Dame Harriet Walter at the BAFTA ‘s 2024 (Image: WireImage)
Succession star Harriet Waters has revealed she doesn’t date men who aren’t famous because they don’t understand what it is like to be an actor.
The 74-year-old star of The Crown and Killing Eve, plays Margaret Thatcher in her latest TV role, ‘Brian and Maggie’ about the former Prime Minister’s final TV interview with iconic broadcaster Brian Waldren, played by Steve Coogan, which starts later this month to stream and watch live on Channel 4.
She said: “I tried dating civilians but it didn’t work. But they don’t really get that work is play, and play is work.
“One guy said, ‘Can I see you next weekend?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m working.’ He said, ‘Oh, poor you.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, he doesn’t understand. This is what I like to do.’ I live to work rather than work to live.
“My job takes me abroad, into amazing adventures. “You can’t have two ambitious people in a marriage, I don’t think. That doesn’t work in the end.”
Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher in new Channel 4 TV series with Steve Coogan. (Image: PA)
From playing a sarcastic British mother in Succession, to Dasha Duzran, the assassin-mentor of Villanelle in Killing Eve, “which, funnily enough, is the part that gets me recognised in the street now, more than I’ve ever been before” Harriet is TV hot property.
But she has found her love life has run less smoothly than her stellar career.“It’s very difficult to embark on a love affair in later life.
“When you’re young, that’s what everything’s aimed at. Music culture, party culture, club culture. It’s all about getting a partner. Whereas when you’re older, it’s much harder to see the signals. You develop links as a friend and think, ‘Is this going to turn into something else?’”Harriet eventually married in 2011 at aged 60 to Guy Paul.
Before then she was with Rumpole of the Bailey actor Peter Blythe from 1996 to his death in 2004.
She had elationship in her twenties, but admits she felt repelled by domesticity.
“Maybe it’s a cowardly thing I did: I ran away from the responsibility of having a family, because I do think it’s a big bind and I just didn’t want that.”