to Cambridge and started out with bit parts in TV and film (Walker played one half of a "frightful folk duo" in Four Weddings and a Funeral and then moved into theatre). It was only when they hit 40 that their careers took off. Chris Lang, who wrote Walker's role DCI Cassie Stuart in ITV's Unforgotten, said: "I have never had anything approaching the volume of response I got about Cassie to any television I've written. People loved her."
Walker gauges her success by visits to the supermarket in north London, where she lives with her husband and fellow actor Barnaby Kay and their son, Harry. "People engage me in lively debate about my characters — it's the part of fame I like."
What is it about her roles that strikes such a chord? "I don't want to be faux humble," she says, with characteristic self-depreciation, "but it really is all about the writing." I'm not convinced. Walker is thoughtful, emotionally intelligent, dedicated and completely unpretentious. She's also smaller than I expected — 5ft 2in, in chunky Nike trainers, black skinny jeans and a black high-necked blouse.
She has returned to television screens in the third series of Abi Morgan's drama The Split. Walker describes it as "a Trojan horse, using the set up of a divorce law firm to talk about relationships; the compromises we make just to keep something going and how love is sometimes not enough". Walker is Hannah, a lawyer who has just told her husband, Nathan (Stephen Mangan), that she had sex with another man, and they are making plans for divorce.
What she didn't expect is for him to fall in love with someone else so quickly, let alone an "annoyingly hot" and successful psychologist (Lara Pulver, who was with Walker in Spooks and is famous for playing the naked dominatrix Irene Adler in Sherlock). Hannah finds out in a "humdinger" of a scene, at a big dinner with the parents of their childrens' friends from school. "Hannah is the last person to find out, which is a special line in humiliation. We all know the feeling when it turns out you don't know what's going on. It is one of most people's greatest fears about their relationships and it changes the power dynamic." Morgan warned Walker that Hannah was in for a bumpy ride. It helped that she knew Pulver already: "We'd do a scene where one of us was emotionally poisonous and then they would shout cut and I'd grab her face and tell her, 'I love you, I respect you.'"
Walker admits to being nervous about interviews. "My dad would say, 'Why would you get stressed? Just act.' If I'm in a crime drama I always get frightened I'll blurt out who the killer is. When we were doing press for Unforgotten, Sanjeev Bhaskar told me to lie." She once did, joking that her son was named after Harry from Spooks, and it is now on her Wikipedia page. "He doesn't mind, he has never seen Spooks."
When Harry was a baby Walker wondered why there weren't crèches at theatres. "I couldn't take three hours out of my day to audition, but now it's better, people are taking their babies to rehearsals." She identifies with the working-mother guilt Hannah feels in The Split. "It is part of being a parent; terrible, suffocating levels of guilt on a daily basis."
We are talking at the National Theatre, where Walker is rehearsing the Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams's The Corn Is Green. She plays Miss Moffat, a visionary teacher who starts a school in North Wales for young miners (one is based on Williams) because she thinks it is abhorent they are down a mine when they should be at school. The cast went to see a mine in Wales for research and she is excited about the Welsh choir who will be on stage: "they made the floor reverberate with their voices!"
Director Dominic Cooke wants to put Williams back into the story. "Williams has been forgotten by the canon even though commercially he was successful," says Walker. "Maybe that's why, commercial is a slightly dirty word." She pulls a face. " I can't believe this play is going to happen until I'm there, sweating, my heart's racing and I'm wondering why the hell I ever wanted to be an actor."
Walker never thought of acting as a career even though she has been doing it since she was 12, when her mother sent her to a youth theatre. Her father was a scrap-metal dealer and thought it was a ridiculous thing to do. Walker was the first in her family to go to university, studying English at Cambridge (again, self-effacingly she says she "wasn't particularly gifted academically but I loved my course"). It was there that she met Sue Perkins, who wanted to get more women into Footlights and brought Walker along. "But I didn't think acting could be my job. I didn't know any actors, I couldn't see how you got there and wanted to work."
After university she continued acting in her friend's plays, above pubs ("I'd do the play so that I could get to the bar after"). It was at a pub play, with Rachel Weisz, that she was spotted by an agent.
Still, getting cast on television was impossible. "I didn't fit these worrying character breakdowns — 'she's 6ft, men turn to look at her as she crosses the room'. I'd walk in — 5ft 2in — thinking I didn't fit that look. But I did fit in the theatre." Those dramas about 6ft femme fatales have been phased out. "Drama reflects the temperature culturally and it is time for change. There are stories to be told about men and women over 35 and I don't think that will slip back."
Despite her elevation to near national treasure status — and another BBC drama called Marriage with Sean Bean (her husband approves of the pairing, he was once Banquo to Bean's Macbeth and knows him) — she is on edge about what's next. "When this play is over I'm going to be unemployed. I'm riding a nice wave but it is going to curl at some point. It's feast or famine and you can never quite enjoy time off if you don't have something lined up." Does she have any desire to go to Hollywood? "I don't know — Hollywood for me is watching Marvel films with my son."
Kristin Scott Thomas
As Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral she used sarcasm to mask being in love with her best friend. Now she plays the steely MI5 boss Diana Taverner in an adaptation of Mick Herron's Slow Horses on Apple TV+.
Rowan Atkinson
Almost 30 years after playing the confused vicar, Atkinson is still the master of comic chaos — catch him this summer in Netflix's Man vs Bee, about a man who battles with an insect.
Anna Chancellor
The famous wedding guest "Duckface" plays the formidable lawyer Melanie Aickman in The Split and is about to star in the film of Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.
The Split is available to stream on TVNZ OnDemand.
Written by: Susannah Butter
© The Times of London
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