Harriet Walter reflects on choosing her career over having kids
Harriet Walter has shared her thoughts on never having kids, admitting that she sometimes wishes she had done.
The award-winning actor, 74, is playing Margaret Thatcher for the second time in her career, in the forthcoming Channel 4 series, Brian and Maggie.
Explaining that her success on both stage and screen kept her occupied throughout her life, she discussed her choice to remain childless.
“You follow what feeds you best, and my profession was feeding me very well,” she told The Times.
“Maybe it’s a cowardly thing I did: I ran away from the responsibility of having a family, because I do think it’s a big bind and I just didn’t want that.”
She added that her life may have been different had her career not taken off.
“I didn’t have that strong maternal urge, or one to settle down. But if I hadn’t acted, I probably would have been more conventional,” she continued.
But, she added: “There are obvious times when you think, ‘I wish I had [children],’ but it’s an abstract thought, not a physical need.”
The star, who has been in a relationship with Fantastic Beasts actor Guy Paul for 16 years, also opened up about the challenges of finding love later in life, saying it was “very difficult”.
“When you’re young, that’s what everything’s aimed at. Music culture, party culture, club culture,” she said.
“It’s all about getting a partner. Whereas when you’re older, it’s much harder to see the signals. You develop links as a friend and think, ‘Is this going to turn into something else?’”
Walter said she asked Paul out in the end after being friends, and the couple both married for the first time, aged 60, in 2011.
“It’s the best time!” she said of late marriage. “It’s exactly when you want to be married. When you want to do all sorts of things, and you’ve got a companion to travel with and hang out, and you don’t have these idealised, impossible visions of how people should be.”
Walter also expressed the urge to prioritise her career goals over a family in an interview with The Independent in 2020.
“I suppose I was driven by an ambition,” she said at the time. “I didn’t want to get married and have children at that point.”
