Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
the Hungarian musical Doctor Heart, in which Serkis starred as a physicist who discovers a way of turning dreams into reality. The two of them had an especially close relationship with the Royal Exchange, usually working on productions with the director Braham Murray.
Time spent apart was made up for with trips away. Holidays were crucial for the couple, from their first break in 1991, when they travelled out to the mountains over the border from Chamonix in Italy. Another subsequent journey abroad saw the pair jump into a Volkswagen camper van and drive from their home in Hackney, east London, to the island of Sicily. The pair would take some adventurous holidays around the globe during the 1990s, from backpacking in Vietnam and Thailand, to paragliding, to scuba-diving, and ice-climbing on glacial peaks. ‘I got into ice-climbing through Andy and we’ve been to the Alps, places like that,’ recalled Lorraine. ‘It’s not as dangerous as it seems. I did lose my nerve once and couldn’t move for about half an hour, but I forced myself to get going again, by which time the mist had come in and we had to camp on the mountain for the night thousands of feet up.’
By the late 1990s, after a string of stage successes and supporting roles in films such as Jack and Sarah (with Richard E. Grant) and Fever Pitch (with Colin Firth), Lorraine Ashbourne was a mainstay of two peak-time BBC drama series: the Manchester-based police series City Central and Kay Mellor’s Playing the Field, about an all-female football team. Just as both became recommissioned for second series during 1998, she discovered that she and Andy were to become parents for the first time, but it was only very shortly before the baby was due that she took time off from hectic shooting schedules.
It just so happened that Geraldine Powell, whom she played in Playing the Field, would herself give birth at the start of its second series. Geraldine’s fictional birth scene was filmed only two months before Lorraine’s real one, and it was an interesting dress rehearsal. ‘Filming the birth scene was amazing because I knew I was going to have go through it for real two months later. If anything, I felt more responsibility for making it look as genuine as possible.’ But, with Lorraine seven months pregnant in real life, midwives were standing by just in case. ‘I was actually quite far gone when we filmed the scene. I was told not to push too hard but to show it more in my face than down below.’ So how did her real-life partner feel about the pretend birth? Lorraine believed that, for Andy, who was used to making acting an authentic, intense experience, the fictional delivery was perhaps slightly traumatic. With a giggle, she told the Mirror, ‘I think those scenes were more disturbing for him than if I was doing a love scene.’
There was tension when it came to the real-life birth of Lorraine and Andy’s daughter in October 1998. Defying the fears of doctors, Lorraine opted to bring Ruby into the world in a birthing pool in the kitchen of the family home she shared in London with Andy. To begin with, she wanted Andy to join her in the pool, and so set about looking for the largest one she could find. ‘But, when it came to the day,’ she told the Daily Mail, ‘I decided I wasn’t going to share it with anyone.’
Surrounded by candlelight, Lorraine lay in the birthing pool for many hours – 16, maybe 20 in all – with a team of three midwives, who at one point were granted the surreal sight of watching tapes of Lorraine’s TV labour from Playing the Field. A supportive Andy was next to her throughout. ‘He was my emotional rock,’ she said. ‘I must have squeezed his hand for about 12 hours as he willed me to be patient and strong. The idea that men are useless at birth because they don’t know what to do certainly didn’t apply to Andy – he wanted to be involved right from the outset.’ Having attended a course on mind over matter, Lorraine endured the ordeal – ‘a wonderful and hideous experience all at once’ – with no pain relief, and recommended birthing pools for all expectant mothers. ‘It’s not that you don’t feel pain, because you do, but you learn to cope with it. I was physically sick at one stage and feeling awful, but the water soothed me.’
Even after Ruby was born, Lorraine was back at work within little more than a month, with near-sleepless nights and 6am alarm calls for long days of filming. ‘I thought I’d have no problems coping,’ she told the Mirror when the child was still only a few months old, ‘but I definitely underestimated how difficult it was all going to be.’ Help was at hand, thanks to fellow cast members and production staff on City Central who converted a storage cabin into a comfortable, beautifully decorated nursery. ‘All the rest of the cast helped and they filled it with soft toys,’ said Lorraine. ‘It’s known as Ruby’s room. It really was so nice of them.’ But most important to Lorraine was her family (who hailed from Manchester, anyway) and, of course, Andy, whose working schedule on various film and TV projects enabled him to be flexible with visits up North.
Parenthood for the couple did force them to rethink their passion for activity holidays. Ice-climbing in the Alps would be less easy, even though they had adored seeing French families there crossing hazardous glaciers with all their offspring in tow. Lorraine reflected in 2000, ‘I thought that was so fantastic that I determined that’s what my children would do too. I could picture them with their crampons on and their ice axes at the ready, all raring to go climbing with us. But, now that I have Ruby, I realise that it was all a bit of a romantic vision.’ At least when Ruby was a little older, and she was joined by younger siblings Sonny (in 2000) and (in 2004) Louis, Andy and Lorraine started to introduce them – in a more modest way – to the joys of the mountains, even if it was just a spot of gentle hill-walking or a journey on a cable car.
Even Andy was starting to slow down a little with his climbing. His spirit of adventure was still there well into his thirties – his climbing conquests included the Matterhorn and even the Eiffel Tower – but, as he would tell the Sunday Times in 2005, he began to feel, as the years flew by, that he couldn’t quite take the risks of old. ‘It’s harder now the kids have come along. I did notice, when I was climbing in New Zealand as we were just about to have our second child, feeling I didn’t quite have the edge I once had – just not being willing to take that little extra risk.’
So, with a new baby, such excitement would have to be put on hold for the time being. ‘Now we’re hoping we can balance work so someone is always there for Ruby. I think that’s important,’ said Lorraine to the Mirror. When the question of marriage between them was mentioned, she would not dismiss the idea. ‘We haven’t made a conscious decision, it’s just that we haven’t had the time,’ she told the Daily Mail in 1999. ‘If I thought it would affect Ruby, I would get married tomorrow. But I think that if you can demonstrate to a child how much you love each other, then that is more important than being married.’
A year after Ruby was born, Lorraine was keen to have more children. ‘Family is the most important thing to me now. You hear some actresses say they had better not get pregnant as they’ve signed for so-and-so series, but I don’t see things that way. If anything, being pregnant has made me more ambitious than I was before. Andy has been working with a couple of actresses who are pregnant and are very worried about losing their ambition, but I’ve told them they shouldn’t worry at all. Acting is not just about my ego and my vanity any more.’ Lorraine would always stress what a great source of support her boyfriend was. ‘He’s a wonderful dad and very much an equal partner when it comes to childcare,’ she said in 2000.
Attempts were made to incorporate Ruby into Lorraine’s onscreen work. ‘I thought it would be so easy to have her with us, even at work,’ she told one newspaper. ‘So, when there was a party scene for my screen son in Playing the Field, I got my mum and dad and Ruby in as extras. But it just didn’t work. Whenever she spotted me, she would shout, “Mama, mama”, and as I am obviously not playing her mum we had to stop.’
An alternative plan was hatched. Andy had an idea to sneak his infant daughter into a closing scene of the film Five Seconds to Spare, a screen adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s thriller novel The Dwarves of Death. ‘She was brilliant during all the rehearsals,’ sighed her mother affectionately. ‘Then, when it came to the take, she became fascinated by the sound boom. They had to cut the whole scene.’ Ruby’s screen debut, for now, would be delayed, although when she was 10 she and her siblings would feature as extras at a birthday party scene for the Ian Dury biopic, Sex