From Trot to Thatcher: the life of Kika Markham

In a varied career, the actress Kika Markham has regularly played real-life charcters, including, on television, Mrs Thatcher — piquant casting for a lifelong anti-capitalist — and memorably on the stage, in David Hare’s The Permanent Way. the novelist Nina Bawden, survivor of the Potters Bar rail crash in which her husband, Austen Kark died.

Markham’s memoir of her life over 30 years with her actor husband Corin Redgrave focuses on the traumatic period, following his recovery from prostate cancer, when in 2005 he suffered a heart attack, causing significant memory loss until his death five years later from an aneurysm on the brain. It somewhat recalls Bawden’s own exploration of grief in her book Dear Austen, in which she describes how — when the truth finally sinks in that the dead do not return — the bereaved initially feel ‘like suddenly being alone in a desert … with no future in sight.