As one grieving relative said, it was “a fairy-tale romance” between one of
Britain’s most mesmerising actresses and a leading plastic surgeon, but not
all fairy tales end happily. Last Monday Natascha McElhone and Martin Kelly
marked the 10th anniversary of a contented marriage blessed by two children.
The next day Kelly dropped dead.
Possessing the kind of luminous beauty that inspires awe in women and
infatuation in men, McElhone, 36, often declared that since falling in love
with Kelly she had become indifferent to the charms of George Clooney, with
whom she starred in Solaris, Robert De Niro (Ronin) and Jim Carrey (The
Truman Show). “I no longer look at men that way,” she said.
McElhone’s half-French husband was not only 6ft 3in tall, dark and handsome,
but his pioneering techniques in cosmetic surgery had won international
renown. His skill in reconstructing noses – notably that of Tara
Palmer-Tomkinson, the socialite and former cocaine addict – had earned Kelly
the sobriquet “the king of rhinoplasty”. He also performed an unsung role in
transforming the lives of disfigured Third World children and planning
Britain’s first full facial transplant.
At 43 he was fit and played in a rock band with fellow surgeons. Hence the
incomprehension and dismay at the events that unfolded after a friend
discovered Kelly slumped in the doorway of his £2.5m house in Fulham, west
London. Paramedics tried to revive him but he was pronounced dead on arrival
at hospital. Everyone’s thoughts turned to his wife, pregnant with the
couple’s third child.
The news reached McElhone in Los Angeles, where she was filming the second
series of the raunchy television show Californication. Playing the former
girlfriend of David Duchovny’s novelist is her highest-profile role for
years. McElhone prepared to fly home with the couple’s sons Theodore, 8, and
Otis, 5, as a postmortem in London confirmed initial suspicions that Kelly
died of a hereditary heart condition.
“Anyone who was in his sphere felt a strange electric current across the room
as he entered. He was the love of my life, the dearest, most exciting and
witty friend I ever had,” she says, writing in a tabloid newspaper today.
“It seems he had this effect on everyone who was his friend. You were
touched by fire, it scalded sometimes.”
McElhone’s stepfather Roy Greenslade, the media commentator and former editor
of the Daily Mirror, described them as “star-crossed lovers.” He said: “I
have never known a marriage as close and warm as theirs.”
The friend who discovered Kelly was a surgeon with whom he was due to have
supper. They had been talking on the telephone 10 minutes earlier, when
Kelly explained that he was running late after being called back to the
nearby Chelsea and Westminster hospital, where he worked as a consultant.
The same hospital received his dead body.
There was also speculation that Kelly’s condition may have been compounded the
previous week by his long flight from Los Angeles after a short holiday with
his wife and children. Such trips were a pattern of their lives. Exposing
her husband to Hollywood was not her idea of a favour: “The bullshit out
there is so thick. Being successful is about more than just swallowing it
and deciding to make some money. You’d also have to say, ‘This is great’,
when you didn’t mean it. And I can’t do it.”
Hollywood once looked equally askance at her: the US censors expressed shock
at a nude scene with Clooney in the brooding 2002 science-fiction movie
Solaris. When a reporter asked her what it was like “seeing George Clooney’s
butt”, she replied: “You should have seen his front.” Clooney impressed her
as “totally lacking in vanity and a true gentleman. Sort of Cary Grant
reincarnated”.
The actress’s own love story had been scripted years before. She was 15,
working as a waitress in the school holidays, when she met Kelly, then a
medical student moonlighting as a male model.
“I thought he was a god at that age – he played in a band, totally cool – and
had no idea he was remotely interested in me,” she recalled.
They drifted apart for 10 years, then out of the blue he called: “He told me
he’d never forgotten me. He kept track of me through a mutual friend and
always knew where I was.” They arranged to meet, fell in love and got
married in Provence. They moved to Paris, where McElhone became pregnant:
“We lived in a tiny flat among the rooftops. It was wonderful.”
Despite their disparate backgrounds, the couple had one thing in common: Irish
genes. McElhone, born in Hampstead, north London, is the daughter of Noreen
Taylor, a former Mirror columnist, and Mike Taylor, also an Irish
journalist. Her parents separated when Natascha was two. After her mother
married Greenslade, Natascha was brought up in Brighton.
Stage struck from the age of three, she acted up and managed to get herself
expelled from the “purgatory” of St Mary’s Hall, an independent boarding
school for girls in Brighton. She pursued her acting ambitions, but found
the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art unappealing: “The teachers
didn’t really want to be there. That brought me down.”
Kelly was born Martin Hirigoyen to a French father and an Irish mother and was
raised in Paris. When he was 17 his parents separated and he accompanied his
mother to London, later adopting her maiden name, Kelly, because patients
struggled to pronounce his surname. He was enrolled at Winchester College
before studying at St Bartholomew’s hospital medical school in London and
beginning his training in Oxford.
His experiences as a volunteer with Médecins Sans Frontières pulled him
towards plastic surgery and more specialised charity work. He saw children
with “horrific” burns and deformities that could not be treated locally.
“These children are shunned and even stoned in Third World countries,” he
said. “They cannot form relationships or be employed.”
After the Taliban fell, he went to Afghanistan and reconstructed noses: the
Taliban had a penchant for cutting them off people they deemed to be liars.
By the time the couple rekindled their attraction, McElhone was basking in the
acclaim of her 1996 film debut, Surviving Picasso. She had been cast as
Françoise Gilot, the young student who endured a turbulent decade with the
artist (Anthony Hopkins), after James Ivory, the director, spotted her in a
production of Richard III at the Regent’s Park theatre in London. She was
about to become a Hollywood player as the woman of Carrey’s dreams in The
Truman Show and a hard-as-nails criminal alongside De Niro in Ronin, both
released in 1998.
Kelly, too, was attracting attention. A scholarship to research microsurgery
and facial reconstruction at Mount Sinai hospital in New York had equipped
him with unusual skills. Peter Butler, who has been authorised to perform
Britain’s first full face transplant, noted his trainee’s expertise as a
surgeon at the outset.
“I learnt as much from him as he learnt from me,” said Butler, whose son
Rafferty was Kelly’s godson. “He made us all raise our game.”
Eight years ago Kelly joined Butler and two other colleagues in setting up
London Plastic Surgery Associates, a private practice dedicated to raising
the level of plastic surgery in the UK. In 2006 Kelly’s advice on the
ethical problems of plastic surgery helped Butler to secure the go-ahead for
a future face transplant. He also assisted in planning such an operation.
Butler is married to Annabel Heseltine, the journalist and daughter of Michael
Heseltine, the former deputy prime minister. “He was a lovely man – a kind
and gentle man whose theatres were always a nice place to be,” she said. “He
led a very normal, down-to-earth life with Natascha, who was dedicated to
him.”
McElhone drummed up celebrity support for his charity Facing the World, which
pays for Third World children to have reconstructive surgery in London.
Unlike her husband, McElhone’s trajectory faltered as she began to subordinate
her career to motherhood, popping up in small films (Guy X, Feardotcom, Big
Nothing) and often opting for foreign or plain eccentric parts, such as a
German artist alongside Judi Dench in Ladies in Lavender. In 2006 she
returned to the stage in Honour at Wyndham’s theatre in London, starring
with Diana Rigg and Martin Jarvis.
With Californication, McElhone was poised to fulfil predictions of big
stardom. Now fate has handed her the worst possible role.
