Sophie Winkleman is sitting beside a crackling fire in Robin Birley’s private drawing room at the top of 5 Hertford Street, sipping tea decorously. She is, of course, also known as Lady Frederick Windsor, daughter-in-law of Prince and Princess of Michael of Kent. But within seconds, it’s clear that this 43-year-old is nothing like most PR-schooled actresses, let alone members of the Royal Family. Suddenly, she delves into her voluminous Aspinal tote bag, pulling out a claw clip she then yanks through her long black hair. ‘Sorry,’ she winces. ‘I came out without a brush.’
Funny, ebullient and super-smart (she has an English degree from Cambridge), Winkleman has an air of old-school charisma about her. When Birley wanders in, she cries: ‘Robin, this is snuggly and heaven!’ To me: ‘I met him because his darling mother [Lady Annabel Goldsmith] was sweet enough to give us our wedding party,’ she explains. ‘He’s a brilliant, very clever, artistic man.’
Winkleman is dressed in a dashing A-line indigo coat from Lucan (the designer, Fie, the Countess of Lucan, is a friend). It conceals an ‘old Armani navy dress of my mum’s’, but reveals spectacular legs (she’s 5ft 9in) ending in sleek black Ghazal stilettos. I wonder how she can keep going in four-inch heels. ‘This is how,’ she says with a grin, opening the magic bag again to reveal a pair of ballerina flats from French Sole.
It seems Winkleman shares all the social graces of the Duchess of Rochester, her character in Belgravia: The Next Chapter, the second series of ITV’s costume drama based on the novel by Julian Fellowes. Its opening scenes show the duchess as a perfect hostess, faultlessly oiling the wheels. Yet gradually we learn she’s haunted by the pain of her young son’s epilepsy.
‘The eldest son of a duke needed to be a very presentable creature and this little boy just has fits all the time, so they do everything to try and cure him, and in those days, the solutions were extremely radical and bizarre,’ she says. ‘Obviously, he doesn’t get better – the duchess sees he needs to be around his brothers and sisters and socialising to get better. It’s a constant tussle between what’s expected of her societally and what she expects of herself as a mother.’
It’s a juicy role in a vastly absorbing drama – Downton Abbey but with meatier themes. Ideal Sunday night fodder. Although based in Belgravia, most of the series was filmed around Edinburgh and in historic houses across Britain. Corsets were donned, ‘which I – unlike my co-stars – love because it pulls me together and sorts out my posture. I find it a huge acting tool.’ As on every shoot, intense friendships developed this time- with Gosford Park actress Sophie Thompson, who plays Belgravia’s Mrs Dunn, the middle-class mother of a bride marrying into aristocracy. ‘She was my set crush, I always have one,’ Winkleman quips.
Her previous set crush was Rose Williams, the star of Andrew Davies’s Jane Austen spin-off, Sanditon, in which Winkleman played George IV’s mistress Lady Susan for three series. More recently, she appeared as The Countess in the blockbuster film Wonka, alongside the likes of Hugh Grant, Rowan Atkinson and Olivia Colman, with Timothée Chalamet in the title role. ‘Timothée was adorable and it was super-fun to be around all these great actors playing daft cameos,’ she says.
But it’s far, far from the case that Winkleman can only play members of the aristocracy. In 2022, she was the very contemporary ‘entitled but marbled with vulnerability’ Kathleen, a single mother by choice, in the BBC’s medical black comedy This Is Going To Hurt. But it was before that, back in the 2000s and fresh from the Cambridge Footlights, that she won the nation’s hearts with her unforgettable portrayal of ‘mental posho’ Big Suze in David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s Channel 4 comedy Peep Show.
The wife of Lord Frederick Windsor, Tatler’s February issue cover star, continues to blaze a trail on the screen
The show was a cult hit, with one ‘obsessive’, as Winkleman puts it, turning out to be Lord Frederick, 44, a banker who’s a second cousin of the King and 53rd in the line of succession to the throne. The couple met 17 years ago on New Year’s Eve in Soho. ‘We were leaving two different parties and we went for the same taxi. His very first words to me were, “You’re Big Suze, I love you!” I looked back at this ridiculously beautiful face and thought, “Oh God. Hello, everyone. I’m going to be in trouble here.” It was quite Richard Curtis.’
Unlike some of the characters in Belgravia, Winkleman never planned on marrying into the aristocracy. The daughter of publisher Barry Winkleman and advertising copywriter and children’s book author Cindy Black, and the half-sister of television presenter Claudia (‘but we had very separate lives as kids: Claudia lived with her mum and she’s nine years older than me’), she grew up in Primrose Hill and attended the private City of London School for Girls.
‘Dad’s dad was the chairman of something called the Artists for Peace Committee, which I think was Marxist. My family definitely weren’t interested in me marrying into royalty. I think Freddie could probably sense that. After two years, Lord Frederick proposed with a diamond engagement ring that had belonged to his grandmother Princess Marina. The couple married at Hampton Court Palace.
‘I didn’t know anyone at my wedding. I had my best pals there but basically it was full of faces I’d never seen before. My mother-in-law, Princess Michael of Kent, took full personal charge of it all and did it brilliantly, including what dress I was wearing.’ (Anna Bystrova for Roza Couture, for the record.) ‘I was so determined not to be a bridezilla, I didn’t even work out my hairstyle and I cannot tell you how disgusting it looked. Coming up the aisle, the first thing I said when I saw Freddie was, “I’m so sorry about the hair.” He said, “Yes, what on earth have you done?” That’s pretty much all I can remember about it. My hair and being such a moron. But it was such a beautiful place.’ The Duchess of Kent helped choose the service’s music. ‘She introduced me to Rutter and suggested ‘Soave sia il vento’ from Così Fan Tutte, which is beautiful in the mouths of the little Hampton Court choirboys. And then my friend Bryan sang.’ Bryan? ‘Bryan Adams, I’d met him at a charity thing in the early 2000s. He sang “Heaven” as our first dance, which I love. We went full Magic FM.’
Rather than morphing into a lady of leisure as some snide commentators had predicted she would, just two days later, the new Lady Frederick Windsor and her husband flew to Los Angeles. Soon she was cast as Ashton Kutcher’s character’s girlfriend Zoey in the US sitcom Two and a Half Men. They stayed for seven happy years, living in West Hollywood, with Lord Frederick working at JPMorgan Chase (he’s now based in the company’s London offices). ‘He utterly loved it,’ says Winkleman. ‘He made a whole gang of dear friends who had no clue of anything about him and that was amazing. Not that he would remotely ever say he was anything; he’s very, very modest and a distant cousin of the senior lot, but there was a sort of scene around him in the old days, and he completely left it behind and started from scratch.’
Meanwhile, Winkleman acted and wrote various screenplays for the likes of Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek. ‘One of the things I love about America is they want things to succeed, they’re not mildly sour like British people can be. You can go to almost the head of Universal Studios with an idea and they’ll go, “Yeah, like it!” and pay you to write it. Here, it’s such a tiny clique of writers, you can’t really break through.’
She was less enamoured with LA’s industry fixation. ‘I found it really comical that someone who had been in some show was genuinely considered a more significant person than another.’ Inevitably, the couple found themselves hanging out with fellow Brits. ‘I did a play with Billy Connolly, Tim Curry, Eric Idle, Jane Leeves – she’s still a great friend. They were all so fabulous.’
Yet when the couple’s eldest daughter, Maud, was born in 2013, they returned to London. ‘I needed to exploit my mother and my sister-in-law [Lady Gabriella Kingston] and get free help, and it was the right thing to do.’ The next few years were tough. After the birth of their younger daughter, Isabella, in 2016, Winkleman caught a hospital bug that left her unwell for nearly a year. She’d just recovered and won a part in Trust, Danny Boyle’s TV drama about the Getty kidnapping, but while being driven home from set, she suffered a crash that left her trapped in the back seat of the upside-down car. Paramedics cut her out. ‘I was completely lucid throughout. I assumed I was a goner and you just go into a strangely un-romantic mode of thinking, “Right, this is my last few minutes. I’ve got to do something practical.” So I was thinking things like, “Hope my parents stay well to help Freddie take care of the children, hope he meets someone nice...”’
After spending three months in hospital, she learnt that she wouldn’t be paralysed, but she had broken her foot and three bones in her back. She was touched by the support of the then Prince Charles, whose cook at Clarence House supplied her family with meals twice a day for months. ‘It was lifesaving, having this massive thing twice daily that I didn’t have to worry about,’ Winkleman says. Other royal cousins rallied round. Prince William asked an air ambulance colleague to ‘take good care of her’, while Sophie, Countess of Wessex, visited her in hospital.
Still, her recuperation was slow and agonising, with Winkleman unable to pick up her children for a year. ‘It was quite sobering. Physio left me in so much pain, it wasn’t working.’ Then she spoke with the Queen at a function. ‘She asked how I was, and she said, “We can’t have that. You have to go in the water.” She told us that when horses had broken backs, they swam, and so she let me use her pool at Buckingham Palace. That’s the reason I got better. It was so typically thoughtful.’
Winkleman’s admiration for her in-laws is heartfelt. She says she’s ‘really good friends with all of them – that’s a really daft thing to say, but behind the camera they’re really fun, clever, kind people. I love Sophie Edinburgh, Sarah Chatto, Zara, the York girls, Tim and Princess Anne, Fergie, all the Kents and Gloucesters. I love Catherine and William, but they’re so busy and don’t live in London, so I don’t see them much.’ The King, she continues, ‘is a very dear friend. I spend a bit of time with him. You see how he works all day long, has a quick supper and then disappears until about 4am to write letters. He cares about so many things and he comes up with brilliant solutions.’
King George V’s grandson Prince Michael of Kent is married to the glamazon and author Princess Michael of Kent
Winkleman’s status means she is now a patron of several children’s charities. ‘It’s such an upside, something I wouldn’t get to do if I was just an actress.’ She laughs, ‘I still say “actress” – it makes me sound about 90.’ After we meet, she’s off to the House of [Lords (‘I’ll take the bus. I love the bus!’) for lunch with her friend, The Big Issue founder John Bird, to plan a meeting she’s having the following week with 250 of the magazine’s sellers.
Non-royal regulars at the couple’s home next to Battersea Park include Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, with whom Winkleman starred in the sketch show Harry & Paul (‘They’re the funniest people in Britain, both of them’); actress Rachael Stirling and her husband, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey; and Jamie Oliver, whom she met at Soho House in Los Angeles in 2009 and who is Isabella’s godfather.
‘Jamie’s spectacular, he really cares about children in our country and I admire that he constantly puts himself on the line for sneery people to hurl rocks at,’ says Winkleman. ‘He could just be a rich, happy chef but he just goes for it all the time.’ For Winkleman’s 40th birthday, which she spent in a rented cottage at Highclere Castle during lockdown, Oliver made her a cake. ‘He texted Freddie asking, “What are Sophie’s favourite things, sweets-wise?” I love all the naffest things – Twixes and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – so he made 20 layers stuffed with cheap chocolate. It was magnificent.’
On nights out, Winkleman adores Asian food, eating everywhere from ‘a little vegetarian place in Euston called Diwana Bhel Poori– wooden tables, bring your own booze, stunning South Indian food’, to upmarket Chinese restaurant Park Chinois in Mayfair, and Imperial Treasure (‘the best Peking duck in London’) and Gouqi, both in St James’s. ‘When I want a date, I force Freddie to take me to one of them.’ An intermittent faster, she tries to avoid eating before noon, but that’s as faddy as it gets in the Windsor household. ‘I’m genuinely obsessed with fat – from pork belly to a strip on a steak. I’m convinced they’re going to find out fat is actually more important than vegetables. At our wedding, we made the Bishop of London [who officiated] do a prayer to the Lord, giving thanks for butter.’
Winkleman is refreshingly upfront about finding motherhood (Maud is 10 and Isabella is 8) challenging. ‘I didn’t realise before I had kids that I have all the authority of a goldfish. I say “no” and they just laugh.’ Yet where she has succeeded is in establishing an hour every night where the whole family sit reading together. She’s also – no mean feat – refused to let the girls have smartphones, which is her chief bugbear.
‘I’m the biggest bore about smartphones. I want to get a revolution together to say let’s get every parent in England to not give out a smartphone to children. If we all did it, then no one would be missing out.’ She walks the talk, eschewing all social media, although she admits at times it would have benefited her career. ‘I’m not saying it in any kind of holier-than-thou way but people have become so self-obsessed it’s sad.’ Her self-admittedly ambitious dream is to find a screen-free school.
And you know what? She just might. Winkleman’s a doer, but also one of those vanishingly rare creatures who still relishes debate and listens to the opposing side. ‘I have so many republican friends. Luckily we can have spirited conversations where I say, “Fine, but what would you replace the Royal Family with?” Because I’ve seen what endless good they do.’ Good? Winkleman’s pretty good, too.
This article was first published in the February 2024 issue.
