Hollywood actress Emily Watson says her parents unwittingly put her in ‘harm’s way’ because of their beliefs.
Her father, Richard, and mother, Katharine, were devotees of the religious charity the School of Economic Science (SES), likened to a cult by its critics.
In 2020, two schools established as an independent educational charity by SES paid nearly £1million in compensation to 45 former pupils who were physically assaulted between 1975 and 1992.
In an interview with Desert Island Discs, airing on Sunday on BBC Radio 4, Ms Watson, 59, says she is still confused about why her loving parents had exposed her and her elder sister Harriet to the charity.
The Hamnet star says: ‘They obviously loved us so much but they did, I think, unwittingly put us potentially in harm’s way. We were OK because we had them.
‘I did see some of [the violence]. I think I navigated it by keeping my head down and being a good girl for as long as I could stomach that.’
SES is influenced by Hinduism and offers instruction in the work of Western and Indian philosophers.
The actress adds: ‘At the centre of it is a philosophy that is a beautiful thing. It’s sort of spiritual communism. But for us as children, it wasn’t like that. It was very repressive to women and young girls, and destructive in some ways.’
Emily Watson said her parents had put her in ‘harm’s way’ because of their devotion to a religious ‘cult’
Watson played Mary, William Shakespeare’s mother, in Hamnet last year
Ms Watson adds that there was ‘an expectation that you would become a wife and a mother or maybe a teacher’, and that ‘the idea of being independent was frowned upon’.
By the time she enrolled at the University of Bristol she had begun to question everything, saying: ‘I felt I was leading a double life, because I was… going out and doing everything that young people do.
‘But at the same time, I was returning every week to these sessions. It didn’t make sense.’
The star began to break away from SES when she landed a role in the sexually explicit 1996 film Breaking The Waves, and the charity told her to ‘go on her undignified way’.
She says: ‘It still took me a while to extricate myself… When you’ve grown up in that situation the fear of leaving something is wired in.
‘I felt like I was in freefall and the thing that caught me was this part, acting… If being on a religious path is about a search for meaning, this feels more alive and more full of meaning than I have ever felt.’
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday at 10am and also available via BBC Sounds.
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