From meek to menacing

• Published date: 16 October 2021
• Publication title: Mix, The

Our drinks have not arrived and the great Dame Harriet Walter already appears to be having something of an existential wobble. By way of familiarising ourselves, I’d lobbed her a softball question about how she is coping with life and work during Covid. But I’ll quickly learn that Walter, the 71-year-old actress, royalty of British theatre, a Dame since 2011, prefers searing honesty and eviscerating self-awareness to small talk.

‘‘I’ve become very confused about what I think,’’ she admits, as we settle in for lunch at a bougie brasserie in Chiswick, west London. ‘‘The trajectory one thought life was going on and why I was here and what good I was in the world suddenly went splat. A lot of things I was keeping at bay, like a sense of being a bit irrelevant, have come in on me.’’

That Walter hasn’t been sick herself during the pandemic and has worked steadily only reinforces her guilt. ‘‘It’s fairly typical that I’ve avoided the illness,’’ she says. ‘‘I just feel I’m a privileged white woman of a certain age and therefore the major concerns and the major things that need changing in the world are not part of my experience. I can’t feed in and be helpful, except to be supportive in little ways.’’ She stops and sighs, ‘‘I’m talking to you like you’re a shrink!’’

What’s strange about this assessment is that the reason we’re sitting here is that, for a younger, streaming-savvy demographic, Walter has never been more relevant. For most of her career, which now spans more than half a century, she has been best-known as a peerless performer on stage. She has played many of Shakespeare’s major female characters and some of the men, too. When Walter has appeared on screen, it has often been in period pieces, such as Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995, or as Lady Shackleton in Downton Abbey.

In recent years, though, Walter has started turning up in all sorts of surprising places, including several of the best shows in a golden age of TV. In Killing Eve, she was Dasha, the Russian former Olympic gymnast and KGB operative with a predilection for leopard print who mentored Villanelle (Jodie Comer). In Succession, she is Lady Caroline Collingwood, the stony-hearted British mother of the younger Roy children and second wife of Logan (Brian Cox), a woman who, even in a series defined by the contemptible behaviour of its principals, manages to stand out. Walter popped up again in the second series of Ted Lasso, the comedy drama following an American coach who takes over...