One is entitled to wonder what she really thinks — you know, deep down inside.
Publicity quotes may be the natural accessory of every new film, even one as acclaimed as the thriller Gone Girl, but it must have taken a great act of will for its star, Rosamund Pike, to talk openly over the past week about marriage.
Gone Girl is the story of an unhappily married young woman who goes missing, leaving her husband (played by Ben Affleck) accused of murder. Yet compared with the dramas of Rosamund’s own life, that’s a pretty straightforward plot.
Her past has all the ingredients for a blockbuster. It is the story of a beautiful English girl, educated privately and at Oxford, whose marriage dreams are twice destroyed in unique circumstances.
She first falls in love with a man who, after two intimate years, realises he is gay and now lives with a civil partner.
In the second reel, she falls in love with another man, they get engaged and buy a house. But when — unknown to him, apparently — she sends out ‘save the date’ pre-wedding cards to dozens of friends with a ‘tasteful’ picture of them in a hot tub, he is so appalled that he summarily dumps her.
This public humiliation is all the more puzzling as it befell a former Bond girl who has evolved into what the Mail’s theatre critic Quentin Letts describes as ‘one of the great beauties of our age’.
Not surprisingly, after such emotional blows, Rosamund Pike remains unmarried at 35. So it was telling when she said in an interview with Spectrum magazine that ‘people have ridiculous expectations of a mate’. She continued: ‘In my grandmother’s day, you wouldn’t expect your husband to fulfil the same need in you as your sister, or girlfriends, or colleagues at work.’
She then argued that it is not ‘universally achievable’ for just one person to meet all your needs.
After the disasters of two great loves, Rosamund now shares her life with former heroin addict and City businessman Robie Uniacke. He is a big, rather shambolic Old Etonian who is not only 18 years her senior but had two failed marriages behind him and four children when they met in 2010. Today they have a son, Solo, two, and she is expecting their second child.
Rosamund’s first love was actor Simon Woods, who, like Robie, was at Eton. He and Rosamund met and fell in love at Oxford, where both were studying English Literature. He was much envied by fellow undergraduates for having captured one of the most stunning girls at Oxford, and for two years she and handsome, charming Woods were inseparable.
But Simon had a secret. Unknown to Rosamund, he was beginning to doubt his sexuality. Eventually, he had to tell her.
How long he had known, he has never said. But how ironic for his admission to emerge just as Rosamund was being bedded on screen by James Bond — she had been cast as icy double agent Miranda Frost alongside Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day. Instead of marrying, they parted.
When Simon fell in love again, it was with a man. Two years ago — nine years after his break-up with Rosamund — he and his long-time partner, Burberry’s creative director Christopher Bailey, tied the knot in a civil ceremony at Chelsea register office. ‘Bond girl’s ex weds his man,’ said one headline.
Rosamund, who had remained a friend and been taught good manners as the only child of opera-singer parents and as a boarder at 214-year-old Badminton School in Bristol, sent them her good wishes.
Piquantly, she and Simon had already been reunited as lovers, albeit as the actors cast as Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley in the award-winning film of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice.
Three years after they parted, they had been brought together for the roles in 2005 by the very man who was to break Rosamund’s heart for a second time, the film’s director Joe Wright. At the time, Joe and Rosamund had been together for more than a year. They had met on the set of an earlier film, the Oxford graduate bonding with the dyslexic boy who left school with no GCSEs but proved to be a brilliant movie-maker.
No one had any doubt that Joe and Rosamund were madly in love. During the four years they were together he directed two other major films, Atonement and The Soloist, while Rosamund starred in films such as Fracture, with Anthony Hopkins. So it came as no surprise when, in 2008, the couple got engaged and bought a house in Spitalfields, East London.
What happened next has never been agreed between them. But the moment Joe learned that his fiancee had excitedly sent out ‘save the date’ pre-wedding postcards, he humiliatingly jilted her.
His friends say he didn’t know she was sending them. She has claimed he did know about them. ‘We’d both designed it and the design was to make them laugh,’ she said.
At any rate, Rosamund’s mother, Caroline had to write to everyone and explain the wedding was off.
Having dumped Rosamund, Joe was said to have spent a lot of time with friends in lap-dancing clubs.The episode had not, however, put him off marriage. Two years later, he married sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the late Indian music maestro Ravi Shankar. They now have a three-year-old son, Zubin.
Having lost two men she expected to marry, it’s no wonder Rosamund has declared: ‘You try to do the right thing and the conventional thing, and it doesn’t work, and then you’re free again.’
Many would interpret ‘free’ in this context as ‘unwanted’. And many, too, would feel great sympathy that this successful and much-admired woman can talk about her life with such poignancy and regret. And then she met Robie Uniacke. Some friends feared she was set for another romantic disaster when she began stepping out with a marriage veteran and womaniser with a controversial reputation.
Robie’s past includes a poisonous spat with a young lover’s angry father — Lord Hesketh, a former junior minister in Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments, who these days speaks for Ukip.
The usually ebullient bon viveur was horrified when he learned his daughter Sophia, 19, was dating Robie, whom he considered ‘totally unsuitable’. Quite apart from his reputation, Robie, then 43, was old enough to be Sophia’s father.
Hesketh was said to have offered his shooting friends ￡500 if they ‘bagged’ his daughter’s lover instead of a brace of pheasant.
Robie and Sophia were not lovers for long, however, and these days Sophia — thought to have been the first girl to kiss Prince Harry — is 29 and a fashion stylist.
Robie had married for the first time in 1983, when he was 22. His bride, Emma Howard, daughter of the late Earl of Carlisle, was 30. She liked his adventurous spirit — he had given up his job as a stockbroker
to dive for treasure. They had a son but both he and Emma were treated for heroin addiction and the marriage was over in a few years.
His second failed marriage was to interior designer Rose Batstone, with whom he had three more children. She is now happily married to David Heyman, producer of the Harry Potter films.
Robie’s past doesn’t trouble Rosamund, who describes him as ‘the most interesting person I’ve ever come across’.
What about the age gap? More than 30 years ago, when Robie married Howard, eight years his senior, he said: ‘The older you get, the less difference it makes.’
The other day, Rosamund, whose second baby is due in a few weeks, was dismissing the idea that a woman ‘goes for an older man because you think you’re less likely to be left by him’.
That sounds like a woman who has romantic scars. Still, she has found happiness now.
As for marriage — and the ‘ridiculous expectations’ that such a relationship brings with it, the issue doesn’t seem to have arisen. At least, not yet.
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