10 May 2022
Article from April 2022 edition of INPractice
Jenny Agutter as Sister Julienne in Call the Midwife. Picture courtesy of the ABC.
We’ve got to make the National Health Service work,’’ British actress Jenny Agutter once wrote to Reader’s Digest.
“We’re hugely privileged to have it and we’ve got to pay whatever taxes required to ensure the money is there. Educators and health workers should be celebrated and paid the most in our society, because we need them.’’
Many folks might remember her as sweet English nurse Alex Price who fell in love with the hairy, homicidal man-beast in An American Werewolf in London. “She wore a nurse’s uniform so I think that’s what made her a bit of a sex symbol,’’ said Jenny of the 1991 comedy horror hit, which overnight propelled her to British pin-up status.
Or as the posh, plum-in-her-mouth 16-year-old Walkabout schoolgirl who got lost in the searing Australian Outback before salvation arrived in the form of Indigenous cinematic debutant David Gulpilil, also just 16.
These days Jenny Agutter (pronounced Agattar), OBE, spends her screen time as pristine mother-figure Sister Julienne in the acclaimed BBC series Call the Midwife … and occasionally speaks out publicly about the perils of privatising the health system.
“It’s sad to see steps going backwards in the States,’’ she once said of Trump’s attempts to axe Obamacare.
“Here we’ve had a net in place for people who could not take care of themselves. One has to have that free medicine for people.”
Call the Midwife is a BBC period drama series about a group of nurse midwives working in the East End of London in the late 1950s and 1960s. The series, created by writer Heidi Thomas, was at first based on the memoirs of midwife Jennifer Worth who worked with the Community of St John the Divine, an Anglican religious order, at their convent in the East End.
However, the show has since evolved to embrace many of the social, medical and moral issues of the respective decades, such as teen pregnancy, back-street abortions, the advent of the contraceptive pill, poverty, homosexuality, immigration, racism, religious and social bigotry, dementia, even female genital mutilation.
In one episode, the resident GP, Dr Patrick Turner (played by Stephen McGann, who is married to Heidi Thomas) discovers to his horror that the morning sickness pill he has been prescribing, thalidomide, is causing birth defects.
The series has been lauded for accurately charting the changes and challenges to midwifery and nursing over the years. One episode even prompted more Brits to give blood.
Closer to home for Jenny was an episode dealing with cystic fibrosis, a hereditary mutation that causes severe damage to the lungs, digestive system and other organs. The condition runs in her family tree and was responsible for the deaths of two siblings. Jenny is also a carrier.
Her parents’ first-born baby died as an infant of cystic fibrosis, and the same condition took her younger sister’s life before she had even been brought home from hospital.
“I remember it very much,’’ Jenny told The Guardian. “But I was only about six, and I remember the child’s memory, which is that you feel a little bit let down. You’re expecting a new playmate at home, and, being a little girl, one’s terribly interested in all those things, and then suddenly it doesn’t happen.
“And no one really explains why it doesn’t happen. It must have affected my mother enormously. You can’t carry a child for nine months and then lose it and not feel that desperately. But it wasn’t discussed.”
Consequently, Jenny is a supporter of several cystic fibrosis-related charities, as well as youth homelessness, and in 2012 was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her many charitable services.
Born December 20, 1952, in Taunton in Somerset, England, the daughter of a British army officer, Jennifer Ann Agutter spent her childhood visiting and living in many different countries, including Germany, Singapore, Cyprus and Malaysia. In England, she trained at Elmhurst Ballet School and at age 11 was cast as a young dancer in Walt Disney’s film Ballerina.
From there her career took off, as one of The Railway Children in the 1967 BBC series and in the film adaptation of 1970.
The following year BBC-TV film The Snow Goose, for which she won an Emmy, was released - as was Walkabout. Filmed in 1969, it caused a sensation with a teenage Jenny, sans togs, splashing about in a Top End waterhole, a scene which was cut from US release.
To this day she still gets asked about that nude scene … mainly by middle-aged men. “You know, what’s so sad is that the whole point of that small sequence in the film was innocence,’’ Jenny told The Guardian.
Above: A young Jenny Agutter circa 1971. Picture: Terence Spencer/Popperfoto via Getty Images.
“If my character had gone into the water in her bra and pants it would have made you feel people were watching. In retrospect, the only thing I’m saddened by is the fact that one has the internet now, and everybody can do screen grabs, and so it ends up being something completely out of context because someone has a fantasy about a 16-year-old.”
Later films included Logan’s Run, Amy, An American Werewolf in London, The Eagle has Landed and Equus, for which she won a British Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and more recently Marvel’s The Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
She has also had an extensive stage career, including as a performer with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Call the Midwife, which began in 2012, was five years later voted the best drama of the 21st Century at the closing night of the BFI and Radio Times Television Festival, having already been voted as the century’s best period drama in a Radio Times poll.
“One of the wonderful things about Call the Midwife is that we are seeing our future being shaped,’’ Jenny said.
“Historically, it is very accurate and the scripts are wonderful at identifying the changes in health care which were good, and the problems which are still relevant today.
“People say it’s sentimental but actually I think it’s quite hard-edged,” she said. “The characters are always facing problems and they aren’t always resolved. I do think though that the stories capture the imagination and the feel-good factor comes from the strength of the community.
And there are always babies, which keep people hooked in.
“The great thing about moving from year to year,” Jenny says, “is you can focus on the situations that affect people at that particular time – social, family and women’s issues. And while it’s historical, it’s close enough to be remembered.
“It’s always a delight when we get the babies on,’’ she told the BBC. “Everybody gets very hushed and very quiet. On set everything is very gentle, and everyone suddenly becomes a mother hen around the place. They are all hoping that they going to be able to hold the baby.
“Mainly, though, the baby stays in the arms of Terri Coates, our midwife, who looks after the mothers and the babies when they come. She seldom allows us to stay with the baby in our arms for very long. But we coo and goo and love working with them.’’
Medicine, and midwifery, runs in Jenny’s family. Her only child, Jonathan (to husband Johan Tham), is a Cambridge graduate doctor at a London hospital, while her aunt was a midwife.
“She worked as a midwife during the war, and some of the stories she tells are fantastic,” Jenny said.
“Once, she went to attend to a woman whose house had suffered from bombing, and she had gone to sit on the bed next to her when the bed just fell through the floor because the floorboards had so many holes in them.
“But she carried on helping with the delivery – just from the floor below.”
Despite her many medical connections, Jenny says she was never cut out for nursing. “I wouldn’t make a good nurse. I’m empathetic, not sympathetic. Trying to take a splinter out for someone would be awful, I’d be squealing.’’
Call the Midwife screens on ABC-TV, ABC iView and Foxtel’s BBC First.
Other story sources: Women&home, Huffington Post, The Yorkshire Post, Mirror.
Click here to read the April 2022 edition of INPractice