Jenny Agutter has been a presence in cultural life for over half a century. As the groovy 1960s gave way to the grim 1970s, she was at the centre of two, very different, era-defining projects. She waved her bloomers at passing locomotives in Lionel Jeffries’s durable adaptation of E Nesbit’s Edwardian classic The Railway Children. She represented nothing less than the fragility of western civilisation in Nicolas Roeg’s still-bewitching Walkabout. A period of Hollywood stardom followed. Some TV work. She raised a son. Now she is friend to millions as Sister Julienne in the BBC’s nostalgic – but quietly subversive – Call the Midwife.
Here she is. Talking to me like we’re some sort of equals. It would be mad to say Agutter is unchanged. But, at sixty-cough-cough, she retains much of the same crisp energy she had as a juvenile actor.
“I have had three really long days,” she says with no apparent flagging. “Then I am off down to Cornwall for the weekend.”
Before she vanishes westwards we will talk about, among other things, her fourth engagement with The Railway Children. Agutter appeared as young Bobbie in the 1968 BBC adaptation and then in Jeffries’s 1970 film. In 2000, she played the mother in another TV version for Carlton. Now she returns to play Bobbie as a grandmother (!) in The Railway Children Return. We are into the second World War and the former child train enthusiast, still in leafy Yorkshire, is caring for young evacuees from across the Pennines.
“I was 14 when I did it on television,” she says. “When the film came up I had done Walkabout. I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t got past that point. I was then just 17 and Walkabout was about the loss of innocence. I met Lionel Jeffries and he just assumed I’d be playing the part. He introduced me to Dinah Sheridan in the restaurant and said: ‘Dinah Sheridan will be playing your mother.’ You can’t say no at that point. Ha, ha!”
It seems few involved with the production predicted its staying power.
“When you’re 17 you’re not thinking of the future,” she says. “I was in the seventies. There was pop music and pop art and miniskirts. It was a different time. The Edwardian world was a separate world. Then I went to the States when I was 21.”
Iconic status
She recalls how the film’s iconic status developed slowly. It profited from afternoon showings on bank holiday telly. It did well on VHS and DVD. When she returned to the UK a decade and a half later, “the first thing people wanted to talk about was The Railway Children”. It will be interesting to see if the mid-market tabloids resist “anger at ‘woke’ Railway Children” headlines when the new film is released. The Railway Children Return skirts Black Lives Matter territory as it deals with a young African-American GI’s mistreatment at the hands of the military police.
“It’s wonderful to see, from a child’s point of view, what adults go through. And the children are outraged by it,” she says. “I think it’s very important to look at our history and to look at things we’ve ignored for years. But I don’t think that’s the reason the film’s doing it. It is because it’s telling an extremely good story.”
Jenny Agutter was born in Somerset, but spent much of her childhood in Singapore. She was at ballet school when Walt Disney arrived to audition dancers for a film about the terpsichorean arts. She got that role. She was then put before the producers of British adventure flick East of Sudan. Thus was her career launched. The school had an agency attached and TV roles were soon coming her way. For all the pleasures of The Railway Children, it is Walkabout that many will remember as her key early film. Agutter is quietly devastating as a teenage girl who, cast into the Australian outback with her younger brother, makes friends with a resourceful Aboriginal boy. The scene in which the now liberated schoolgirl swims naked in a pool was controversial in 1971. It would probably be even more controversial if first released now.
“I was a 16-year-old,” she says. “That was very much a part of the story. It was never not going to be part of the story. When Nic Roeg talked about it to me, he showed me pictures by Sidney Nolan – the Australian artist. He talked about how important it was to not be inhibited. It was not something that was easy. But, by the same token, I accepted that this was part of something that I really wanted to do. It is a lovely film. I have no qualms about that at all.”
Agutter acknowledges that the response would be different now. Technology plays a part.
“Years later, there is internet. There are mobile phones. There are all these strange websites. I have no regrets about doing it. What I am sad about is the misuse and the fact that people pull that out of context.”
There followed a period of proper stardom. In 1976, she played opposite Michael York in Logan’s Run and, amid a host of stars, in the classic war film The Eagle Has Landed. She later won a Bafta for the film version of Peter Schaffer’s play Equus. In the early eighties, she had another memorable role in An American Werewolf in London. During this time she was living in Los Angeles. Many are the juvenile stars who grew up disastrously in that city, but Agutter seems to have kept her head above the water with relative comfort. I find it hard to imagine her moving about Hollywood of the post-classical era. How did she find it?
`Lots of traps’
“It’s very hard to explain what that city is about,” she says. “But I loved it. I actually really enjoyed it. I saw very quickly that there are lots of traps. A lot of people can believe in the dream. It’s California. People went there for gold. They went there to pick oranges that didn’t exist. So it was a place of the imagination. But if you don’t have the discipline it can fall apart.”
While others were getting sucked into cults, Agutter was working with schoolchildren in the largely African-American neighbourhood of Watts.
“I loved that community,” she says. “It gave me something very solid. It was a school with a terrific headmistress. I’m still in touch with her today. I loved going into that school. I loved working with her kids. She had volunteer teachers that would come in and do things. I did Shakespeare. Los Angeles can lack substance, but that was very grounding.”
After 15 years among the lotus eaters, she returned to the old country. She met Johan Tham, a Swedish hotelier, in 1989 and they married a year later. She laughs as she explains that her husband “just didn’t like Los Angeles”. Agutter seems to have been entirely unaltered by the American experience. Her accent acquired not a hint of a drawl. You can’t imagine her indulging in therapy speak. She remains (on screen at least) a living embodiment of unpretentious, clear-headed Englishness.
“It’s an odd one because I wasn’t brought up in the UK,” she says, having clearly heard this before. “And then I went to America in my 20s. But I guess I identify myself as being British – European actually. Yeah. I mean… You know… Really, where are we?”
For the first time in our conversation, she sounds a tad downhearted. It is clear where she is going here. Brexit depressed her?
“It really upset me,” she says. “When I heard the news that morning we were going in for a reading of Call the Midwife. Everybody was in a real pall over the whole thing. It just was so upsetting. I couldn’t believe that we were gone. And I knew it was a reaction – it was a reaction to the government and to what was going on. Google that day was full of people asking what the EU was.”
A number of her colleagues in the business have since taken up Irish passports. As we are speaking, the producer David Puttnam is making the shift.
“I have Irish ancestry on my mother’s side,” she says. “My mother is from a true Irish family. They came over in the Famine. But that goes too far back, I guess.”
Older roles
How lucky we are to have her still at the heart of the business. She appears in all kinds of places you don’t expect. Rooting through her CV, I was reminded that Jenny Agutter is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – playing Councilwoman Hawley in The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Then there is Call the Midwife. Launched in 2012, the show goes among a group of midwives in the East End during the 1950s and 1960s. It is in some ways a cosy entertainment, but it also gets at important issues. “BBC uses Call the Midwife to promote abortion once again,” the Christian Institute bellowed furiously last year.
May I delicately suggest – and I am prepared to be told off – that there are now more good roles for older female actors than there once were? Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, each her senior by some years, all seem to be doing swimmingly.
“No, you’re absolutely right,” she says. “I also feel really lucky to have been part of the generation that has women writers there. And also belonging to a society that has started to recognise women in different kinds of roles. In Call the Midwife we’re looking at the 60s and all the changes that are happening during that time. But things have changed a great deal more since – if you think about the women leaders around the world. That’s reflected by the women writers.”
She goes on to talk about how technology has altered the business. She worked with the great make-up man Rick Baker on American Werewolf in London. Now a lot of those effects would be done on computer. She seems sanguine. But there are limits. She doesn’t like the idea of a virtual Agutter.
“I don’t like the idea of them saying: ‘All right. We are going to just take your image and we’ll pay you and put you in the film.’ You know?”
As if anyone would dare suggest such a thing.
The Railway Children Return opens on July 15th
