EXCLUSIVE
Call the Midwife star Jenny Agutter opens up about finding lasting love, becoming a grandmother and the joy of playing one of her best-loved roles…
In Call the Midwife, the relationship that means most to Sister Julienne is her closeness to God. Of course, as an Anglican nun, she has never married – and her alter ego Jenny Agutter readily admits there was a time when she also couldn’t imagine she would ever walk down the aisle. By her mid-30s, she had carved out a successful Hollywood career, but was happily living alone in LA – and hadn’t found Mr Right.
“I was very apprehensive about relationships,” Jenny (71), tells Yours. “I didn’t know how it could work to be with someone through your life and not find things boring or difficult.”
But that all changed when Jenny met hotelier Johan Tham (who she calls Jon because she can’t pronounce Johan in Swedish) at an arts festival in Bath in 1989. Suddenly she was open to the idea, especially when he wooed her with love letters.
“What was lovely is that we didn’t live in the same place,” explains Jenny, who was still in LA. “So we wrote letters, and his letters were wonderful. I think it’s very revealing, getting to know somebody when they’re not there. With letters you find out what their head’s about and what they think about things and their sense of humour. He was funny and delightful.”
Trans-Atlantic letters blossomed into a whirlwind romance, and the couple married in August 1990. Their son Jonathan was born on Christmas Day that year.
“Once my son asked, ‘How does one know that you found a person you can live with forever?’” continues Jenny. “I said, ‘I really don’t know! You take a leap of faith, but it’s a leap of faith you might not have been able to take another time.’ For me at that time, it was a leap I was willing to take. I’d found someone I could be totally myself with.”
Jenny and Johan have been married 33 years. “I find my husband constantly a surprise, which is the one thing that always worried me when I was younger. There’s a lot Jon and I share. We love music and art. We may have different tastes, but we like exploring the same things.”
So, Jenny has been doubly successful, enjoying a happy home life and busy career that’s spanned 60 years. Since her stint in Hollywood, she’s filmed two remakes of The Railway Children – she starred in the iconic first film aged 17 – as well as Spooks and The Alan Clark Diaries.
Hollywood also came calling with roles in two Marvel Movies in 2012 and 2014.
But she’s currently best known for Call the Midwife, which returns this mo
