Natascha McElhone

Over the past year and a half, Natascha McElhone has tried to avoid being pigeonholed as a widow in the depths of despair. It’s a reasonable position, as the bereaved are routinely misunderstood.

For starters, they’re expected to be inarticulate in their grief. But when her husband of 10 years, the cosmetic surgeon Martin Kelly, died of a heart condition after collapsing at their London home on 20 May 2008, McElhone, who was filming Californication in LA at the time, flew back to the UK and penned a deeply moving tribute that appeared in a newspaper days later.

‘It was a timeless, surreal place that I was in,’ McElhone says now. ‘I’d just come off the plane and was five months pregnant with Rex (the couple’s third son). But I felt it was so important at that moment in time, when something is very raw and real. I wanted Martin to be known, and for him to leave an indelible mark.’ The bereaved are also expected to be inconsolable. But McElhone’s eulogy celebrated a life lived at ‘breakneck speed’ rather than mourning a life cut short. She expressed humble gratitude for the years they’d enjoyed together. Most affecting was her honesty. ‘He was too good to be true,’ she wrote. ‘There was never a day when we didn’t say, “It’s ridiculous how lucky we are. Look how blessed our life is.” I frequently felt undeserving of this; he, however, never.’

‘In a funny way, grief is like a state of grace,’ she says. ‘You become terribly honest in a way you’ve been afraid to be before.’ Of course, there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. And in her most private moments, McElhone may well be inarticulate and inconsolable. Grief is traumatising. Mind and body go into shock.

And yet the 37-year-old actress I meet at a London hotel couldn’t be less insular or closed off. Serenely beautiful in the flesh, she’s dressed casually in blue jeans and a frayed tweed jacket, her shoes kicked off so she can sit cross-legged on the couch while checking her laptop for emails. It’s a telling moment, a few seconds snatched between commitments and put to good use. One gets the feeling McElhone doesn’t have a surplus of idle hours, what with a successful career and three young boys – Theo, nine, Otis, six and Rex, one – to look after.

I wonder what her sons have inherited from their father. ‘Their brains are very much like Martin’s, thank God,’ she says, her eyes widening, ‘because he had an extraordinary brain. Theo has a fascination for science and how things work. He’s a little chess fiend, and Martin was an avid chess player. Otis has a lust for life, a contagious energy that was very much Martin’s. And the baby,’ she laughs, getting up to grab a photograph, ‘I think he looks like Martin, but I’m probably projecting wildly.’