Page 284 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

Fox as Jeremy Bamber in the TV series White House Farm CREDIT: ITV
It was a happy home, and Fox feels ‘very lucky: when I’m at my lowest and think I’m no good,
which happens a lot, I can go to my sister or my mum or my dad and when they say it’s going to be
all right, I believe them, because they’ve been through it.

‘I was probably the luckiest of my siblings because I had experienced parents. They’d done it
before, once in the case of my mum and twice [Fox has a half-sister, Lucy, Viscountess
Gormanston, from Edward’s first marriage to actress Tracy Reed] for my dad. We’re incredibly
close. We turn out for each other. We can cry on each other. We love each other.’

One period in which they needed that support system was 12 years ago, when his mother
contracted Ménière’s disease, a rare disorder of the inner ear that affects balance. The episode left
her with a second bout of depression (the first, in the early 1990s, put her in a psychiatric hospital
for a month). ‘All families are tested, and Mum has spoken about it bravely and openly,’ Fox says,
quietly. ‘It was a hard time, but we had each other. You see one of your pillars of strength
compromised by a medical condition and you need one another.’

Fox has acknowledged before that his parents’ connections may have opened doors to agents, but
not ‘some Masonic back door to every job’. Accusations of nepotism are inevitable, so are
comparisons – especially to his father, who’s not only one of our finest stage actors but has more
than 70 screen credits, among them Gandhi, and A Bridge Too Far and The Go-Between, for both
of which he won Baftas.

The real Bamber weeping at his family’s funeral in August 1985, alongside his girlfriend, Julie
Mugford CREDIT: ANGLIA PRESS AGENCY