Well known for her work on stage and screen, Anna Maxwell Martin is now becoming just as known for her fierce advocacy for disadvantaged children and for her candid comments about the affects of grief.
The actress met her former husband, director Roger Michell, in 2004. After 16 years together and 10 years of marriage, the couple separated and Roger died suddenly shortly afterwards at the age of 65.
“As a bereaved family, I’m really cautious around the pressure I put on Christmas,” she shares, adding, “sometimes we do literally nothing and it’s fine.”
“I’ve had to apologise and pick myself up and pick my children up and say I’m sorry, I’m going to do better. I always want to be the best person for them,” she explains.
(Image credit: Kate Green/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA)
Anna’s own grief experience has also been shaped by the death of her father, who died when she was just 24.
“This year I go into having more years without my dad than with him – that is a really weird watershed for me,” she shares.
With real candour, she adds, “I think we all need to understand that more about grief. It hoodwinks you. It can be OK, can’t it? Then suddenly it’s not. And that can be a week later, a year later, 10 years later.”
The actress also weighs in on the “flurry of support” that comes when somebody close dies, before “everyone forgets.”
Anna explains that with the non-linear pattern of grief, this withdrawal of support can be challenging, because you don’t know when it might be needed, and it might not be there.
“Sometimes grief can be delayed, and your difficulties swamp you,” she says, adding, “I had a mini-grief for Roger last summer. It was the first I’d done a play since he died, and I found it incredibly difficult without him.”
“I was trudging into work, crying. And this summer it hit me again, as it did my children. Grief is an exercise in massive patience.”
While she steers herself and her children through this difficult experience, Anna describes getting help for her special educational needs child also as “pretty brutal.”
“I think we all need to understand that more about grief. It can be OK, then suddenly it’s not”
Anna Maxwell Martin
While she says some teachers have been “life-saving” for her daughter, she explains that the current emphasis on school attendance is exceptionally difficult for some children.
“It’s cruel to measure a child by that when they cannot be in school because their nervous system is on fire,” she explains. Being threatened with fines made her realise how others with similar challenges could be more easily exposed to poverty because of them, instead of supported.
“There are children who aren’t at school because they haven’t got a warm coat or had anything to eat, then are berated and fined. Those fines push families further into poverty,” she says.
Anna concludes that for the rest of her life, she’ll be “hammering on doors at Westminster on behalf of teachers, pupils and children facing difficulties at school.”
“All I want for Christmas is for funding cuts to be reversed; for more therapeutic support,” she finishes.
