The posh don't say anything serious, says Harriet Walter
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Dame Harriet Walter, the Succession actress, has said the aristocracy does not say anything serious, having “rubbed shoulders” with them in her youth.
Dame Harriet, who stars in the hit HBO series as Lady Caroline, the cutting Roy family matriarch and second wife of Logan Roy, the media mogul played by Brian Cox, said growing up in the “foothills of the aristocracy” helped her to prepare for the role
Speaking to the Brydon & podcast with Rob Brydon, she discussed meeting real life “Lady Carolines” and said her portrayal of the character was a “mixture of lots of people.”
Dame Harriet, the niece of Christopher Lee, the British actor, said her family did not have “masses of money” growing up, but “we rubbed shoulders” with the aristocracy, who “sort of rubbed off on my whole family.”
“You didn’t ever say anything terribly serious. You didn’t get into the nitty gritty of your inner soul, you didn’t talk about yourself... everything was flippant, everything was glib.”
She added: “I think that because I’ve been on the receiving end of cold, snooty, witty put down people... I’ve observed it because it’s delved into your head because it’s so scary or something.”
Dame Harriet’s family tree boasts both aristocrats and prominent merchants. On her father’s side, Dame Harriet is a great-great-great-great-granddaughter of John Walter, founder of The Times.
Dame Harriet’s mother is Xandra Lee, the sister of Christopher Lee. Lee’s maternal great-grandfather, Jerome Carandini, the Marquis of Sarzano, was an Italian political refugee. His wife, Lee’s great-grandmother, was Marie Carandini, the English-born opera singer.
Lady Caroline, the Succession character played by Dame Harriet, is also a wealthy aristocrat, the likes of whom Dame Harriet says she observed while growing up.
But the similarity ends with Lady Caroline’s immense wealth, as Dame Harriet said that despite her mother and father coming from wealthy backgrounds, her family was “not very well off”.
“What happened was they knew people who had country piles so I always think of it as we lived on the foothills of aristocracy,” she said.
“We were very low down but we rubbed shoulders with people so I was aware of them, but I wasn’t one of them.
“We didn’t have masses of money, put it that way.”
Speaking of her uncle, the late Christopher Lee, Dame Harriet told Brydon that despite their similarities and successes, she took her career much more seriously than the Lord Of The Rings star had.
“He’d been to the death camps and liberated them. And he was in before he was 30,” she said.
Dame Harriet recalled wanting to be an actor as a child, but had been “disappointed” when visiting Lee on the set of one of his movies.
