Hugh Hudson's reflections on Cheswardine Hall

Hugh Hudson's Reflections on Cheswardine Hall

Transcript of the Mail on Sunday article, 29th July 2001

Hugh Hudson, Director of ‘Chariots of Fire’ and ‘Greystoke’, reveals the secret scandal which wrecked his family, bankrupted his father and still haunts him.

My Grandfather Made Love To My Father's Wife. It Tore Us Apart, Says Blair Film Boss: Exclusive: Hugh Hudson, Director Of Chariots Of Fire And Greystoke, Reveals The Secret Scandal Which Wrecked His Family, Bankrupted His Father And Still Haunts Him

Mail on Sunday, The (London, England) - July 29, 2001

OSCAR-nominated film director Hugh Hudson, who made Chariots Of Fire and Greystoke, has revealed an extraordinary family scandal in which his grandfather, then a High Sheriff and thought to be above reproach, had a passionate affair with his father's first wife.

The traumatic fallout from the bizarre sexual liaison put the family at war and ended in Hudson's father being disinherited and stripped of land and property worth millions of pounds. It left him almost bankrupt and led to him taking a job as a farm labourer and eventually dying in penury.

Although his grandfather's act effectively disinherited Hugh Hudson too, the elegant Old Etonian is today a millionaire many times over and one of the most celebrated film directors of his age, laden with Hollywood movie honours. However, he confesses he remains scarred for life over the divisions caused by the scandal concealed by the British class system he despises.

Hudson - who is credited by Tony Blair with helping to turn the political tide in Labour's favour with his groundbreaking political film Walking On The Cliffs, made for Neil Kinnock in 1993 - says that his upbringing damaged his relationship with his own son. This has caused him such anguish and pain he now feels he cannot return to the grand Devon farmhouse, set in 500 acres, he once shared with his ex-wife Susan, from whom he was divorced six years ago after constant separations caused by his work.

'It's a monstrous thing to make love to your son's wife, like a castration,' says Hudson today, speaking for the first time about the scandal. 'My grandfather arranged a marriage between my father, his eldest son, and his own mistress, without telling my father she was his mistress.

When my father found out he let it be known what had happened, and that my grandfather had continued the affair after the marriage.

'My grandfather was so infuriated it was impossible for him to forgive my father. Instead of taking the blame himself, he blamed my father - for making him feel guilty. It was all about guilt. So he disinherited my father for the sin of bringing the scandal to light. Our family never recovered from it.'

People who lie are always found out, Hudson believes.

'There is no way it could have remained hidden but my grandfather refused to recognise that, so he sent my father away and caused an enormous amount of pain, which was to affect me and, indirectly, my son for the rest of our lives. I had a bad relationship with my father, no relationship at all with my grandfather who died when I was four, and I've never been back to what was the family home.' Hugh Hudson - who was expected to go into the City or become a lawyer, not a groundbreaking filmmaker - came from what he calls 'A typical upper middle class family'. His grandfather Ralph Charles Donaldson-Hudson was High Sheriff of Shropshire in the early Twenties, and a distinguished member of the county council. The family seat was Cheswardine Hall in the tiny village of Cheswardine, near Market Drayton.

'There was a big house and land in north Shropshire,' says Hudson.

'My grandfather was a landowner, farmer and industrialist. What happened to us was a perfect example of Victorian double standards, particularly among the landowners and men who made their money from industry. They built their lives on appearances and couldn't or wouldn't let go of what they believed was theirs, and I mean not just the land, but the women. 'This woman is mine', my grandfather was saying, 'it's my right, 'Droit de seigneur'.

Just because she is married to my son doesn't mean she no longer goes to bed with me'.

'So when my father found out and made a fuss, my grandfather disinherited him, took away all his rights to the land, money and property, and by doing so excluded me too. I was effectively disinherited when my father was, and excluded from the family home.

'My mother was my father's second wife and it was her second marriage too.

She married my father knowing about the scandal, because she wanted to be with him. But that marriage didn't last long and I had practically no relationship at all with my father.

'In fact, my whole family disintegrated. All our lives overturned and nothing was ever the same again, thanks to my grandfather.

That influenced my whole life.

'You want to look up to your grandparents, you want to like them and remember them with affection and respect. But my paternal grandfather was not somebody to be looked up to. I don't remember him, and there was never any connection, apart from the fact that, thanks to the largesse of the family and his estate, I was sent to Eton, which I hated.

'The school was very archaic and there was a great deal of sadism. It was run by the boys, which you could argue was a good thing. You learned very fast how to deal with people. But I didn't want my son to go there. He went to a private school in Devon, where I lived when I was married.

'Zac Goldsmith has since bought the house. I can't bear to go back to it now. I don't really want to see what's been done there . . . it's better just to let go.' Carrying his dark secret for decades, Hugh Hudson now admits that the estrangement between father and son is a theme, which has driven his best work.

Chariots Of Fire was his first movie and won four Oscars including Best Film. It tells how Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams achieved Olympic victory against all the odds.

Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes, starring Christopher Lambert and Andie Mac-Dowell, was a lush spectacular directed and produced by Hudson and based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's famous novel, Tarzan, Lord Of The Jungle. It follows the orphan John Clayton, heir to Lord Greystoke (Ralph Richardson in his last role), who, after being shipwrecked, lives first with the apes, then returns to Scotland, his grandfather's castle and his aristocratic roots. On the film notes, Hugh Hudson refers to the young man's return to so-called civilisation as 'More threatening than the savage world he left behind him'.

Family, its discovery and loss, is the prime motivation in the film.

At the time Hugh Hudson said: 'It's the theme that interested me. The haphazard nature of birth. The fact that Tarzan-Clayton is born into a noble family but lives in an environment where he has to struggle to survive.

Then he is plonked down in the 'civilised' world and finally realises it is not the place for him. The real power of the story is he won't conform, he's his own man, the same as Chariots really.' Hugh Hudson is a secretive man who has traditionally shunned interviews, and perhaps self-examination.

He says the nearest he got to having therapy himself was while making Greystoke, when he hired a psychiatrist to help him understand not only the interfamily relationships of the movie, but his own.

'I realise now I was trying to work out something for myself,' he says.

'It was probably why I was so drawn to the script. And from the psychiatrist, who was a very clever man, I learned a lot. I've never been in therapy myself, but I see now I've always tried to deal with the issues of father-son relationships, or lack of them, in my films. Filmmaking has been my therapy.

'I'm afraid we all repeat patterns. My family is completely fragmented.

Both my parents were married to other people before they married each other, and were only married to each other for a few years. In the end my mother was married four times.

'When my mother wanted to leave her first husband and marry my father she already had two children and, shockingly, the court separated the children.

My half-brother was sent to live with his father and my half-sister, who is ten years older than me, came to live with my mother and father before I was born. My mother, because she wanted to marry my father but already had two children, was told by the judge she was a 'scarlet woman', labelled for life.

Absolutely appalling, and I think my half-brother always held it against the family that he was separated from his sister.' He adds: 'My own pain was not direct. It came through my parents. For a long time, after the Army - I went into the Tank Regiment for National Service - I lived with my mother in Chelsea. Then I married and went to live in Devon, where my son was born. I didn't move back into the house where I live now until my mother died.

'I hardly saw my father at all and he died of cancer at the age of 64. It is one of my great regrets that I never got together with him. I wasn't encouraged to do so.

'He was like an outcast in his own family and was a failed man in his own terms. In the end my father went back to the land after many years and became a smallholder and a farm labourer to the end of his life.

'The biggest sadness I have,' Hugh Hudson says, 'Is that I may have done the same thing to my own son Thomas Hudson. I suppose to overcome the lack of human achievement of my father I compensated by trying to achieve something for myself. I don't know if this is a correct analysis, but it is a pattern and it is only in the last few years that I have realised how I repeated the same pattern and it's a terrible lesson.

'There is something in the fact that when your parents don't achieve, you set yourself impossible targets. But in dedicating my own life to my work so selfishly for so long I put my marriage under terrible strain, and ended up perpetrating the same pattern of betrayal and non-communication with my own son and he is only just beginning to forgive me.' Thomas is now 22 and a photography student. For 18 years he lived with his mother at their farm in Tavistock, which was sold as part of the divorce settlement. Hudson has had Thomas living with him for the past year. Hudson's current girlfriend, actress Maryam d'Abo, has her own home.

'Now Tom and I are living under the same roof we're beginning to talk,' Hudson says carefully. 'There was a lot of anger. Tom felt I'd let him down because my work came first. He and Susan never came with me when I travelled and I was always travelling.

'There is no medicine for the hurts of the past, which you can't undo, and perhaps the wounds will never heal.

But I am trying, and maybe it will get better. He doesn't want to take my help or my money, and in a way that's good, I respect that. Perhaps just talking and being with him will help.'

Recalling his early days in films he says: 'When work dominated my life, I didn't think about anyone else. I don't know what made me want to make films in the first place. I wanted to tell stories I suppose, and I've always been able to make things look beautiful, but I realise now I should not have left my wife and child alone so much.

'It might have been better if we had separated ten years before we did.

Better for her anyway, it would have given her more chance of a life. As it is I hope I can help give my son a chance at a life.' He has strong feelings about political changes, particularly those, which have taken place over the past century, and the shift in the balance of power within the British class system.

'My family history is a parable of the English class system and how it has changed,' he admits. 'It took 100 years and two world wars to alter the balance of power and ownership. It's a good thing it did, but it took too long.' When I suggest his own family scandal is a more powerful personal way to tell that story than any he could invent, he smiles and says: 'In my view I've got four more good films in me - that just might be one of them.' Using his undoubted skills to tell the story on film may be the way for Hugh Hudson to repair the terrible damage wrought by his grandfather all those years ago.

- Hugh Hudson talks about the family drama which has underscored his life and work in Part Two of the new series called When I'm Sixty Four, presented by Hunter Davies on BBC Radio Four at 9am on August 7.

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