Dame Harriet Walter is both an outspoken feminist and one of the world’s preeminent Shakespearean actors—having played nearly every character from Cleopatra to Lady Macbeth to Portia in The Merchant of Venice. But being both a feminist and a Shakespearean actor has posed a bit of a dilemma.
“There are exceptions, but pretty much the women in Shakespeare are talking about their man, or putting themselves in relation to the man,” Walter said in a 2015 interview, citing Shakespeare’s failure of the Bechdel test. “He doesn’t write less well for women; it’s just that the themes are smaller, on the whole, and they are less fulfilled characters. When the greatest playwright—so considered—in the English language leaves women out of the picture so much, it has a bad effect on your sense of worth, because the culture that followed in his shadow has reinforced that. It does have an effect on us.” Walter has played some of Shakespeare’s male characters as well, channeling Brutus and Henry IV in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female stage productions of Julius Caesar and Henry IV. But on the whole, Walter wishes that Shakespeare could be resurrected—in order to “do some rewrites.”
Offstage, as a period-drama veteran who has appeared in Sense and Sensibility, The Young Victoria, Atonement, The Crown, and Downton Abbey, Walter has navigated as many gender-role confinements and corsets. While previously working with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes—she played Dowager Lady Shackleton in the drama’s fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons—the English actor came to appreciate how female-driven his period dramas are. So when Walter heard about the role of the Countess of Brockenhurst in Belgravia—Fellowes’s new Epix series, which is set in 19th-century London and based on Fellowes’s 2016 novel of the same name—she knew the part would be compelling. Rather than taking a back seat to their male counterparts, it is the Countess of Brockhenhurst and Tamsin Greig’s Anne Trenchard who headline the series, as women from different social strata whose lives and legacies are thrust together when they discover their late son and daughter parented an illegitimate child. The miniseries tracks the women’s unlikely alliance as they strive to keep their family names free of scandal—but the secret seems like it will be thrust into the open in Sunday’s finale.
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The role was naturally appealing to Walter. “Women [of the time] were not allowed into certain areas, definitely not fighting wars, definitely not manufacturing businesses, definitely not running the estate,” she told Vanity Fair. “Women probably had less of a bite of the action because they were supposed to be decorous and ladylike and do a lot of embroidery.” But though the majority of the Countess of Brockenhurst’s day is spent in the drawing room, Fellowes found a way to give her a bit of action and artistic fulfillment by making her a painter. Said Walter, “This was, I think, a kind of rebound against having to normally be in the drawing room. And there were some very serious, good watercolorists around at that time, female watercolorists, who’d actually traveled abroad in order to paint. But he had me sort of painting people, which meant looking at people and judging their character and looking into their souls a bit. And it felt like that was a bit of a key to the character, that she was a bit deeper than some of the satirical characters one plays that are quite shallow and just after money.”
Also appealing was the fact that Walter got to play out a long-simmering secret, and find some semblance of emotional fulfillment from another female character—Anne Trenchard—who is also grieving a late child. Walter said that the Countess of Brockenhurst and her husband did not discuss their late son—“so when she meets another woman, albeit from a different class, who’s gone through the same thing, she’s longing instinctively to kind of bond with that woman. And on the one hand, she does. On the other hand, she looks for the reasons why their situation is different.” Their son and daughter’s affair carried societal stigma: “My son was a lord, and he’s allowed to play around with women. It’s kind of acceptable. She was from a lower rank, and her daughter should have kept herself respectable. And suddenly these big differences and what we see now as unfairnesses come out and are lying beneath the relationship between those two women all the time.”