Ed Stoppard: ‘As Tom Stoppard’s son, I had a fear of failure’ (2024)

Ed Stoppard is looking very dapper. He is dark-haired, full-lipped handsome with his pale skin and mop of hair. What really sets him apart, though, are his clothes. He is wearing a bottle-green corduroy suit, maroon braces, crisp white shirt, lilac socks and polished brown shoes. His hair is beautifully coiffed. “Do you really like the suit?” he says, looking pleased. It turns out it is Savile Row and he got it as a payment for doing a short film for a friend. “There’s a waistcoat too,” he says proudly, “but they’re just taking it in.”

Stoppard, 40, has been acting for years, with roles in Any Human Heart, The Pianist and Upstairs, Downstairs, but it’s his portrayal of Brian Epstein in ITV’s acclaimed three part-drama Cilla, opposite Sheridan Smith, that has got everyone talking. Smith is, of course, amazing as Cilla, and her rendition on screen of Anyone Who Had a Heart has sent the original version zooming up the charts.

Yet Stoppard’s beautifully nuanced performance as the quietly charismatic Beatles manager has impressed the critics — and won over a legion of female fans. “Actually, I don’t think Epstein was a Svengali,” he tells me. “I always think of those characters as being manipulative whereas Brian was warm and kind. He really loved Cilla. She was very important to him, and he to her.”

More than six million people have tuned in to the first two parts of the drama (part three goes out tonight). “I am so happy for everyone in it and, for me, Brian Epstein was a dream part. I love complicated characters and he was a gay man from up north who was a musical impresario. You don’t get much more complicated than that.”

You sense Ed is finally escaping from under the shadow of his hugely successful family. “Is he the son of . . ?” people ask, and of course he is. His father is the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, who won an Oscar for his screenplay Shakespeare in Love, his mother the doctor and advice columnist Dr Miriam Stoppard, who educated an entire generation in sexual health. The couple divorced in 1992 but remain good friends.

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Did he hesitate to join the same business as his father? “Well, I spent some time denying it and walking away from the idea of following acting as a profession but then one day I came to a crossroads and it became obvious that there was nowhere left to go. I was out of university. I had studied French and really stayed away from drama, which was a shame because it was something I had really enjoyed in the past. Friends were off doing different things, law conversion courses and getting into jobs in marketing and banking. I sat and watched them and then it came to me very suddenly and quickly; I had to act.”

Why did it take so long? “I was the person who thought I couldn’t go into acting because of the weight of expectation people might feel, but all that was from me. The pressure not to be in this profession certainly didn’t come from my parents and once I’d got over myself I realised it was what I really wanted to do.” Are his parents proud of him? “Erm, I haven’t asked them really.” Do they go and see him in productions? “I’m not one to self-publicise but if they want to, then . . .” Have they seen Cilla? “I don’t know.”

There are reasons he is protective of his parents. They were married for 20 years and he and his older brother Will grew up in London (they have two older half-brothers from Tom’s first marriage). Everything changed when Tom left his wife for a seven-year affair with actress Felicity Kendal, who often starred in his plays. It caused a tabloid sensation.

Ed, I imagine, survived the fall-out by being at Stowe. “Yes, I boarded. It was an OK time at an OK school. It was a common-or-garden public school with everything that went with that; corporal punishment and the like.” It was at Stowe that he started to act. “I was good at it, I thought but, as I said, I avoided it. I had a fear of failure, my fear.”

Today his father is considered one of our greatest living playwrights. But Ed is keen to give Miriam her due. “When I was young it was my mother who was famous. She was the one that got stopped in supermarkets. To put it into context, there were only three television channels and she was on all three. Her programmes got nine million viewers. That’s Downton-ian in its proportions.” The situation changed once Shakespeare in Love came out. “That really struck a chord. Everyone recognised my father after that.”

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Even though his father was surrounded by actors and directors, Stoppard doesn’t remember meeting any of them. “No it wasn’t a glamorous upbringing in that sense. There wasn’t a rosta of people marching through the doors. My parents didn’t have huge parties. It all felt very normal really and, like I said, my mother really was the star, the tour de force.”

His father gave him his plays to read. “I loved that. I still love that. I’d go away with a pencil and put marks on them and then we’d discuss it all.” Did he make criticisms? “I think more suggestions. I don’t remember criticising anything. My father would then take them away and tell me he’d taken on board what I had said. He was very sweet like that.”

After university Stoppard went to Lamda and found his way. “I hadn’t acted at university so I was happy to lie on the floor for 45 minutes and breathe. I thought it was great but other friends of mine had been Lear and they were furious and wondered why they were doing it.” In 2009 he starred in a West End revival of his father’s play, Arcadia. “It was a lovely time because he writes so beautifully and every line was a joy. I got over it eventually, that pressure.” Have any of his siblings become actors? “No,” he says shaking his head vigorously. “My eldest brother is a postman [half-brother Oliver gave up postgraduate work for a simpler life], but one of my other brothers works for my mother.”

His mother is remarried, to the industrialist Sir Christopher Hogg, and his family has recently expanded again with his father’s third marriage to Sabrina Guinness. Interestingly, after so many divorces in the family, Ed Stoppard has been with his wife Amie for 20 years. He met her on a film set. “I was a runner on a film and she was the production assistant. She got to boss me around. I was her gofer. I still am.”

Today Amie works as a doula (a paid birth partner). The couple have three daughters and Stoppard says that when he is not working he spends his time being a dad. “I run them up to school and back from school and in between times I hang out at home.” He says he has no hobbies. “I do, however, have friends that whittle wood.”

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What he likes to do is talk to his wife about her job. “It’s fascinating. She supports women before, through and after the birth of their babies. She’s really good at it. When she first trained I thought it was an odd idea, very middle-class, but when I thought about it I realised that in fact being a doula is a very traditional role to take. We used to live in extended families and so we had support from others but our relationships have changed now.”

One can’t help wondering how it would feel to have the Stoppard clan at your hospital bed. He starts chuckling. “Could you imagine your extended family coming after the birth? Mother-in-law, sister, etc? It would be a nightmare wouldn’t it? That’s why we pay other people to do it. Might make a funny short film, eh? Families and all their toils and troubles?”
The final episode of Cilla goes out tonight on ITV at 9pm

Ed Stoppard: ‘As Tom Stoppard’s son, I had a fear of failure’ (2024)

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