Charlotte's Web Of Support

With International Women’s Day and Mothering Sunday this month, Herts’ Charlotte Beaumont talks about the female writers, actors, agents, dramatists, and her mum, who have helped propel her to Broadchurch and beyond.

- Melanie Dakin

When Charlotte Beaumont describes her mum as the most influential person in her life, I can’t help recalling Reese Witherspoon’s 2015 Women of the Year speech about raising the benchmark on female ambition. She particularly spoke about women empowering other women and the importance of the mother daughter relationship.

As well as appearing in all three series of the BAFTA award-winning Broadchurch, the actresses’ TV work includes EastEnders, Holby City, Waterloo Road, Doctors and Skins. She made her film debut in 2010 as the daughter of The Blockheads singer Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Other film roles include biopic Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This (2014), sci-fi blockbuster Jupiter Ascending (2015), and the lead in horror The Windmill (2016). And she’s still only 22.

Her mum Lynn, a musical theatre performer, was reluctant to steer her daughter towards an industry that is notoriously hard to crack. But once she knew Charlotte was serious, she backed her all the way.

‘It sounds very clichéd but I would have to say the most influential woman in my life has always been my mum,’ says Charlotte when we meet up close to her Farringdon home after she’d finished two back-to-back theatre projects.

She says that growing up in Herts her mum did ‘absolutely everything she could’ to support her ambition. ‘She brought me up so that I knew that anything was possible.’

She adds that her mum was reticent to drive her too hard. ‘Mum was so wary of being like Bette Midler in Gypsy where she’s so, so pushy, but growing up around theatre you immediately absorb it.’