‘Catholicism is the bear I wrestle with’
An actress who has rediscovered her Irish roots tells Peter Stanford about the mixed blessing of her faith
17 October 2008

Carol Drinkwater at her home in France

'And then she would make us all shake our legs like this." Carol Drinkwater hitches up her skirt, raises her elegantly shod foot in the air and waves a bronzed limb as if she is about to do the Hokey Cokey in the middle of the smart London bar where we have met. It is all in tribute to Sister Teresa, the drama and dancing teacher at her Kent convent school who, almost five decades ago, got Drinkwater started on her career as an actress. "She was so joyous. I can see her thick white stockings now, and her flat black shoes. Even the rosary beads that she would wear hanging from her waist would jangle when she did it."

Those drama lessons were one prelude to Drinkwater's acclaimed work as an actress (she also credits her late father, who was in the entertainment business). She starred alongside Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre and won the Best Actress Award at Cannes in 1990 for her role as Max Von Sydow's daughter in Father. But she is still best known for her role as Helen Herriot, the vet's wife in the BBC's All Creatures Great and Small. It brought her a Variety Club Television Personality of the Year award in 1985.

Though she still acts occasionally, Drinkwater has also made a second successful career for herself as a writer. Her trilogy of books about the olive farm she has lovingly resuscitated and nurtured in the south of France with her film producer husband Michel Noll have all been bestsellers in recent years. And now she has followed them up by undertaking a journey around the shores of the Mediterranean to trace the history of the olive tree. "There are two olive groves in Lebanon that I write about that are over 6,000 years old and are still producing fruit. That means they are 4,000 years older that Christianity itself. If they could speak, what would they tell us?"

The second instalment of this extraordinary story, part natural history, part travelogue, part philosophic musing, comes out this month and publication has brought Drinkwater back to London where her healthy tan and subtle glamour look curiously out of place on a bitter autumn day with the clouds of the credit crunch gathering.

Though her schooling was at the Holy Trinity Convent in Kent her roots, she says, are in Ireland, where her mother Phyllis was born, and where Drinkwater spent her childhood holidays with aunts and cousins. She has just, she reports, become an Irish passport holder. "It started with the Iraq war, which I oppose, and with feeling as a consequence uneasy when travelling with my British passport. And then, for this latest book, I was going to countries like Algeria for research, where a British passport was simply not advisable.

"The olive farm remains a constant in my life," she confirms, "but three years back I decided that I also wanted to get back in touch with my Irish roots. I think living a life in another language has made the desire to really discover the poetry and beauty of the Irish world extremely important to me. I now have a gatekeeper's cottage at the foot of a splendid Georgian estate right on the borders of counties Offaly, Laois and Tipperary."



She came upon it, she recalls, completely by accident. "I was travelling round Ireland with my mother, who is now 84, and we took the wrong motorway. And we ended up in a small town where I happened to look in an estate agent's window, and..." She raises her hands to signify that fate took a part. "The house turns out to be just 20 minutes from where my mother was born and the farm where I grew up when I wasn't at school."

She now spends a few months each year in Ireland researching a new book for young adults which is to be set there. Drinkwater has successfully made a name for herself in writing for teenagers, most recently about the Irish potato famine. She also is embarking on a trilogy of novels set on the Côte d'Azur.

And has rediscovering her roots had an effect on her faith? "Catholicism," she admits, "is the bear I am always wrestling with. Some times I find myself feeling exceptionally close to the Church, at Mass all the time and lighting candles every day. And then there are times when what it says upsets me. I worry, for example, about its attitude to population growth and the impact that will have on the planet. But it is very much a part of my life. I pray every day. In my handbag I carry two prayer cards my mother gave me recently, with novenas to St Jude, the saint of hopeless causes. I wasn't quite sure what she was trying to tell me by giving them to me."

Her upbringing in the faith was traditional. The convent operated on strict lines - no running was allowed, for example. But it also gave her a glimpse of a world of possibilities. As well as Sister Teresa, her dancing drama teacher, she also retains happy memories of Mother Genevieve. "She was always hurtling along the corridors, so she could never tell us not to run. There was something so French about her. I adored her. I can't help wondering if she isn't the reason I have ended up making my life in France."

Key to the appeal of her accounts of life with Michel on their olive farm is Drinkwater's candour in writing about difficult as well as the happy times in their lives. Bringing the abandoned farm back into production coincided with the couple's struggle to have children, which ultimately ended in disappointment. She continues to find a great consolation in working with nature but the pain of being childless is still raw.

"We are part of a scheme where young people from around the world come to work on organic farms like ours. Recently we had a young American staying with us for four months. He was 25 and we all got on very well. I couldn't help but think that he was of an age where he could have been my son. When it came time for him to leave, I found it very hard. But I'm lucky. I can talk to my husband about it and share those feelings..."

Her voice trails off. There are tears in her eyes. I once shared a platform with Drinkwater at a literary festival and will never forget the honest but never self-indulgent way she spoke to the audience that night about not being able to have children, a subject that often remains taboo in our society. And the comfort that her words gave to some in the crowd who came to have a quiet word with her later.

"I suppose it brings us back to my Catholicism," she remarks when I remind her of that evening. "It has taught me to celebrate what I have got, not to moan about what I haven't. I have been so enormously privileged in so many ways and my Catholicism has taught me to embrace that with energy and optimism."

The Olive Tree is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson at £18.99