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Bafta-winning actor Jason Watkins has reflected on the loss of his two-year-old daughter, who died suddenly from undiagnosed sepsis.
The 62-year-old and his wife Clara Francis lost their daughter Maude on New Year’s Day in 2011 as a result of a life-threatening reaction to an infection. Their grief was the subject of the 2023 ITV documentary, Jason & Clara: In Memory of Maudie.
Watkins admitted he found it difficult to return to work after the loss. “I was thinking, ‘What is the point of this pretending?’” he told the i.
However, although he continued working for financial reasons, he says it doubled up as therapy. “I think it was being somebody else or having somebody else’s thoughts,” he says. “It was work that was all-consuming.”
The father of four has two children from a previous marriage and two other children with Francis, his wife. He says that bereavement has changed him as a person.
“I was very selfish [before]. You have to be thick-skinned in this business,” he said. “The pain you have suffered can be slightly ameliorated. You can’t go into a hole. You keep going forward. It’s opened up a different world for me.”
The couple have since been involved with bereavement and sepsis awareness charities, and was responsible for the documentary that aired in 2023.
But, he continued, the grieving process has remained difficult.
He said: “When we were looking through Maude’s things with our friend I was thinking, ‘Is this a good thing to be doing?’ We knew it would be difficult but because we were in charge of telling the story it was bearable.”
In an interview on Good Morning Britain last year, Watkins opened up about the difficult emotions that come with the loss of a child.
“We are an imperfect family who have survived the worst thing that can happen to a parent,” he said, adding that the documentary aimed to show that families “can survive” such a loss.
“It’s indescribable, the sense of guilt, loss, the absence of your child, the light of your life is gone and you don’t know how you can go on.”
Watkins is starring in The Seagull at the Barbican and said that the play touches on philosophical questions about the state of the world.
He believes we have collectively become “more obsessed with ourselves and what we think we deserve. There is this navel gazing when the world is burning. We laugh at that [in the play].”
