“We are all subject to the yin and yang of love and pain,” says Hugh Bonneville with feeling, having recently experienced both.
He’s about to appear in the play Shadowlands as author CS Lewis, whose quiet life as an Oxford don was transformed by falling for American poet Joy Davidman, only to lose her to cancer.
“It’s really about the inevitability of suffering, but the hope that comes with late-flowering love, that everyone has a second bite at the cherry.”
It’s impossible to hear those words without thinking about what the actor has endured in recent years, including a triple bereavement, the end of a long marriage and the beginning of a new romance. Does the play resonate with him personally?
“Hugely. I lost my mum, my brother and then my dad in the space of eight years,” says this thoughtful, squarely handsome man of 62.
He wears a three-piece suit like one of the solid English gentlemen he often plays on screen, perhaps Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey or Mr Brown in the Paddington movies, but today the jacket is off, the white shirt is open at the neck and, after a flurry of good manners, Hugh settles down to speak openly and with surprising vulnerability.
Has he, like CS Lewis, found “late-flowering love”? “I have,” he says, pausing for a moment to consider his words.
“I want to be sensitive about what I say, because there is still a lot of rawness,” he says, meaning the after effects of separation and divorce from his wife Lucinda, known as Lulu, after 25 years.
“But I do feel very blessed and very content to have started a new chapter.”
Is Downton Abbey truly finished for good?
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they make some sort of spin-off, but no. Our company has left the building. The Grand Finale really was a farewell. As we came towards the end of filming, I would take a look around each set – let’s say the library – for the last time, so that I would be able to remember.”
He added: “I feel enormous love for Downton. Every single day a message comes through about what it meant to someone, so I’m enormously proud.”
Hugh’s partner Heidi Kadlecova, 54, made her first public appearance with him at the premiere of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale in September.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that he relishes the scenes in Shadowlands in which a younger woman explodes into the life of the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.
“Joy is a real firecracker compared to CS Lewis,” says Hugh.
“He lives this very sweet, rather calm bachelor life with his brother, they pootle around Oxford, drink beer with Tolkien and discuss their wonderful hinterland worlds. Then Joy bursts in and changes everything.”
The play by William Nicholson is funny at first, but the end is powerful. Joy dies and her young son Douglas is left bereaved and weeping with Lewis, who lost his mother at the same age.
The Christian writer struggles to reconcile what’s happening with his faith, until he looks back on their brief but intensely happy marriage and says: “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
Hugh says working on this story has brought old emotions back to the surface. “Some people have said: ‘Have you grieved properly?’ I don’t know. Do we ever? The other day I woke up really, vividly missing my mum.”
Shadowlands
Shadowlands opens at the Aldwych Theatre on 5 February 2026.
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(Hero image credit: Chris Floyd)
