(or Daniel Day Lewis once asked me out for a curry)

I wanted to be an actress for as long as I can remember, from the age of five at least. I yearned to go on the stage and made my brother’s and sister’s life a total misery, forcing them to play bit parts in a series of epic dramas based on the myths of ancient Greece.

Early Theatricals

For long stretches of my childhood I barely lived in the real world at all - I was too busy looking up what GCEs I would need in order to study drama at university. In my defence, working in the theatre was like going into the family business - there were three generations of actors and actresses peering over my precocious little shoulder.

My great-grandfather, Arthur Whitby, played the comedy roles in Sir Frank Benson’s company at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre before the First World War.

The Benson Memorial Window at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

You can just make him out, seen as Sir Toby Belch, leaning tipsily third from the left on the bottom row of the Benson Window at the RST. He appeared in Harley Granville Barker’s celebrated season at the Savoy and was generally considered to be a distinguished actor. Caught up in the patriotic fervour of 1914, he volunteered to serve overseas even though he was by then in his forties. Gallipoli proved too much for him, and he was shipped home with shell shock and died in the early nineteen twenties. His wife, Cissie Saumarez, was an opera singer who worked with the D’Oyly Carte and appeared in the chorus line of many of the original Gilbert and Sullivan productions.

Their daughter, Gwynne Whitby, was a fine classical actress who worked with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, playing Katherine in Henry V, Titania, Miranda, Olivia and Desdemona. More than that, she was an amazing grandmother - loving, vivacious, wicked and eccentric. She drove an old London taxi with a kitchen chair strapped to the front and let me have pink meringues for breakfast. Here she is in an ENSA (Every Night Something Awful) production which toured Germany after the war.

My grandmother Gwynne Whitby

My grandfather Hugh Williams

She met my grandfather, an actor called Hugh Williams (known as Tam), when they were both students at RADA in the early 1920s and this is where the writing gene first comes in.

Rewind to South Wales in 1843, when Tam’s own grandfather, another Hugh Williams, was active in the Chartist movement. This radical solicitor, known as Hugh Cant O’ Blant (or Hugh of the Hundred Children) is said to have been the mastermind behind the Rebecca Riots, a series of uprisings that occurred throughout South Wales between 1839 - 1843, in which groups of local farmers dressed up as women to protest against the excessive charges on the toll roads they had to use to bring their produce to market.

Hugh Cant O’ Blant was the subject of my first novel Rebecca’s Children and two things fascinated me about him: he was considered to be so revolutionary that the Home Office had his mail intercepted and read, yet at the same time he wrote a book of patriotic poetry National Songs and Poetical Pieces (the writing gene) which he dedicated to Queen Victoria. One man was arrested simply for having a copy of one of his seditious poems - The Horn of Liberty - about his person.

My grandfather Tam, grandson to this firebrand, was an extravagant and glamorous figure. A matinee idol before the Second World War, he appeared in Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and David Copperfield with WC Fields and Freddie Bartholomew. He led my grandmother a merry dance, having numerous affairs including one with the notorious Tallulah Bankhead which effectively put an end to their marriage.

He volunteered for active service during World War II and I edited a collection of the letters that he and his second wife, the model Margaret Vyner, wrote to each other between 1939 and 1945. When peace was declared he found it difficult to pick up the threads of his career and before long was facing bankruptcy. He rose magnificently to the challenge, writing a success called Plaintiff in a Pretty Hat, which had a lead part made-to-measure just for him. In total he and his wife Margaret wrote nine drawing room comedies, including the book for the long-running musical Charlie Girl, And at one point three of his plays were being staged in the West End at the same time.

Double Yolk was one of my grandfather's plays

Double Yolk was one of the comedies which my grandfather wrote - he included in it a part for my grandmother Gwynne and also gave Richard Briers an early break in the theatre.

All this writing and acting weaves its way from generation to generation in my family. My uncle Hugo Williams is one of the foremost poets of his generation - he has been awarded the TS Eliot prize and also the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (apparently she suggested he should drill a hole in it so that he could wear it round his neck!) My uncle Simon made an early splash as James Bellamy in the long-running television series Upstairs Downstairs, has written novels and comedies himself and is currently appearing on stage at the National Theatre.

I love them all and feel connected to them all and like the fact that all of us have a kind of creative resemblance to one another — we’re striving in our different ways to find artistic fulfilment.

For my part, I did get the right ‘O’ levels and did study drama at university (Manchester) and had ten amazing years working as an actress - not performing the classics, as I had hoped, but drinking rather a lot of sherry in light comedies (a homage to my grandpa, perhaps…)

On tour in THe Secretary Bird

Rookery Nook in the West End

I had the good fortune to travel the world, as well as the length and breadth of this country (an education in itself) and worked with some incredible people. I had one scene in My Brother Jonathan, which was Daniel Day Lewis’s first major television series and he did ask me out for a curry at the end of the day’s shoot, but my grandmother Gwynne was seriously ill in hospital and I just wanted to get home to see how she was.

I was in rehearsals to appear as Tom Conti’s wife in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell when I found out I was pregnant and once my son was born, giving up the theatre was a no-brainer. Why slog off to Ipswich or Northampton to do six months in rep, when I could be at home with him?

Besides which, I was beginning to write, which in my case meant gradually coming alive, so my story ends - and starts - here.