EXCLUSIVE: Actress Sarah Parish opens up about the importance of her charity work with husband James Murray and the lasting legacy of their late baby daughter Ella-Jayne
Sarah Parish has just completed a five-hour road trip from Cornwall following a “nice little three-day break” with her actor husband James Murray and some close pals – a refreshing pause in a life running at full pelt. Sarah, 57, has spent the last decade juggling two remarkably different careers: the unpredictable but creatively rewarding world of acting and what she calls the “grounding” reality of running a children’s charity born from personal tragedy.
In January 2009, Sarah and James, 50, lost their eight-month-old daughter Ella-Jayne to congenital heart failure after she was born with rare genetic disorder Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome. Five years later, they founded The Murray Parish Trust and raised over £5 million for Southampton Children’s Hospital, where Ella-Jayne spent most of her short life.
This year, rebranded as Inspire This, the charity now focuses on closing what Sarah describes as a “real gap” in support for the mental health of seriously ill children and their families. Sarah and James both received MBEs in July in honour of their charity work.
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“For a child in hospital who can’t get out of bed, there isn’t a lot to do apart from watching telly and scrolling on your phone, so an intervention needed to happen,” Sarah says. She and James are on a mission to reach every seriously ill child in the UK by 2035, by providing everything from drama classes, yoga and music workshops to comforting spaces in paediatric units where parents can process the unthinkable.
“If your child passes away, there are rooms in hospitals where you can stay with the child for a bit before you say goodbye,” Sarah explains, recalling her own memory in such a space after her baby daughter lost her fight for life. “It was incredibly depressing. It was a very bare, depressing room and it just doesn’t make your life any better at all.
“It wasn’t the hospital’s fault. It’s just that’s the last thing they’re going to spend money on. We’re just trying to make a bad situation better for people. Anything to help people get through the most traumatic time of their life.”
For Sarah, that help came from her charity. “It kept us going, really, kept us together, kept us connected because we’ve always got something that is ours,” she says. “I very rarely get upset now because there’s too much happiness and joy within the charity. Grief is a funny thing. It comes and goes.”
Sarah got her career break in ITV ’s Peak Practice in 1997 before landing roles in BBC dramas Cutting It and Mistresses then Sky One’s Trollied . She later scored tougher parts, including playing a cold-blooded killer in ITV thriller Bancroft .
Juggling her TV roles and the charity can at times feel overwhelming, she admits. At the start of summer she was simultaneously filming the second series of ITV trainee police comedy Piglets and Netflix drama Geek Girl while managing the charity’s rebrand plus organising its Christmas fundraising event for which she has banked support from celebrity pals including Hugh Bonneville, Dame Imelda Staunton, David Tennant and Amanda Holden.
So has she ever contemplated giving up acting to slow the pace and focus 100% on fundraising?
“No!” Sarah roars. “Jim and I live for acting. The charity is a much harder job and it takes up much more of our time, but the two work so well together, because one is candy floss and the other is real and they weigh up perfectly. The charity wouldn’t be where it is without the acting.”
Asked to pinpoint her all-time career highlight, Sarah enters a conversation with herself. “Oh my God! Maybe Bancroft because it was my own show,” she says, before pondering 2017 BBC spoof comedy W1A as an option. “I loved doing that job. I loved going to work, I got excited about saying the lines and there was something delicious about being able to take the mickey out the BBC without getting fired.”
Starring in award-winning 2012 American drama Hatfields & McCoys , playing Kevin Costner’s wife, is also up there. She says, “I remember thinking, ‘This is so weird. I’m from Yeovil. What am I doing next to Kevin Costner? This is ridiculous.’”
At any moment did she imagine them becoming mates for life? “He was so nice, but no,” she says. “I was too intimidated.”
Describing herself as “a proper jobbing actor”, Sarah admits she sometimes yearns to be “one rung higher on the ladder” professionally, in a calmer place where multiple future jobs are permanently banked instead of living a “hand-to-mouth” existence, where she doesn’t know from one job to the next what will follow.
Although the unpredictability of her career keeps her “sharp”, she says security is appealing in an industry where women over 40 are shockingly underrepresented. That’s why she’s become more proactive lately and is developing her own projects, specifically TV adaptations of two books.
“I wish I’d had the confidence to do it sooner,” she admits. “One day, I suddenly went. ‘I don’t know why I’m waiting. Just make things happen.’ More and more actors are doing it, especially older female actors because they’ve just gone, ‘I’m not ready to be put out to pasture.’”
After becoming “particularly ratty” and noticing it was harder to learn her lines during perimenopause in her early fifties, Sarah believes she escaped relatively unscathed after leaping quickly on HRT.
“My fifties have been my best decade by far, purely because you get to an age as a woman where you don’t really care as much. It’s a really lovely feeling to think, ‘I am who I am. You take me or you don’t.”
But although social media criticism barely registers (“I just feel sad for people who post nasty things”), Sarah is “so upset” about the impact of excessive smartphone use on teenagers, not least her 15-year-old daughter Nell, who was conceived a couple of months after Ella-Jayne’s death.
After two “traumatic” births, Sarah was told she could never provide a sibling for Nell naturally. She says, “I always thought I would have a big family and we were prepared to go down the adoption route until Nell told us she wasn’t bothered at all about having a sibling. I remember being slightly disappointed for a very short while, but I got over it really quickly.”
Once a party girl, these days Sarah’s true happiness is found spending a weekend “doing nothing” at the family home in rural Hampshire. Apart from an annual pre-Christmas girlie weekend away, she stays connected virtually with her close friends Amanda Holden, Lisa Faulkner, Angela Griffin, Lucy Gaskell, Tamzin Outhwaite and Nicola Stephenson, who all met on the set of Cutting It .
“You could make a sitcom out of it,” says Sarah of their “hilarious” WhatsApp group. “Sometimes I’ll open my phone and there’ll be 75 messages. It’s ridiculous conversations about all sorts of nonsense. They’re funny girls so we have a few hysterics.”
Find out more about Imagine This at imaginethis.org.uk
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