Rebecca Front: ‘Dad nearly drowned on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales'

Times

24-04-2025

Rebecca Front, 60, is an actress, comedian and writer from east London. She is known for her roles in The Day Today, Poldark and Avenue 5 and her Bafta-winning performance in The Thick of It. She lives with her husband, the TV producer turned writer Phil Clymer, in north London. They have two children, Ollie, 26, and Tilly, 24.
A couple of incidents on family holidays triggered tricky times for me as a pre-teen. One of these episodes occurred as I was climbing the spiral set of 325 steps in the central tower at Durham Cathedral when I was 12. Somebody stopped ahead of us and, tugging at my mum's jacket, I said that I wanted to go back down, but we had to wait as there were people in front and behind us. I found the whole situation very oppressive and it got into my head that we couldn't leave, leading to a lifetime of claustrophobia, with the worst of it usually experienced in lifts and Underground trains.
However, no other holiday was as traumatic as the Yorkshire trip when my dad nearly drowned, which was f***ing dreadful. It was the summer before I started secondary school and we were visiting the Yorkshire Dales National Park, picnicking by the River Wharfe on a very hot day. My older brother, Jeremy, and my dad were wading in ankle-height water when dad's foot got caught in the roots of a tree. The current knocked him off balance and he couldn't get out of the river. My poor brother was desperately trying to drag him out, eventually saving his life by yelling for help. Two strapping guys pulled Dad out and he was barely conscious. If that wasn't bad enough, the following day Jeremy fell in the shower and hit his head, and the day after we received a phone call saying that my grandfather had died. At that point we packed and went home.
Although that holiday ended in disaster, my mum was determined to create happy memories for us and decided to take us on the kind of road trip she had when she was young, using money that her father had left her. I hadn't been abroad before and it was so exciting as we took our inefficient, third-hand Triumph through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany for three weeks. Along the way Dad wanted to visit some war graves in Verdun, northeast France, where the gift shop sold bomb-shaped chocolate. Heidelberg, in southwest Germany, was an incredible town — it looked like every fairytale illustration I'd ever seen, with enormous hillside forests.
My best work trip was for the BBC series War & Peace in 2015. We filmed in Latvia, Lithuania and the Russian city of St Petersburg, where we did two stints, shooting in summer and winter. I was very nervous about the long shoot, but it was a phenomenal job with the most glorious people — it was a brilliant social whirl, hanging out with castmates such as James Norton, Paul Dano, Jack Lowden and Aneurin Barnard, who was playing my son. Even though I'm much older than him he was lovely to me, and from rehearsals onwards he'd always say, 'You're coming with me!' whenever the cast would go somewhere. My phone would ping constantly with invitations to join whatever fun gathering was happening.
The architecture in St Petersburg is beautiful, and our comfortable post-Soviet hotel was within walking distance of the Hermitage, the fantastic art and culture museum. We didn't start filming until 5pm, so I would spend the days sightseeing, walking to galleries and churches and lunching on blinis. It was thrilling; I absolutely loved it.
I love a US road trip and American diners with their over-easy eggs and hot sauce on every table. Phil, the kids and I usually drive from Seattle to Los Angeles, or vice versa, as we have friends in those cities. In Washington state we always try to stay at the Sleeping Lady resort, which has fairly rough-and-ready cabin accommodation — and a fabulous swimming pool — in woods on the Cascade Mountains. In California we like to stay at Deetjen's Big Sur Inn, which has amazing home cooking and, controversially, no wi-fi — this stresses me out much more than it does the kids.
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Shortly before our last road trip Ollie rang to ask whether there was room for his new girlfriend, Imogen. It's quite brave to be trapped in a car for three weeks with a family you've just met, but when she joined in with us singing along to the music I immediately knew that she'd fit in.Three People with Rebecca Front, featuring interviews with Peter Capaldi, Nicola Stephenson and Armando Iannucci, among others, is available from all podcast stores