Since 2020, Ruth Gemmell has been the beating heart of Netflix’s Bridgerton: elegant matriarch Violet, shepherding her eight children towards love matches while holding close lasting grief over her late husband. Yet in all that time, as her profile has gone global, Gemmell has somehow kept one of the most intimate details of her real life completely off the radar. She’s been married for 11 years – and nobody seems to know to whom.
Her husband is never named. Never tagged. Never photographed. Google yields … nothing. “I have really spent time protecting that for her,” says one of the show’s publicists. It’s the kind of romantic mystery Lady Whistledown would dine out on. So when Gemmell mentions her man twice in the first two minutes of our chat, it’s a surprise.
The 58-year-old has her back to the window in her Perth hotel room because, on the other side of the room, “is a whole pile of clothes”, she says. “My husband’s. I’m a light packer.”
There’s more. The couple are on a weeks-long Australian holiday because he’s a cricket tragic who flew across the world to watch the Ashes, combining it with a family wedding in Adelaide and a sojourn to the Gold Coast.
It’s a lovely twist. Gemmell’s revealing to me her private second-chance love story just as season four of Bridgerton finds the Dowager Viscountess – long widowed, long defined by solo motherhood – doing the same thing.
Violet’s romance storyline with suitor Lord Anderson is life-imitates-art for Gemmell. Her first marriage, to the late actor Ray Stevenson, ended in divorce in 2005 after eight years. “Loss, whatever that loss is, is something universal,” she says. “When you first fall in love, you’re there with open arms. After you’ve been hurt – and not just by a relationship, but by the physical loss of a person, grief – your guard goes up.”
But it doesn’t have to be forever, Gemmell says. “One of the things that’s really lovely is to recognise someone who is willing to be patient. Who has the desire to let that play out. Then you’re able to drop those guards and be a little braver because you recognise the good in that person.”
Second time around, she says, “Friendship and humour are everything. To feel romantic, you have to be comfortable and confident. Friendship and humour is that road for me.”
When she was younger, relationships sometimes caused Gemmell to wonder: “What did I do to deserve this?” It’s only later, she says, “you have that feeling of, ‘Well, you’re lucky to have me.’ Understanding your own worth – that’s vital.”
The parallel between her own life and Violet’s desire to rediscover herself is fabulous, Gemmell says, a chance “for her to realise she’s not just a mother and a widow. To behave like a teenager again.” She pauses. “I think women of our age will recognise that. That trepidation, that bravery.”
Facing down those things, she says, has been one of the gifts of midlife. “I’d like to think I care less. I’d like to think my 50s have taught me not to worry about certain things, but I still struggle sometimes. What’s different is you realise that there’s more to life than just your job. When you’re younger, you live to work, and later you work to live. Other things become more important.”
Since childhood, work has been Gemmell’s north star. She fell in love with acting aged 12, on a school trip to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Newcastle, in the north of England. Whenever Oberon fell silent, “I couldn’t breathe until he started speaking again,” says Gemmell. “That effect someone has over a group of people was mind-blowing. It had me sold – hook, line and sinker.”
Her parents, who divorced when the actor was young, were supportive. She moved from County Durham to London and studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, which counts Terence Stamp and Hugh Bonneville among its graduates.
After a series of early ingénue stage roles, much of Gemmell’s screen work in UK television series such as The Bill, Spooks and Silent Witness fell into two camps: “I obviously looked vulnerable, so I was killed … and then I obviously looked shady, so I was the murderer.”
Amid long periods of “unemployment or temping”, Gemmell got an early big-screen break in the 1997 hit Fever Pitch. In it, she played teacher Sarah opposite Colin Firth, still riding high as a global dreamboat thanks to his wet-shirted turn in Pride and Prejudice.
Asked at the time to tell a funny on-set story, Gemmell hit on a moment between takes for a bedroom scene. Firth, as if staying in character, began to explain a soccer fixture and Gemmell ”just glazed over, uninterested”. The headline that followed – “Ruth Gemmell gets into bed with Mr Darcy and promptly falls asleep” – mortified her: “I’d take myself less seriously now.”
Gemmell is still surprised when she’s recognised in public (“mostly in London”) but loves that Bridgerton fans respect Violet’s velvet-sledgehammer compassion and her care for her brood. As someone who’s childless, Gemmell models her alter ego on her own mum, a nurse who died when Ruth was in her late teens. “My mum was exactly that kind of fierce, loving matriarch,” she says. “I miss her to this very day.” She adds that she “absolutely adores” her on-screen kids: “They’re talented, funny, generous.”
Behind the scenes, the “hideous” corsets are endured for entire days. There are board games, chaos during family scenes, laughter that derails takes, and Gemmell’s close friendship with Adjoa Andoh, who plays Lady Danbury. “When we’re together, we’re either laughing, reminiscing about our childhoods or counselling each other.”
While Violet presides over ballroom dramas bedecked in diamonds, Gemmell’s real life is defiantly unglamorous. As castmate Golda Rosheuvel (Queen Charlotte) once put it, “She lives in a f—ing field.”
True? “Pretty much,” Gemmell says, telling how she swapped a hectic life in London for the freedom of a small village “in the middle of nowhere”. She’s mad about gardening (“I kill most things, but anything germinating fills me with joy”), a keen birdwatcher (“I’m slightly fascinated by the woodpecker”). She also cooks (“I have to follow a recipe”), swims and “was sensible enough to stay near a pub”.
And it’s all shared with her mystery husband. Gemmell’s known him since she was 14. His sister is an old school friend. They didn’t see each other for about 20 years. Then, one day, she went to visit that friend. He was there.
Instant attraction? “I did feel he was interesting,” she says. Cue plot twist: she was caught speeding and he put her up while she did a driver-education course. It’s a classic rom-com writ large – lead foot leads to lasting love.
I fish for clues. Is he in showbiz? No, she says. She has zero desire to bring him into her career now, and her decision to keep his identity secret is an act of protection.
Violet has her own protecting to do with her budding romance. For one, there are her children’s feelings. Secondly, motherhood and decades have changed her since she last touched a man with hands ungloved. “She’s a woman who hasn’t been intimate for a very long time. We can talk about the emotional side of being brave and opening up to someone – but there’s also the real physical thing.”
Cutting to the chase, it feels like Gemmell’s talking about herself as much as her alter ego. “Your body is entirely different and that’s very scary,” she acknowledges. “There are quite a few hurdles.” Without giving too much away, she adds, “I think that’s something you’ll see Violet navigating.”
Dear Reader, does this mention of intimacy mean Violet will soon steam up the screen à la her children? Gemmell laughs. “I’m not getting my arse out for anyone. There’d be an awful lot of Vaseline on the lens.”
Somewhere in England, there’s a village with a pub, a half-successful garden and a bird-obsessed star “quite happy living like a country bumpkin”. And somewhere in that village, there’s a man whose clothes cover most of the hotel room floor and whose name, for now, remains unprinted.
If Lady Whistledown, now unmasked as Penelope Bridgerton, ever decides to reveal him, she would surely write what Ruth Gemmell already knows. That some of the best love stories are the ones you keep, as long as you can, just for yourself.
Bridgerton season four streams on Netflix from January 29.
Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up here for our free newsletter.
