It’s not every day you get to interview someone you have known for most of your adult life. But today I’ve come to meet Clara Francis, jewellery designer, dressmaker, screen and stage actor – and who also happens to be a close personal friend.
We’re here to talk about her work, in particular an upcoming role in Leopoldstadt, a new Tom Stoppard play opening at the end of January at the Wyndham Theatre. Set among the Jewish community of Vienna in the first half of the 20th century, the play follows the lives of a prosperous family and is directed by Jewish comedian turned playwright and director Patrick Marber.
But I also want to ask about the terrible tragedy that she and her husband, the actor Jason Watkins live with, the death from sepsis of their two-year-old daughter, Maude, in 2011. Although I know the couple have spoken often about their loss, it’s not an easy subject to introduce, even as a friend.
I first met Clara almost 20 years ago when we both had market stalls opposite each other selling fashion jewellery at Old Spitalfields Market every Sunday. After graduating from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, she had been cast in a few plays and TV shows and starred alongside Samantha Morton in Carine Adler’s critically acclaimed cult indie drama Under the Skin.
But, between acting roles, Clara had started to look for other ways of earning some extra cash. “I once saw a friend wearing this gorgeous piece of jewellery made out of these tiny Japanese beads, which really intrigued me,” she says, “so I went to Kentish Town Library, got some books on how to bead and taught myself to make jewellery. I then got a stall in Old Spitalfields Market and just sold what I had. When I sold out on the first day, I thought, ‘Blimey! I can make a living out of this’ – and suddenly it became more successful than my acting career.”
Soon her meticulously crafted pieces became hugely sought-after and were featured in Sunday supplements and fashion magazines, with customers flocking to her stall every Sunday.
When she was fired by her agent in her 30s, Clara knew that it was time to focus on what was making her happy. “I thought I either get a new agent or I could just get out of this thing which never made me really that happy. It always felt like a heartache.”
When she did return, after a 15-year hiatus, it was in a 2016 stage adaptation of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, a Bertolt Brecht play set in Nazi Germany. She played a young Jewish wife who must leave her home in order to protect her gentile husband from the Nazis. “My friend Phil [Willmott], a director I’d worked with a lot in the past, called me totally out of the blue and said, ‘I’ve got this part that I’d really like you to play, and I’m auditioning all these women, but really I can only imagine you doing it.’”
Was she apprehensive about going back to acting? “I wasn’t too sure,” she says, “then after doing it, I thought, I actually really enjoy this still.” Realising that she needed to do things slightly differently this time around, Clara got a new agent, but had some new rules.
“I said to my agent, I think I can do this if you’re happy for me to be very picky about what I do, because Jason is away pretty much all the time so I can’t do a job that means I’m going to be away from the kids for too long. So I get maybe one or two auditions a year and because what I’m looking for is so specific, I tend to get the parts.”
After the Brecht play came another opportunity when she was cast as Hinda, a young Jewish Orthodox woman in Disobedience, Sebastián Lelio’s screen adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel of the same name, which starred Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. Another Jewish character, I tell her. “Everything I do is Jewish,” she jokes. Although her part was a small one, Clara enjoyed playing Hinda very much, even if she jokingly refers to her character as “a real piece of work”.
How did it feel to be cast in Leopoldstadt, where most of the cast are from a Jewish background? “When we’re all standing on the stage and talking about what happened in World War Two and there are grandchildren of those people who survived the Holocaust who are telling that story, I think that’s incredibly moving. Yes, I found that very moving”
Did she find a lot of parallels between this story and her own family background? She grew up near Brent Cross in north London, part of a secular Jewish family. “Yes, of course,” she says. “My grandparents were both German Jews and were both Holocaust survivors. They came from Frankfurt and Wetzlar so I never grew up not knowing about it. I’ve always, always known about the Holocaust and it’s so much a part of who I am and what my family is.”
With her jewellery pieces more sought-after than ever —one of her headpieces can even be seen in the current screen adaptation of Little Women, worn by Emma Watson — Clara has also started another creative venture. Together with her friend, Tania Hindmarch, she has created O Pioneers, a small British clothing label that uses end of stock heritage fabrics — — Liberty is a strong favourite of theirs — to design beautifully intricate “prairie” dresses (think Anne of Green Gables or indeed Little Women), with long sleeves and mostly long skirts, perfect for shul or any time when you want to channel your inner Jo March.
Alongside her careers, she has spent a lot of time campaigning for better awareness of sepsis, a hard-to-detect condition in which the body responds to infection by causing injury to its own tissues and organs. She has recently started work as a facilitator for SLOW (Surviving the Loss of Your World), the bereavement charity which helped when Maude died.
“It’s an amazing local charity; it’s a meet-up and anyone who lost a child can meet once a week. After Maude died, the first time I went to that place, I thought, ‘these are my people, this is my new tribe and they’re going to pull me through this and one day I’m going to do the same thing for someone else.’” She also volunteers twice a month for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital’s phone line for bereaved parents.
I tell her that I am hesitant to ask her too much about her daughter, but her response is reassuring. “We can talk about Maude. Interestingly when Maude died, that was the first time I really thought I want to be an actress again. I really thought that I needed it.
“ It was all so unspeakably awful for many years, with the shock of grief that, at the time, I was envious of Jason. Even though it was really difficult for him he could go away and he could be somebody else.
“And while he was concentrating on being somebody else he wasn’t him and he didn’t have to think about it. There wasn’t a second of the day where I wasn’t thinking about her.” The couple have two other children, Bessie and Gilbert, who was born after Maude’s death.
So how does she feel about her acting career now that she’s about to embark on this 16-week run of Leopoldstadt? “After everything that I’ve been through, I was thinking that I’d never be happy again and there’d never be any sort of joy in my life. And now this thing has come along and it doesn’t feel like it did when I was acting the first time around, because the first time around it meant everything to me.” In what way? “It meant everything to me in terms of who I was and how it defined me. It doesn’t feel like that now. It just feels like an added extra in my life.”
Does she ever regret those years in which she didn’t act? “I don’t regret giving up acting at all, because, if I hadn’t given up then, I would have really become very disillusioned with it. When I came back to it, it was lovely because it just felt so fresh.”
Leopoldstadt opens on January 25
SLOW: https://slowgroup.co.uk
O Pioneers: www.opioneers.co.uk
