Born in London in 1977 to Patricia, a psychologist, and John, a journalist, Bertie Carvel trained at Rada, before becoming a decorated stage and theatre actor; he received an Olivier in 2012 for his portrayal of Miss Trunchbull in Matilda the Musical, and an Olivier and Tony awards for his performance as Rupert Murdoch in Ink in 2017. His television career includes Doctor Foster, Dalgliesh and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. He is married to the actor Sally Scott; they have a son and live in London. He plays Tony Blair in season 5 of The Crown, available on Netflix now.
I don’t know exactly when or where this was taken, or by whom, but it looks like a happy day. My mum seems happy, though I’ll bet she’s just about to tell whoever it is to put the camera down. She was a force – fiercely intelligent, outspoken and opinionated – but she was shy when it came to photos.
I look happy, too. What five-year-old wouldn’t be, snuggled up to his mum in a rowing boat, with a fishing rod? But I also seem rather shy. Perhaps a little jealous of the photographer, perhaps wanting her all to myself. I recognise my own son in that little boy, the same way of claiming his mother, the same depth and ferocity of love.
My son has very much inherited his granny’s strength of will. Stubborn like you wouldn’t believe. Even though they just missed meeting each other – she died six months before he was born – she is so present in him. I feel powerfully aware of their connection.
I was a sensitive boy. Confident around adults, less so around other kids. I was very empathic. My parents separated at around the time this picture was taken, and I remember being very worried about how they were both feeling. I wanted to protect them.
That’s been true throughout my life; I’ve been a bit of an emotional sponge. But that’s not a bad quality – the world could do with more empathy. It’s humanity’s superpower; the antidote to our more destructive tendencies. And it sharpens the imagination. I’m sure it’s what led me to become an actor.
I did no acting at school. But I spent every weekend in Chislehurst Caves [in south-east London], live-action role-playing with friends. As a 12-year-old, I used to take the train there dressed as a dwarf – beard, chain mail, axe and shield, the whole shebang. Over the next seven or eight years I must have played thousands of characters of every description: heroes and villains and everything in between. But nobody thought of this as acting. We were just a bunch of friends hanging out in our imaginations.
It wasn’t until I was at university that I found myself acting in a play. I realised I was good at it and that other people thought so, too. I was studying English at the time, but I managed to get a scholarship to Rada. When I told Mum, she was astonished. It must have seemed so out of the blue. But she was so very proud, too, and so glad that I had found something that made me happy.
Mum came to all of my shows, without fail. She wasn’t always complimentary – “Why are you wearing a padded vest?” (reader, that was my stomach); “Why don’t you smile more?”; or, my personal favourite, “You don’t look like you when you’re acting” (which I thought was rather the point) – but she was always proud. I could not have asked for more love and support.
I spend too much time regretting things. Regret is a species of grief. The antidote is acceptance, but that can be painful – so, instead, I spend a lot of energy distracting myself.
Looking back, I regret not sharing my triumphs with her more. She loved to hear my news, and, of course, I’d give her the headlines, but when it came to the details I’d clam up, like a teenager. That’s part of growing up, I suppose – learning to go it alone, without seeking a parent’s validation. But, if I’m honest, I was afraid. My self-esteem felt so fragile that I wanted to keep it under guard. I was afraid she might poke at it, laugh at it, break it. I remember the first time I told her I was being picked up for a day’s filming and how her face lit up as her voice slid into her upper register and tripled in volume: “Oo-h! They’re sending a driver!” I was so embarrassed, it felt like mockery, but it was love.
In 2019, I was doing Ink on Broadway. We’d had great success in the UK already, and Mum had seen it in London. She had been slowly losing her sight over the preceding 10 years and was increasingly vulnerable and reliant on me, so it had been hard to leave for New York.
Then one night she called and didn’t sound quite right. I said: “Mum, I think you should call an ambulance.” She refused. By the next morning, she wasn’t picking up the phone, so I called my wife and asked her to go round. Mum was taken to hospital. They got her into the hyper‑acute stroke unit where things stabilised
The next day they planned to do a routine, apparently low-risk operation to prevent an embolism, but it went catastrophically wrong and caused one instead. Tragically, it took the surgeons several hours to realise the mistake and she was left severely brain damaged. She spent the final eight months of her life unable to move or communicate, except occasionally to squeeze my hand.
Those months were the hardest of my life. Looking back, I realise I was grieving in slow motion. It was an extraordinary time: a curse, for my mother, at any rate, who was so autonomous and full of vim, who always said she knew where hemlock grew and would take it if she were incapacitated; but also a strange blessing.
One of my lasting regrets is not being with her when she went in for that operation. By contrast, being with her at the end of her life is one of the great honours of mine. It altered my outlook entirely. The grief was overwhelming, but also strangely transformative. The twin events of her death and the birth of my son have changed my perspective on my own mortality. Though I’m acutely aware of the limited time I have left, I’m also far less obsessed with curating my future. I feel more present.
I live in the flat in London that I grew up in, where Mum spent half of her life. My son sleeps in my old bedroom. He is approaching the same age as I was in this photo, and he is starting to become curious about death. I try to speak to him about it openly and without fear. It’s important to me not to brush it aside, though I don’t want to breed an unhealthy obsession. Death is just a part of life.
I’ve never taken ayahuasca, but many people who have report a sense of waking up to the interconnectedness of everything. Losing my mum and becoming a dad have given me something like that feeling. I’m less anxious, less afraid. There’s an unbroken chain linking all of us, backwards and forwards through time, from beginning to end and back again.
My mother made me who I am, in every sense. When I look at these pictures side by side, I know she’s there in both.
