Alex Kingston on Strictly: ‘I won’t allow myself to be bullied’

Andrew Billen

The Times Online

Article taken from The Times

Alex Kingston on Strictly: 'I won't allow myself to be bullied'

 

The former ER star on taking to the dancefloor, standing up for herself, but never being pushy for roles

Alex Kingston: “I’m not competitive but I really have a very strong work ethic”

 

Andrew Billen

Sunday September 21 2025, 6.00pm, The Times

 

 

 

The biggest star of the new season of Strictly Come Dancing, which made its opening sashays on Saturday, is without doubt Alex Kingston, who has been famous for almost 30 years, first as ITV’s Moll Flanders, then as the jinxed English doctor on ER, and from 2008 to 2015 as Doctor Who’s wife, River Song. She says she is fundamentally shy and private but able to bring a heightened version of herself to the public arena — which will be why she greets me with a large, warm and undeserved hug in the snug of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, not far from the village where she lives, where she also comes last in pub quizzes and dazzles in pub pantos (fairy godmother one year, a serving wench the next).

She is also, she tells me, not only an emotional actress but an emotional person. The day before we meet she had become teary during her very first Strictly dance with her professional partner Johannes Radebe. It was a communal, all-comers affair in which she wore a fringed pink flapper dress through which, viewers will have judged, her legs kicked promisingly: “I’m not 100 per cent sure how I’m going to get through some of the dances without bawling,” she confesses. Her plan, she told the show, was to mask her bashfulness by adopting a different character for every dance.

 

 

She is 62 and has been a fan of Strictly for so long — some 20 years — that its now-annual scandals and crises (allegations of inappropriate touching and cocaine use being the most recent) did not give her pause before signing up. The Saturday war horse’s reputation has been most badly dented, however, by contestants’ allegations of bullying and the departure of two professional dancers. I wonder how she would react if anyone bullied her this season.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been bullied in the past by theatre directors and I sort of feel that I’m of an age and I have the experience now where I won’t allow that to happen. I would be able to stand up for myself and say no. I’m an incredibly hard worker. I’m not competitive but I really have a very strong work ethic. I’ll work as hard as I possibly can but if I feel that I’m getting too much pushback, I think I would just say, ‘This is my limit. Let’s just slow the pace,’ or whatever.”

Earlier in her career she wouldn’t have been able to do that? “No. When I was younger and more inexperienced, I didn’t feel then that I had a voice, I guess. There were times when, yes, I would have defined myself as ‘whipping boy’.”

She recalls a theatre director who paralysed her with fear. The more she tried to do as he demanded, the worse she became. It was only when the play began its run and he left that she discovered how to play the part. “When he then came back to see the show six weeks later, he said, ‘You were wonderful. Why didn’t you do that from the start?’”

It was on ER, the NBC hospital drama that became a worldwide hit and which she joined in its fourth season in 1997, that she resolved to tolerate bullies no longer — although here the (female) victim of (another male) director was not her.

“He was getting more and more frustrated because this actor wasn’t doing what he wanted her to do. But she wasn’t doing it because she was terrified. He was getting frustrated and coming across in quite an aggressive way but he couldn’t see that in himself. So yes, I had to go and have a few words with him about how, if he perhaps changed the way he addressed this particular actor, he might actually get from her the performance that he was wanting.”

Was he mortified? “No. Not particularly. But he understood. He definitely changed how he approached this young actress.”

 

The grim headlines Strictly has attracted lately are still outstripped by the good. In recent years it has been lauded for casting disabled celebrity contestants, including two eventual winners, Rose Ayling-Ellis, who is deaf, and Chris McCausland, who is blind. This year’s line-up includes the model and actress Ellie Goldstein, who has Down’s syndrome. Kingston is enthusiastic; her younger sister Susie was deprived of oxygen at birth and she hopes Susie will be filmed for the show, and that she and other residents of her care home could perhaps watch Kingston rehearse.
“But I don’t know how my sister will be. It’s something that’s gotten more intense as she’s gotten older. She can go into sort of spasms. They’re not fits but she spasms up and she can be for, God, 24 hours not eating, not going to the toilet, nothing. And then it releases and she has to sleep for 24 hours and get through it. You just don’t ever know what might trigger that.”
But in good times they talk? “Oh, no. She’s non-verbal.”
For almost all her life, Susie’s main carer was their late mother, Margarethe (Kingston’s father, Anthony, a butcher, died last year). “My mother cared for my sister until she was 82. She knew that she had Alzheimer’s and didn’t tell anyone. So for us it was quite a shock when she just one day said, ‘I can’t look after Susie any more. She needs to go into a home.’ Because my mother was so fiercely protective. She wouldn’t let anybody support her. She did it all herself.
“I think actually it’s one of the reasons why she got Alzheimer’s, because she was so sleep-deprived. She never had a night’s sleep from the moment my sister was born. She came from German farming stock. My grandfather died of the Spanish flu after the First World War so my grandmother basically ran the farm by herself with three children. I come from a family of women who just get on and do it.”
To support her mental health, Kingston retreats to her garden where she has bees and a greenhouse. At her other home in northern Italy, summer finds her outside wearing her lederhosen.
All actors, and not only those who play Time Lords, are travellers in time and space. Kingston and I first met 25 years ago on the all-encompassing ER set in Los Angeles for an interview for which she wore surgical scrubs throughout. Her marriage to the actor Ralph Fiennes had ended messily five years before, after he fell in love with Francesca Annis, who was playing his mother in a stage performance of Hamlet. Kingston could not even bring herself to utter his name. Today she will not speak of the marriage at all (it is nearly 30-year-old news), but she will talk a little of her second, to the German journalist Florian Haertel, whom she married in 1998. They had a daughter, Salome, in 2001, but separated in 2009 and later divorced.
“The second marriage was a success up to a point. I think that trying to have more children through in vitro … and then we went through the adoption process twice and had two spectacular fails.” The birth mothers changed their minds? “Yes, sort of. Sort of took the money and ran. I think that really took its toll. But the man that I’m married to now is the right man for me.”
He is Jonathan Stamp, a journalist, documentary-maker and academic whom she met when playing a “leprous mother” in an undistinguished remake of Ben-Hur, on which he was serving as historical adviser. They kept in touch and four years later began a relationship.
“I’m a Pisces, he’s a Virgo.” Meaning? “Well, he’s very organised and I’m not particularly organised. We are exactly six months apart. So I feel it’s almost like we’re yin and yang. And he understands me because he’s a writer, he’s a classicist. He teaches here at Magdalen [College, Oxford]. I’m an actor and I love stories. I can literally sit and listen to him tell me about Jesus and the ancient world, just loving it.”
She left ER in October 2004, having been told aged 41 that her character, Elizabeth Corday, was no longer interesting to write for. She thinks Britain’s thriving theatre scene makes ageism and sexism less of a problem here (she played Prospero at the RSC two years ago). But her professional longevity was ensured by River Song, the time traveller who wooed and won over three versions of the Doctor, played by David Tennant, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi. After a change in showrunner, she did not reappear when Jodie Whittaker took over the role, although the two meet at conventions and lament their near miss.
Did she think Whittaker was a good Doctor? “I did, actually. I thought that the world in which her Doctor existed started to get a bit more serious. It started to get quite heavy, the storylines, and I think what I loved about the time that I was on — and in particular with Matt and with David — was that there was always a lightness.”
She has not watched Whittaker’s successor, Ncuti Gatwa, but knows that his Tardis days ended with his apparent regeneration into Rose Tyler, perhaps Doctor Who’s most famous companion. Did she not feel, “That should have been me?”
“No. No, no.”
She has no ambition to be Doctor Who? “No, because I’m River Song. Why would I want to be Doctor Who?”
We discuss the serendipity of her career and of her life. Had she not joined ER she would have been cast in Silent Witness and missed global fame. Had she said yes to HBO’s Rome she might have met Stamp but at a time when she was still married and in the thick of bringing up Salome, now at drama school. “I do, in a weird way, believe in fate and destiny,” she says. “I just relax into ‘what will be will be’. I’ve never been pushy as an actor. I’ve never gone out for jobs or tried to fight for jobs because for me life’s too short. So I try to make the best of what comes my way.”
And Alex Kingston’s best has taken her a very long way indeed.
Strictly Come Dancing is on BBC1 on Saturdays
Script developed by Never Enough Design