Motherhood, Majesty And Moon Walking

She shot to fame playing the Queen in The Crown and now Claire Foy is tackling another steely lady, the wife of astronaut Neil Armstrong. William Langley catches up with the busy working mum.

- William Langley

After a long, eventful and faintly mysterious life as the wife of the first man to walk on the moon, Janet Armstrong died of cancer in June at her home near Houston, Texas. Among those who felt a pang of loss was Claire Foy, the rapidly rising English actress who portrays Janet in a new film marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

The two women had arranged to meet but on the scheduled day a hurricane smashed into Houston, and in Space Center lingo, it was necessary to abort the mission.

“We were filming on a very tight schedule,” says Claire, “with just this one small window when I could have gone. It’s something I’ll always regret. I think Janet in her way was an inspirational character. She had been through a lot with the moon and NASA and Neil, and there was loss and tragedy in her life. When a person goes through that at a fairly young age they learn quickly what life can throw at you, and so I think she must have had a backbone of absolute steel.”

Steely women have become something of a speciality for 34-year old Claire, the youngest of three children, born in a down-on-its-luck industrial town in northern England. As a child she barely knew that such a profession as acting existed, and found her way into drama at a relatively late age. Since then, things have moved fast, and roles such as Henry VIII’s doomed wife Anne Boleyn in the television adaptation of Wolf Hall, and the young Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix megadrama The Crown, have propelled her, blinking in slight disbelief, from the “don’t call us” depths of the casting pool to the cusp of Hollywood stardom.