‘Every family has silences’: Kathryn Hunter on despair, desire, dislodgeable limbs – and her acting genius

Kathryn Hunter pulls off her black beanie and sits down. She hates having to keep still: “It’s torture.” On aeroplanes, she is always in the aisle, bobbing up and down. She has an inner restlessness, an energy looking for the right outlet – one that even eight hours of rehearsing hasn’t quieted. With the beanie, a body warmer and a cup of builders’ tea, the acclaimed actor looks as if she is on a break at a construction site. She is working on a stage adaptation of Eurotrash, Christian Kracht’s novel about a mother, played by Hunter, who is accompanied on the final trip of her life by her son, played by Ben Whishaw. As the pair come to terms with their dark past – and Europe’s – they must confront what Hunter describes as a “hinterland of silence”. In this case, it stems from the family’s Nazi ties, but Hunter believes “people will relate to it … in that every family has silences”. Working on the play has got her thinking about her own mother – and about the actor Marcello Magni, the co-founder of Complicité theatre and the love of Hunter’s life, who died in 2022 at 63. We are talking in a rehearsal studio in south-east London, surrounded by fur coats, tweedy suits and flattened Toblerone wrappers (the play is set in Switzerland). Hunter, 69, is known for her deep, cigarette-fuelled gravel, but in private she is more softly spoken. At work, her voice is protean; she plucks at words and leaves them vibrating. She can oscillate between a boom and a squeak (as King Lear at the Globe in 2022), a whisper and a caw (as all three witches in Joel Coen’s 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth). On TV, she is steely as Eedy Karn in Andor and as Sue’s gruff best friend in Ann Droid. But the silence in Eurotrash? “That kind of silence can cause trauma,” she says. “It’s not natural, is it? It’s not healthy.” Four years ago, Hunter ended her own long silence by clarifying that the life-changing injuries she suffered at 23 were not the result of a car accident, as was widely reported, but a suicide attempt. It was a sort of “coming out”, she says: “To come clean and make the plea for people in trouble to reach out and break silence … and rediscover the miracle that life can be.” She wants others to know that suicidal feelings “can be healed and it’s not something to be ashamed of; anyone can fall through the loop”. She continues: “I don’t think people want to die. I mean, of course you do. But then if you can just be …” She inches a hand along the table towards me, grips my phone and turns it fractionally. In a sense, her honesty is a reorientation – it reflects “a duty to connect” and “a gratitude for having come through”. During their relationship, Magni “met my big depressions in a kind of: ‘Oh,’” she says, pulling a mildly curious face. What does she mean? “Without the sophistication of psycho-da-da-da. He listened and attended and kind of pulled me up through his optimism. But not in a false way. Waiting. Holding. Not even sentimental. Just being there.” Hunter made the attempt on her life long before they met. She was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada), having graduated in French and drama from the University of Bristol. “What I remember about the depression is just sort of shutting down,” she says. In her suicide attempt, she broke her back, her pelvis and one arm. “I have one foot where a bit is missing. My toes are like that,” she says, crabbing her fingers on the table. “And I have an arm that is distorted because it’s set wrong.” Mental healthcare “was not in the domain” then: “When I ended up in hospital, I remember it was sort of like [as] a criminal.” She had so many scars and wounds that, when she saw herself in the mirror, “I thought: ‘Oh my God, it looks like a knitting pattern.’” She was in a wheelchair for months and had to use a colostomy bag. One day, the Rada principal, Hugh Cruttwell, visited her. In his white suit, he shimmered before Hunter’s hospital bed like an angel. She asked him if she could return to Rada. When she went back, her fellow students didn’t know what had happened. “They were all in their own world,” she says. Hunter has said before that an actor must find each character’s body. Now, she had to figure out how to inhabit her own altered form. She had always been hypermobile, happy “to pop out [my limbs] and sling them around”. (“I don’t dislodge my joints now that I’m getting older,” she adds.) She discovered her flexibility as a child while watching a contortionist on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. She thought: maybe I could do that. And she did, right there on the floor. But now a different kind of flexibility was required. Never mind the limp, she realised: “I’ve got this whole upper body to play with.” She twists an arm, waggles her fingers. It was almost a provocation: “You can only express yourself with one arm! Or an elbow!” She became keenly alive to her body’s possibilities. Hunter is known for her groundbreaking performances of radical physicality – skills she honed at Complicité, where “you could play a deer or a lamp-post or a kettle or a king”. As the witches in Coen’s Macbeth, for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best supporting actress, she is otherworldly, feet hooked around her head. Her primate in the 2009 solo play Kafka’s Monkey did the splits. As Richard III, in 2003, she leaned into her asymmetries. Working with Peter Brook, she pared back her physicality, intensifying each gesture. *** Hunter began acting at university. The first time she stepped on stage, as an undergraduate at Bristol, she was riveted: “There was everybody: designers, lighting, costume, and we were all doing the same thing. I thought: wow … oh, wow. All these people telling a story. And I felt that little click.” She is staring into space. “You’re saying the lines and … I feel as if I’m plugged into lots of people.” Her hands reach out, those slim, stark fingers miming prongs in search of sockets. One time, she said a simple line in a French play – “Oui, Madame de Montmartre” – “and people roared with laughter. And I thought: ‘This is what I want. This is it.’” But why laughter? “That something you have said can trigger – and I remember the sensation to this day – can trigger this warmth and hilarity.” Hunter’s childhood home was not one of song, drama and dance. Her Greek parents “were wonderful people”, but “it was quite fraught … it was an arranged marriage and unfortunately a very, very unhappy marriage. It was like a war zone.” Was she closer to her mum or her dad? “Ooohhhhh,” she says, drawing out the exclamation till her voice vanishes. “I think what I remember is wishing they would be nice to each other, or happy, which was sort of impossible.” Hunter’s father was a shipping magnate, as was her mother’s father, from the island of Oinousses, in the Aegean sea. Hunter and her twin sister, Angela, were born in New York, the youngest of four. The family moved to London when Hunter was two. Hunter’s real name is Aikaterini Hadjipateras, but she changed it professionally after Cruttwell asked her: “Do you want to play the full spectrum of roles or just gypsies?” She wasn’t offended. “It was how the industry worked.” She and Angela are close. “Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very close,” she says, tightly interlacing two fingers. Angela visited hospital daily after Hunter’s suicide attempt; a few years ago, when Hunter had lung cancer, she cared for her again. Hunter is a trustee of Zalala, the charity Angela founded to support education for girls in Mozambique. When Hunter and Angela were girls, their grandmother drew up lists of “eligible men”: “Not only did you have to marry somebody Greek, but from that island.” But while their contemporaries got married in their early 20s, she and Angela escaped this fate because their mother was “wild”. Wild? “I mean, fiercely intelligent. She would listen to all the shipping stuff. And because she was so bright, she picked it up. When her father died, she inherited a lot of money and then she said to my eldest brother [the shipping magnate John Hadjipateras]: ‘Let’s go into business together, you and me …’” It was 1972 and few women ventured into tanking. “She was a feminist without knowing she was a feminist.” Their mother’s unconventional behaviour gave them “enormous licence”, so the list of eligible partners didn’t last long. Hunter’s parents divorced and her mother “had several very strong friendships with women”. I can’t help wondering if Hunter’s lifelong obsession with King Lear – whom she first loved at 13 and went on to play in 1997 and 2022 under the director Helena Kaut-Howson – stemmed from the family’s shipping dynasty and the sense of legacy. But she puts me right: “No. It was Lear going out into the storm. As an adolescent raging against the status quo, family, I completely connected with that. I became obsessed.” She won’t rule out playing Lear again. Hunter is one of the UK’s most acclaimed Shakespearean actors, but she is best known for leading men. Maybe the blended identities of her childhood – she is hazy about whether Greek or English was her first language – and her mother’s independence, her readiness to break the mould, opened in Hunter a personal borderlessness, a heightened permeability to other experiences. “I remember that if somebody told me their story I found it unbearable,” she says. “It was like it had happened to me.” A sort of empathy overload? “As you grow older, you try to put a shield on. I think, as an actor, you have to have both an elephant skin and be completely skinless and raw. But I don’t know why the male thing. Maybe you’re right – it was unconsciously going: I don’t want to be that little woman. Maybe it was.” She met Magni when she joined Complicité in 1988 (she won an Olivier award for The Visit three years later). While they were on tour, “I declared myself”, Hunter says. “I said: ‘I’m in love with you,’ and he said: ‘Well, thank you, that’s amazing. But I’m not in love with you.’ I said: ‘Don’t worry, you will be …’ “Did you ever see Marcello?” she asks. “An amazing charisma and electricity. Passion. A fierce precision and instinct. [The French acting coach] Jacques Lecoq called him a devil in a box. It was just a dream to play together, to learn from each other. He directed me, I directed him. I have to be grateful. We had 37 years together.” Hunter didn’t see the point of getting married. When Magni proposed, she said: “Wonderful, darling, but what for?” It was while playing Cleopatra in 2010 – a rare female lead – that she realised what Cleopatra really wanted. Political power, of course. But beyond that, “the certainty of this man”. Hunter rang Magni, who was on stage in Amsterdam, and left a voicemail saying: “Yeah, well, shall we get married?” That sounds like some voicemail, I say. “He didn’t like the phone much, but he did respond to that,” she says. They got married in 2011. Magni died four years ago of prostate cancer. “The irony was that I was very ill,” say Hunter, who had just recovered from lung cancer. “I almost had survivor’s guilt, because everybody was going: ‘Oh dear, Kathryn.’ I thought: well, I’m 63. It’s not bad. But, miraculously, I came through. “If I’m really honest, I still haven’t computed his death. I replay it nearly every day. I have lost other people and, of course, I thought about death; I tried to kill myself. But I have to confess that I never really thought about death properly until Marcello died.” In Eurotrash, she embodies a character close to the end. She says it has taught her what Magni felt “in those last 10 days that death was sitting on him”. Has it been therapeutic? “I think so, in terms of the stories that one chooses to tell as one gets older. I was touched by that: how do you do an ending?” She can’t help thinking of Brook, with whom she worked six times. “Finally, when you just got to sit still, you realised there was only one thing he thought was interesting on stage – and that was you.” • Eurotrash is at the Young Vic, London, from 13 November to 9 January • In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org • Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here