MATERIALS GIRL His Dark Materials’

Charlotte Metcalf meets Emma Manners, the ‘Accidental’ Duchess of Rutland

PORTRAIT BY ALEXANDRA DAO

IN BRIEF

MICHELIN STAR OR COUNTRY PUB? One of my favourite pubs is the Chequers at Woolsthorpe

THEATRE OR GARDENING? Musicals take me back to when I was training as a singer. The Belvoir gardens are too huge for me to be more than just visionary.

WINE OR TEA? Defi nitely wine, but I couldn’t go without Earl Grey and we now have our own Duchess tea and are starting to bottle wine from our vineyards.

CAT OR DOG? Shih Tzus, labradors, westies and a blind pug – all like unruly children.

‘G oodness knows why I wrote it!’ chuckles Emma Manners, Duchess of Rutland, ‘I just didn’t think it through.’ At Scarfes Bar we’re chatting about her highly entertaining memoir The Accidental Duchess (Pan Macmillan, £9.99). It comprises a warts-and-all portrait of her marriage, motherhood and the uphill slog of ‘living above the shop’ at Belvoir Castle.

Indeed, she begins once chapter ‘Was I a monster?’ after unfortunately overhearing a conversation between castle staff hoping to ‘break’ her.

Emma dashed off the book in three months, after dispatching her youngest son, Hugo, to university. She says it was a ‘full on, very emotional and cathartic process’.

I am not surprised, given she lays bare various marital humiliations and her recent nervous breakdown. ‘When you’re really hurt, you must try not to let your ego get in the way,’ she says, ‘you have to get your head around the situation and accept it.’ She’s talking about the Duke’s 50th birthday party, a lavish affair which she organised at Belvoir with hundreds of guests. When Emma joyfully asked her husband to dance, he said was ‘busy’ and walked away, cruelly negligent as to who witnessed his wife’s utter mortifi cation. It heralded the end of their relationship.

Luckily for Emma, the characteristics that best defi ne her are optimism, resilience, a positive attitude and sense of purpose, enabling her to make the most of her life and role as the chatelaine of a dauntingly vast historic pile. ‘My upbringing was very pragmatic,’ she explains, ‘and I need practical people around me who just kick on and don’t get daunted by challenges.’ Though Emma is in another happy relationship, for the sake of her family’s and Belvoir’s stability, she didn’t divorce David and they remain on good terms, living in different wings of the castle but coming together every Sunday for lunch with the family.

When Emma met David Manners in London at a friend’s dinner party in the 1980s, she was immediately drawn to him and let him drive her home. An attempted kiss as he dropped her off was met with a swift slap. Only after buckets of red roses appeared at her parent’s home, did her friend point out that David was not a publican, as she assumed from his card, which read ‘Marquis of Granby’.

‘Like most people, I’d never even met an hon before, let alone a marquis, and David was so personable and humble, not at all entitled.’ Emma softened. They married and on his father’s death, David inherited the title and they moved into the magnifi cent if forbidding castle.

Thirty years and fi ve children later, Emma remains Belvoir’s driving force, towing it into the 21st century as a commercial enterprise, opening it to visitors, with a thriving retail village and pizza outlet in the old engine yard.

‘I tend to go at everything at 100mph and don’t really let people get close,’ she says, ‘but that’s changed since my breakdown.’ One day, fi ve years ago, Emma simply needed time out and alone. She walked across the castle to her late mother-in-law’s bedroom and didn’t emerge for months. She’s remarkably open with me, admitting she’s put herself back together in a different version of herself, relying on daily meditation, regular contact with a spiritual counsellor and spending time ‘in a private corner’ at least once a year. Meanwhile, she continues her ‘day job’ as Belvoir’s custodian. ‘Downton Abbey romanticised the aristocracy but I want to shine a light on the daily lives of the hardworking British women in private heritage. Every day we go into battle to juggle the tax man, health and safety, dry rot, the roof.’ If anyone has lifted the lid on the realities of today’s aristocracy it’s Emma, with her books, television series (one on Belvoir’s Capability Brown landscape with Alan Titchmarsh) and commercial ventures. There’s also her podcast, in which she interviews other chatelaines, and she’s planning a third series with her oldest daughter Violet, talking to people working at Belvoir.

Emma grew up in a cosy house, poetically named Heartsease, deep in rural Wales, which is partly why she considers herself an ‘accidental duchess’. ‘The most important words in my life are still probably “hard work”,’ she says, ‘but the wonderful thing is I had such a happy childhood that it gave me the foundations to cope with whatever comes next.’ Her childhood pony, Betty, imbued her with a lifelong love of horses – earlier this year she rode with 20 other women 80 miles across Radnor, sleeping in barns and swimming in lakes. ‘We ended up on the Welsh beach where my parents had a blissful house and it was an amazing way to reconnect with my childhood.’

Family remains paramount. ‘Charles, my eldest son, is 23, and will inherit and take Belvoir forward,’ she concludes. ‘This memoir isn’t about me but about what these 1,200 heritage British houses mean for local communities. And it’s the women who’ve helped sustain them for future generations. We always have and we always will. I certainly intend to. It’s my life’s work.’ duchessthepodcast.com n

Materials GIRL

As the final instalment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials comes to our screen this December, HARRIET COMPSTON meets its stand-out star Dafne Keen to talk growing up, grief and her first on-screen kiss

FASHION DIRECTOR NICOLE SMALLWOOD PHOTOGRAPHER RACHELL SMITH

Jacket Haze of Monk Skirt David Koma Boots Christian Louboutin Chair Fritz Hansen @ The

Conran Shop

Skirt and top Prada Bodysuit Encommùn

t’s the fashion market at Portobello today. Dafne Keen admits that if she wasn’t here, in production at a central London hotel, then she would be trawling the stalls of W11. ‘The charity shops are so good. I can’t deal with it,’ says the 17-year-old British-Spanish actor, who also likes to make her own clothes. But, instead, we’re talking about HBO/BBC’s highly successful adaptation of Philip Pullman’s epic His Dark Materials trilogy in which she plays heroine Lyra Belacqua who, as Pullman puts it, is ‘destined to bring about the end of destiny’.

For Dafne, the role started with a jellyfish. She was on a tiny island off the coast of Puerto Rico when the makers of His Dark Materials contacted her asking for an audition tape. ‘I was about to do it when I was like “let me go and have a swim in the ocean”. I got stung by a Caribbean jellyfish. So, I did the tape in this dark room with no lamps, bad Wifi, bad quality with a rash over my face.’ It obviously didn’t matter. Dafne got the part. ‘Lyra is a very complicated character,’ says Dafne, who, in her role, also tackles complex emotions such as loss, abandonment and grief. ‘There were lots of conversations about how a young girl would react to death. What was so interesting and good to put together was that Lyra continued to mourn for all three seasons. She finally gets closure but usually when characters in films get that, that’s it. And it really isn’t. Life, death, love, loss. You still feel the pain of it.’ The final season follows Lyra and fellow adventurer, Will Parry (Amir Wilson), as they continue to battle across a series of parallel universes, amid a swirl of witches, spectres and dark matter. It also sees Lyra and Will become more than friends – a storyline that resulted in Dafne’s firstever romantic scene. ‘It was wild – but fine because I’ve known Amir for years. We have great chemistry when we act together. He is a delight, super talented and super respectful. It was very interesting to navigate sexuality, which I have never done before on camera. I think we did a really good job of it without sexualising Lyra, without her just becoming an object of desire.’

The topic of desire in her roles will surely become even more pertinent, I say, as Dafne gets older. She agrees. ‘It starts happening when you begin looking like a woman. People treat you differently. I have never had anyone try to flirt with me on set, anyone say I am beautiful on set or talk about how to make my character look more attractive. I’ve never experienced being a woman in the industry. Until now. It’s really formative, bizarre and amazing. It’s also very weird and sometimes bad. But, ultimately, I am so grateful that I get to do acting.’

Born in Madrid in 2005 to English actor Will Keen and Galician writer, actress and theatre director María Fernández Ache, Dafne

Lace body, top and skirt Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini. Boots Christian

Louboutin

Blazer, trousers, bra and pants Miu Miu

Cap and dress

Stella McCartney

Boots Jimmy Choo

grew up in London for a few years before returning to Spain. ‘It was madness,’ she says of her upbringing. ‘My parents were always improv’ing. One of them would be writing a play, the other acting in it… They taught me that the glitz and glam of acting is nice, but my job is to show up on set, know my lines, do it as well as I can and try and tell a story.’ Her parents also gave her a great education in old movies – Some Like It Hot is her favourite film and Jack Lemmon her actor role model.

Dafne made her screen debut aged nine alongside her father in The Refugees, a sci-fi drama about a Spanish family who take in a group of refugees from the future. ‘My dad had to [spoiler alert] kill me in the film. He was traumatised. I was milking it. The fake blood tasted like strawberries. I was having a great time.’ Dafne’s mother was on set coaching her. ‘It was the three of us, a little family business. Really fun.’ Three years later, Dafne landed the lead role in Logan, opposite Hugh Jackman (‘the loveliest, most talented and charismatic man ever’) in his swansong as Wolverine. The film was packed with stunts – a perfect fit for Dafne who has been practicing aerial silks since she was tiny. Hugh recalls: ‘There’s a scene where Dafne punches me in the arm. I went home with bruises.’ Her compelling performance earned her the 17th spot in The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the 50 Greatest Superhero Movie Performances of All Time. Logan catapulted Dafne into the spotlight. ‘It was really terrifying, really daunting.’ Couple that with the usual teenage challenges. ‘Being young is complicated. Everyone feels very intimidated by everyone. I think some boys feel emasculated by the fact that I am successful. Some love it, some just feel indifferent about it. Anyone around my age is just going to be immature. So I just have to cope with it basically.’ She also has to contend with social media which, unsurprisingly, she describes as ‘a really dangerous place for young people’. Fortunately, Dafne has enough to distract her. She is into street photography – most recently, shooting her way around Paris where she stayed up all night and watched the sunrise from the Louvre. She draws, too, keeping a sketchbook on her at all times and loves music (right now, she is having a ‘huge’ 50s jazz moment, last week it was 90s New York rap). She also wrote a novel last year and a few short films, including one that she is directing. With so many interests, is acting her future ambition? ‘I don’t want to stop acting ever.’ Her next project is ‘top top secret… with lots of stunt action’– but whatever it is, going by Dafne’s track record, it will pack a punch.

The eight-episode final season of His Dark Materials will debut this December on BBC and be available to stream on BBC iPlayer. n