Dame Harriet Walter at the 2024 Bafta TV Awards in London where she was nominated for her supporting actress role as Lady Caroline in the TV show Succession. Photo / AFP
When did Harriet Walter get so hip? And what’s her beef with Shakespeare? Joanna Wane talks to one of England’s great dames.
When asked recently why she has played so many abominable mothers, Dame Harriet Walter wasn’t the least bit offended. “I don’t look cuddly,” she said.
The 74-year-old British actor is experiencing a late-career makeover, starring in a slew of high-profile shows that have introduced her to a new mainstream audience.
A renowned Shakespearean on the stage, she’s probably most widely known for her arch portrayal of Lady Caroline Collingwood – Logan Roy’s cold-fish second wife in Succession and Mommie Dearest to Kendall, Roman and Shiv, their equally appalling children.
Over the past few years, she’s played a hilariously unhinged Russian assassin in Killing Eve, a leather-clad lesbian and reformed drug addict in Flowers, and another chilly mother in Ted Lasso.
She’s even become part of the Star Wars canon, appearing as a rebellion doctor in The Force Awakens, a fleeting cameo that generated more fan mail than anything else she’d done in the previous 40 years.
On a late-night call from her home in London where she’s snacking on tea and toast, we dissect the depths her character plumbed in Succession, across five extraordinary seasons.
“It’s brilliant writing, so it’s complex,” she says. “Imagine being married to Logan Roy and having three of his children. Caroline’s defence mechanism is to be glittery and sharp and witty and to avoid confrontation and depth. That’s her way of getting through it.
“I’ve been asked to play lesser versions of Caroline Collingwood quite a lot ever since. Whereas Dasha [from Killing Eve] was great because she’s just anarchic and rude and unpredictable. I loved her.”
Born into “the foothills of the aristocracy” – the legendary horror actor and wartime spy Christoper Lee was her uncle – Walter has slipped into the skin of some indomitable women.
In February, she was on screen in the UK in and as The Iron Lady, a two-part drama on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – a woman whose politics she most certainly does not share.
She played Winston Churchill’s strong-willed wife, Clementine, in The Crown, Princess Margaret in Patrick Melrose, and has worked her way through most of Shakespeare, from Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth to Julius Caesar in an all-female production of that play.
Over the years, her lifelong love affair with Shakespeare has never quite lost its shine.
However, exasperation with the limited voice given to his women characters has had her take the playwright to task in a mischievous new book, She Speaks! – an imagining of what his heroines might have said if only they’d been given a few more lines.
Written in rhyming iambic pentameter, it’s Shakespeare viewed through the female gaze – the title is a reference to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.
Highlights include a Witches Rap (Macbeth), Ophelia living it up as a free spirit among other women after escaping to a nunnery (Hamlet), Isabella calling out her rape by Angelo (Measure for Measure) and Olivia musing on her sexual attraction to another woman (Twelfth Night).
In May, the book will bring Walter to New Zealand for the first time, as one of the Auckland Writers Festival’s major drawcards. Ain her solo session, All the World’s a Stage, she’ll join the likes of acclaimed novelists Colm Toibin and David Nicholls on a gala night panel.
She Speaks! has also been included in the schools programme. It’s serendipitous timing; last week, a draft curriculum for senior secondary students recommended the mandatory study of Shakespeare in NCEA English.
Walter, who has identified as a feminist since she was 20, notes in the introduction to her book that the mirror Shakespeare holds up to the world, as a 16th-century man, reflects only a “beautiful sliver” of women and women’s lives.
How, then, does she view his relevance to a teenage girl today?
“I would say look beyond the plot – all those stories where their fathers own them until they’re married off, they’re not ever to look at a man in the lascivious way that men are allowed to look at them, and they have to dress up as a boy if they want to do anything very proactive,” she says.
“Look into the language and the meaning of the lines and the depth of Shakespeare’s thinking and say, ‘All of that applies to me as well because I’m a human being’.
“Jealousy, love, ambition, terror, altruism, selfishness, courage, timidity. It’s all in there. Think of yourself as Henry V, not Catherine. Open your heart and your mind and tell yourself it belongs to you.”
Walter, who is married but has no children of her own, has another beef with Shakespeare: the almost-complete absence of benign maternal figures in his plays. An entire chapter in She Speaks! is dedicated to “The Motherless Daughters”.
“It’s quite sad that either you get a great writer like Shakespeare who doesn’t even put mothers into the plot, or a whole spate of roles, mostly written by men who have a rather unpleasant mother in the story.
“It’s the Wicked Witch or the kind Fairy Godmother, with nothing in between. The audience is in some way very programmed to judge women in a way that they don’t judge men.
“I feel rather a traitor because my own mother was so wonderful. I’m certainly not playing her when I take on those roles.”
Last year, Walter’s performances in Ted Lasso and Succession won her double Emmy Award nominations for the second year in a row – the first actor to achieve such a feat.
Not bad for someone who was rejected by five drama schools before finally being admitted to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
For many years, she’s been involved with Clean Break, a theatre company that works with women in prison and has staged some all-female productions of Shakespeare’s plays.
Describing herself as being more “in the back-up troops” than on the front line, she’s also been vocal on issues such as climate change and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The recent crackdown on protesters in the UK has shocked her.
“I’ve always been aware that many of the views I hold would cost me a prison sentence or perhaps my life in another regime,” she says.
“But people being given prison sentences for demonstrating against fossil fuels, police behaving extremely aggressively towards peaceful demonstrators in the streets of London … that is new.
“I’m not a very outspoken or brave person, but I think because you get a platform if you’re a public figure, you have to stand by what you believe in.
“I’ve never been a natural sort of rebel or ringleader or daredevil or any of that. I don’t see myself doing it that way. But maybe some point will come when I have to.”
In June, Walter will be back on our screens in full-blown matriarch mode for the second series of Wolf Hall (Neon and Sky), cast as the powerful landowner and Plantagenet matriarch Lady Margaret Pole in this classy TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling historical novels.
Yet to be scheduled for release here is a new Australian TV drama, Playing Gracie Darling, featuring Kiwi actor Morgana O’Reilly (The White Lotus). Walter plays a tarot card reader in that one.
In 2011, she self-published Facing It, a photo book of women aged 50-plus. Has her perspective on ageing changed now that she’s in her mid-70s?
“There are more aches and pains, there are more difficulties, more of my friends are dying. So there’s a bit more to contend with now.
“But my views on how to be proud of who you are and challenging the world with ‘This is who we are, this is what we look like’ – I haven’t changed on that front.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.