Emily Watson: My family values

I grew up in London. It was quite an unusual upbringing. My parents [Katharine, a teacher, and Richard, an architect] were members of an organisation called the School of Economic Science, which is a kind of religious set-up. We [Emily and her elder sister Harriet] went to a school run by them. It was all about meditation and learning Sanskrit and philosophy. I don’t think I was very good at it. But lots of aspects were great, like self-awareness, which is very helpful to an actor. There are parts that I’m not too keen on. It left me quite wary of organised religion, but my family life was very rich and full of interesting and stimulating things.

I was very close to my grandparents – Mum’s parents, Margery and Dennis, who lived in a cottage in Dorset. We stayed there in the summer and it was utterly idyllic. In my mind’s eye, it never rained. There were endless hot summers. Christmases were wonderful. It would snow and we’d go tobogganing. I’m sure a lot of it is structured in my memory in a way that’s not really true, but to me it was a fabulous, fabulous world. We weren’t so close to my dad’s parents – they were divorced when he was a child.

Mum was 69 when she died in 2011. It was a shock but you have to honour them for their life and what they were; let them have their death. You have to honour the process of saying goodbye to them and all their things, and burying them. It’s a huge thing to do for somebody, especially if you do it in a very conscious way, which we did.

We didn’t have a traditional funeral that somebody else had written. We did it ourselves. We wrote it. We performed it. We really looked down the barrel of the gun and said to all Mum’s friends and relatives and the people she taught, who all came: “This is the woman we loved, let’s celebrate her.” It was an unbelievably massive undertaking, but we had this clock ticking because of a film I was making in Australia, that was about to fall apart if I didn’t get back. So I said to Dad, “I’ve got to get back to Australia in 10 days” and we did it. We threw ourselves into it with the most creativity that we possibly could. And then I had to shut it all out of my head until I finished the film. And then, only after that, you start really dealing with it.

Grieving for somebody is love in a way. Death is inevitable and absolutely natural. I think it’s better to come to terms with that sooner rather than later. The thing I really miss is showing off the children to Mum. Dylan has just started learning to read and that’s the sort of thing you want to tell your mum, especially my mum. That was her thing.

My dad lives in Bridport in Dorset now. They’d only lived there for a few years before Mum died. He has a big circle of friends because Mum was very gregarious. She was a big collector of people. All my life she was collecting waifs and strays and taking people in and helping people.

My husband, Jack, and I take time to talk and we live a considered life – I’ll put it that way. We named our daughter Juliet not so much because Romeo and Juliet was my favourite play, but because we felt we ought to. We met at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon. There aren’t many Shakespearean names that work in the playground.