Rachel Ward – what a magnificent woman! The beautiful, aristocratic English rose who starred in the 1980s Aussie miniseries The Thorn Birds is gloriously defiant about the trolls who turned out in force to lambast her this week for having the temerity to look her age.
She’s 68, a granny with grey hair, spectacles and a cavalier attitude to skincare – ‘My husband’s always shouting at me, “Don’t forget the sunscreen!”’ – and she doesn’t give a jot about the keyboard warriors who laid into her after she posted a video of herself on social media looking, well, just what she is.
‘WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, DEAR GOD?’ asked one in screeching capitals. ‘She looks ravaged,’ carped another.
‘I couldn’t care less,’ Rachel retorts gloriously from her farm in the Australian Outback this week, incidentally looking splendid in a pink floral boho dress and sporting a pixie hairstyle her daughter Matilda cut with nail scissors.
‘The whole thing has become rather over-inflated because it touched a nerve and it’s probably time the conversation was had,’ she says, talking exclusively to the Daily Mail.
‘Women fear being judged and criticised for ageing naturally. They feel they have to hang on to their youth and are resorting to rather drastic ways of doing it. But let it go! And much bounty will come from it.
‘I was just a catalyst for the debate, but the trolls absolutely didn’t ruffle my feathers. If you expose yourself online, you have to expect it, don’t you?
‘There’s a hypocrisy about it. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I’ve no criticism of anyone who chooses to have treatments, but I just can’t be bothered. And I don’t know why people are. It’s not as if I care about being attractive because I’m looking for a mate or trying to hold on to one. Those days are long gone.’
Thorn Birds star Rachel Ward on her cattle farm in New South Wales, Australia this week
Iconic role: Rachel Ward with Richard Chamberlain on the beach in The Thorn Birds in 1983
She chortles richly. She has been married to Australian actor Bryan Brown, 78, for more than 40 years and they share a comfortable, jokey camaraderie. They have three grown-up children together – Matilda, 39, Rosie, 42, and Joe, 34, who helps her run the farm – plus three adored grandchildren.
Rachel and Bryan met on the set of The Thorn Birds in 1983: he played her errant screen husband Luke O’Neill; she was his winsome wife Meggie. Now, of course, she is his handsome, grey-haired, real-life wife. She ditched the dye just before Christmas. Shortly afterwards, Matilda got to work with the scissors and gave her that gamine crop.
‘Bryan didn’t want me to go grey. Or at least he didn’t like the thought of me going grey – although he’s as grey as a wombat himself. He said, “You don’t need to.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘I don’t need to?’ I need to because I just can’t be bothered to go to the hairdressers any more. I’m bored with it.” I’m not in the entertainment industry. I don’t have to look good on camera any more. It’s liberating going grey.’
When I suggest Rachel and Bryan love and irritate each other in equal measure she laughs and agrees: ‘Of course we do!’
‘Does he like you to wear make-up?’
‘Well, he likes me to wear lipstick but I don’t gratify him,’ she chuckles again.
She says her children urge her to consider the lighting and camera angle when she posts videos on social media, or they say, ‘We couldn’t see you properly because the lens was so dirty.’
But she flagrantly disregards them and posted the contentious video that provoked the furore without any thought of flattering herself. ‘Matilda rushed to my defence when I was trolled. Then there was an absolute tsunami of lovely comments for which I’m hugely grateful,’ she says.
We can testify to that: Daily Mail readers defended her in record-breaking numbers, thousands praising her for having the confidence to post a natural, unadorned image of herself that obviously hadn’t been Photoshopped.
Rachel Ward and husband Bryan Brown – the couple have been married for more than 40 years and have three grown-up children together – Matilda, 39, Rosie, 42, and Joe, 34, who helps run the farm – plus three adored grandchildren
‘I love her attitude,’ was the prevailing message. She has since responded with gratitude to the surge of kindness in another social media post, saying, ‘Do not fear ageing . . . later years are to be exalted and welcomed. You wait until you get there!’
‘Of course, there are some things I’m conscious of,’ she concedes now. ‘When you’re old, you should lift your chin and not let the corners of your mouth go down. It’s about carrying a bit of lightness and not looking cross or miserable.
‘I don’t want to weigh in about cosmetic treatments because everyone’s got the right to do what they want, but it’s awful if they think they must hang on to their youth, because it can never be reclaimed. I don’t regret losing my youth and beauty. I love to see it in young people but I wish they had more of a perspective on their loveliness.
‘I didn’t see it in myself. What a waste! I was hung up about so many things: my boobs were too big, my limbs weren’t slim enough, hair not big enough. The pressures I felt to be perfect – particularly when I was a model. But a lot of women think they’re not good enough. They bloody are!
‘Those of us who aren’t young any more should look with pleasure, not envy, at youth and beauty. I love looking at my daughters and grandchildren in all their deliciousness. Not just mine, but everyone’s!’
She is tall and slender with a gloriously sculpted jaw.
‘I suppose it’s easy for me to be smug about not having any surgery, but if I had a double chin I might be more keen to have a neck lift,’ she smiles.
One thing she is rigorous about is her weight. ‘I need to keep slim because I have to be fit to run the farm,’ she says. ‘I have to jump up rickety ladders to look into water tanks and climb steep hills to round up cattle. I run back and forth into the cattle yard.
‘The only thing I still make an effort with is staying fit and eating healthily. I’m very careful about where my meat comes from.’
She works full-time on the land, farming the family’s 800-acres near Utungun, New South Wales, with its stock of grass-fed cattle, with son Joe who gave up his desk-bound job as an animator and graphic designer to join his mum.
The farm is 600 miles from Sydney, where she and Bryan also have a cottage. The farm is an idyll; a traditional wooden house, brightly painted and crammed with colourful original artwork, its wrap-around veranda furnished with creaky wicker and day beds; lush pastures stretching to a limitless horizon.
But working the land is hard, physical labour, and Rachel is a regenerative farmer – she is an impassioned proponent of this method – grass-feeding cattle on pastures rich in nutrients from soil replete with minerals and organic matter.
She’s an equally ardent crusader against industrial farming. ‘Animals are kept in pens or “feed lots” and fed on low-quality grain doused in chemicals, all in the interests of producing cheap food. It’s abhorrent.’ She advocates that we should all know the provenance of the food we buy and she sells her own meat through her farm-to-plate business.
She is, too, a fervent supporter of the UK’s small family farms and vehemently opposed the Labour Government’s plans to impose inheritance tax on farmland. (After nationwide protests, in a dramatic climbdown Sir Keir Starmer has now raised the tax threshold from £1 million to £2.5 million.)
When she made Rachel’s Farm, a film for the BBC last year, it caught Jeremy Clarkson’s eye.
‘I love Clarkson’s Farm!’ she cries, ‘and Jeremy contacted me to say how much he loved my film. In a sense we’re mirroring each other. We’re both late learners in our new skills base.
‘To be a farmer you need to be a Jack of all trades: part electrician, part plumber, agronomist, mechanic, veterinary. You have to have strong hands and forearms, which I’m developing, and you have to learn from your forebears.’
Rachel has segued through careers predicated on youthful beauty. She has constantly reinvented herself, saying: ‘I’m quite good at reading use-by dates.’
She began as a model and cover-girl for Vogue and Harpers & Queen, then moved to the US in 1977 where she appeared in TV adverts. She became an actress, winning a Golden Globe for her role in crime drama Sharky’s Machine, starring with Burt Reynolds.
Rachel (pictured in 1989) and Bryan met on the set of The Thorn Birds in 1983: he played her errant screen husband Luke O’Neill
The Thorn Birds (for which she was also nominated for a Golden Globe) was her big break: Meggie Cleary’s scandalous affair with the family priest (played by Richard Chamberlain) made Rachel a star.
The show was also the making of Bryan and led to a number of international offers. Born in Sydney to a salesman father and a pianist turned drama student mother, he had originally started out as a stage actor in his home country before flitting between Britain, the US and Australia.
After The Thorn Birds, he played the lead in British TV spy film Kim, and supported Paul McCartney in the 1984 film Give My Regards To Broad Street.
Rachel found the entertainment industry shallow and obsessed with looks and sex. ‘I knew I had to move on from being an actor and I became a filmmaker and director. And now I’m a farmer,’ she says.
She feels ambivalent about The Thorn Birds: ‘Although it had enormous public support it was pilloried by critics. They were the trolls of their day. Now I don’t care at all – unless someone tells me I’m a bad farmer – but I was very thin-skinned then. There were very few women on the film sets in those days, and it was all about sexualisation. My contracts were full of arguments about full-frontal nudity.
‘I was quite precious and it made me feel very uncomfortable. But I wouldn’t have been bold enough to confront anyone. Some girls are born with balls but it took me a long time to grow them.
‘I was young and lovely, but the pressure to have treatments! At 40, I had it all: Botox, fillers. I was in front of the camera and my regret is, I didn’t realise I was beautiful. I was so self-critical.’
She was raised to believe women were inherently inferior – the playthings of men – by her aristocratic father, who expected females to be decorative, not intelligent.
Born in the Cotswolds, the oldest of three children of Peter Ward, son of the 3rd Earl of Dudley, and his wife Claire, she says her father and mother were products of their class and era.
Rachel (pictured in 1980) began as a model and cover-girl for Vogue and Harpers & Queen, then moved to the US in 1977 where she appeared in TV adverts
‘My childhood was devoid of parental attention. We children lived in the country with nannies and a chauffeur while our parents were off in London.’
Her brother Alex – who inherited the entire family fortune when their father died – was dispatched to boarding school aged eight, while Rachel and her younger sister Tracy, now Duchess of Beaufort, boarded from the age of ten.
There were weekends at grand country houses. ‘Pretty girls were seated next to the host at dinner so he could play footsie with you. The older you got, the farther down the table you were moved.
‘It was a grooming ground really. You’d never use that word for it then, but my father said to me, “You’re a very pretty girl. You’ll be able to marry a rich man. Why do you want an education?”
‘So it was engrained in me from my earliest days that men were superior; that I was a second-class citizen. My brother was considered more worthy of a good education. There was a time when I was resentful and angry. It does something to your psyche and confidence. You don’t feel good about yourself. But now I don’t envy sons who have inherited roles they’re obliged to take on.’
The family home – Cornwell Manor in Chipping Norton – is a Grade II listed manor with 12 bedrooms, a ballroom, pool and tennis courts set in 2,000 rolling Oxfordshire acres.
‘Alex has made the most of it, but his future was prescribed. Mine was not. I had the freedom to do what I wanted. And a lot of me was running away from a system I felt was unjust.’
Bryan’s background could not have been more removed. ‘What his single mum lacked in material wealth she made up for with the love and attention she gave her children. She was absolutely devoted to him and I have never known a more confident man.’
It’s a joy to talk to Rachel, who is so obviously at ease in her own, unashamedly wrinkled, skin.
She is funny, capable, passionate and clearly in love – in the easy, companionable way of long-married couples – with Bryan. How has she stayed happily married in a notoriously fickle world?
‘I married the best man in Australia,’ she says simply. ‘So there is no temptation to stray.’
