British actress Sophie Ward is a woman who has always been ahead of the curve.
Born in 1964, the daughter of actor parents, she began acting lessons as a small child, and by the age of 10 had her first professional role in a British television play. In 1994, Ward starred in a TV adaptation of Joanna Trollope’s novel A Village Affair, about a married woman with children who falls in love with another woman. And in December 1996 – at a time when Ellen DeGeneres was still in the closet – Ward caused a tabloid uproar in Britain by coming out as a lesbian herself.
Ward and her partner, Korean-American writer Rena Brannan, had a wedding ceremony in 2000, before same-sex civil partnerships were legalized in Britain. Currently, Ward is a patron of the GLBT support organization London Friend.
But Ward did not always know she was gay. At 23 she married a man she had met at 19, and became stepmother to a son from his previous marriage. It wasn’t until her late 20s that she began to grapple with the possibility that she might be a lesbian.
Around this time, she was offered a television role that she felt passionate about, as Alice Jordan in A Village Affair. The role was and remains the only gay one that she has played, although Ward admits, laughing, “People who know me have looked at my work and said ‘Well, you were gay in that, too.’ But officially, that’s the only time.”
She says that she didn’t feel nervous about taking the role. “I read the book [on which the adaptation was based], and of course I knew it had so much truth in it. So I absolutely was drawn,” she said. “I mean, you know, it’s not very often you get asked to do something where you think straight away ‘Oh, well this is actually really interesting, because I know this. This is true.'”
Ward continues: “There wasn’t a lot of television at that time that was featuring lesbian stories, particularly anything that had some grounding in reality. A Village Affair wasn’t just about, you know, beautiful women kissing each other necessarily, it was about some of the pain about coming out and being who you are, and trying to figure it all out.”
The program was groundbreaking for its time, and featured a hopeful ending of sorts for Alice. But it would not show her living happily ever after with her female lover, Clodagh (played by Kerry Fox).
“There’s so much sackcloth and ashes surrounding lesbian love stories,” Ward says, and admits that the ending of A Village Affair, in which Alice decides to give Clodagh up, does not makes sense to her. “I must say, I still don’t understand why they didn’t stay together,” she says with a laugh. “It seemed like they were going to have a great time. Clodagh had all these plans for a farmhouse in France, and I thought ‘That sounds amazing!’
I used to have a lot of conversations with Kerry saying ‘Well why? Why isn’t my character just saying ‘That sounds fantastic!'”
In real life, Ward has ended up happily ever after with a woman, and she says that the experience of making A Village Affair helped to clarify her feelings. “It certainly made me more sure of what I already thought, which was that I probably was gay,” she says.
But it also caused her to delay her coming-out announcement. “I felt like it would look really weird,” Ward admits, “as though I’d just done a television program and then decided ‘Oh, hey, that’s me!’ And I didn’t want it to seem as though I was trying to jump on some sort of bandwagon, or get publicity for the show, or anything horrible like that.”
She muses, “Of course, there was such a weird symmetry between the story of the character I was playing and my own life that it was unavoidable that comparisons would be drawn. But I was trying to leave some clear space between the TV program and my own life.”
Before A Village Affair, Ward’s acting roles varied widely, and though she was drawn to acting from an early age ? “I was keen on it ever since I was tiny-tiny,” she says ? she also tried out other creative possibilities.
As a child, “I’d already started putting on my own plays, and bossing people about basically,” she says with a laugh. Soon, Ward heard that some of her friends were going to acting classes. “There was this really amazing woman who set up a place in Islington [in London], called the Anna Scher Theatre, which was on a council housing estate in one of the halls there,” Ward recalls. “It was 10p for a couple of hours.” She soon joined the classes.
“Anna did a lot of improvisation, and really it was to give the kids in the area something to do, and keep them out of trouble,” Ward explains.
“And as a result there were all these brilliant kids, very natural, with lots of stories. It just so happened that casting directors discovered it, because all these kids had a lot to offer, and they weren’t stage school kids. And so the casting directors started coming along and watched some of the classes, and I got picked from there to do my first job.”
Roles for Steven Spielberg (Young Sherlock Holmes) and Franco Zeffirelli (Young Toscanini) followed, and she played the part of Isabella Linton in the version of Wuthering Heights that starred Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.
Ward was sure of her desire to perform, but she had more than one interest. “I was training as a ballet dancer, so I thought that perhaps that would be the direction it went in,” she says. “But I was thrown out for being too tall. I hit 5 feet 8 inches by the time I was 15, and in those days the Royal Ballet certainly wouldn’t accept somebody of that height.”
Advisers suggested that she try the New York City Ballet, but Ward wasn’t convinced.
“Ballet takes real dedication, real commitment, and so in some ways I think I was quite relieved to be told ‘Oh, it’s not gonna work out for you physically, you don’t fit, you’re not the right proportions,'” she admits. “And from then I concentrated more on working as an actor.”
But being tall, slender and blonde, there was another profession that briefly beckoned: modeling. “
When I was still at school I worked as a model for about two or three years, when I was doing my O-levels and A-levels.” She eventually appeared on the covers of Vogue and Tatler.
Because she had already been cast in film and television roles, Ward skipped drama school, but in her mid-20s, she took up theater as well, appearing in roles that included Ophelia in Hamlet and Amanda in Noel Coward‘s Private Lives ? and she discovered a new enthusiasm for acting.
“I became very passionate about it, wanting to learn more,” she says of her love for theater. “And I was lucky, because the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow sort of took me under their wing, and I worked there for a long time. If you could earn a decent living in it, then I think most actors and certainly myself would feel happy doing a lot of theater. It’s much more immediate, and there’s a whole sort of life attached to it.”
Most recently, Ward has branched into producing, with her coproduction of the play Nothing winning favorable reviews at the Brits Off Broadway festival in New York.
When asked about her gradual path toward understanding her sexuality, Ward reflects: “I don’t know how much hormones blind you to certain things. Because I did have a lot of people who said to me afterwards that it wasn’t until after they’d had children, and that great desire to have children had subsided somewhat, that they felt that they were able to really be themselves.”
Ward notes that although she did not identify as a lesbian when she was a teenager, she did have crushes on women. “I knew that I had feelings for women, and I thought possibly I was bisexual,” she says. “But I was with my husband when I was so young ? almost as soon as I’d left school, I was living with my husband ? and I was 19, and I was a stepmum, so I was just sort of getting on with doing that.”
“So it wasn’t like I was closeted, or confused, or anything like that at that time. I just felt … I knew I had feelings for women, but it wasn’t a problem, it didn’t feel terrible. And it didn’t feel like I was locking off part of my personality. Of course in retrospect, I can see that perhaps I was.”
She denies that coming out publicly at such an early stage in her career, when there were virtually no other well-known actresses to keep her company, was brave.
“Of course in an ideal world it would be lovely if there were loads of other role models and people that made you feel ‘oh, well you’re not on your own,'” Ward says. “But of course you’re not on your own, there are loads of gay women.” She laughs.
Ward acknowledges that the fact that there were few openly gay actresses at the time did make her coming-out a bigger deal than it might have been if more actresses had been out.
“But on a personal level,” she says, “the thing that’s hardest is coming out [to the people close to you], the same as anybody else, I think.”
She continues: “I had quite a conventional life. I’d met my husband when I was 19, and I’d got married quite young, and everything had been fairly straightforward. So [coming out] really was to upset everything that had already been established.”
Having made the decision to be open with her family, however, the idea of staying closeted publicly just didn’t seem like an option to Ward. “That decision not to come out is such a big decision; in a way it’s much bigger than coming out,” she says. “Because your life has to be so organized.”
Making the decision to not talk about your personal life, Ward notes, has many implications for a public figure.
“It means you can’t be seen publicly with your girlfriend,” she says. “That you can’t ever talk about your girlfriend or partner, that you can’t have any kind of social or professional life together where you might be seen.”
She adds with a laugh, “I think that sounds awfully tiring.”
For her part, Ward says that she “just couldn’t envision an alternative” to coming out. “It would have been such hard work. Maybe it makes a difference having a family, I don’t know, but … how would [staying closeted publicly] have worked in my family, with my children? Would I not have come out to them?”
She laughs at the thought. “Would I have separate households somehow, or would I have to tell them not to tell anyone? I mean, it’s just impossible to think about. So it wasn’t particularly a brave decision; it was just that, that was the decision that was going to make life better for everybody. So … that was that.”
Ward’s straightforward approach to her personal life has left her plenty of energy to channel into her career.
She reflects on the hectic past six months, starring in the play Nothing while also gaining her first experience as producer. “The thing that I really enjoyed was putting the people together: the play and the cast and the director, designer, the lighting people, putting them all together, and letting them all work together,” she says. “And being able to see something come to fruition, something that you really feel strongly about. Because I really loved this play.”
“So it was a success. And, uh … it did nearly kill me,” she says with a laugh, “but it was a success. It was worth it.”
To find out more about Sophie Ward, visit her official website, sophieward.com.
