It was almost 9pm and the sun was setting as Martin Kelly, a gifted plastic
surgeon, arrived home in Fulham, southwest London on May 20. It had been a
long day: the 43-year-old specialist in facial reconstruction had spent
hours in the operating theatre, attended an early-evening meeting, then
dashed back to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital to check on a patient.
Kelly had already telephoned a friend who was joining him for supper to say he
was running late: as soon as he got home he dropped his briefcase in the
living room and walked onto the balcony to phone his wife, the actress
Natascha McElhone, who was in Los Angeles filming the second series of
Californication. He got her voicemail.
Four days earlier it had been the couple’s 10th wedding anniversary but they
had decided to delay their celebrations until the following week, when Kelly
would be flying out to America. They planned to spend a night at the
historic San Ysidro ranch, in California, then go for the 20-week scan on
the baby McElhone was carrying, a brother or sister for their sons Theo, 8,
and Otis, 5.
“He left me this message, full of the joys . . . he couldn’t wait to come out
the next week, he was so excited about the scan, so excited about the baby,”
she says. “Thank God, a lovely last message.”
Little more than 10 minutes later - McElhone calculates it as 13 - Kelly was
dead. The tall, handsome doctor, who played in a band and had been
snowboarding five weeks beforehand, was found by his friend lying in the
hallway, one foot wedging open the front door. His heart had suddenly and
inexplicably given out.
There was a lock on Kelly’s mobile phone, which meant nobody could access
McElhone’s or any of his family’s numbers. For the next few hours she kept
filming 5,000 miles away, unaware of the drama back home, where her
husband’s body had been taken to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital after
frantic attempts to revive him.
The couple’s sons were with McElhone in California and she had booked them
into afternoon gym classes just across the road from the studio. There was a
break in filming, so she had walked over to watch them when she picked up a
message from her husband’s best friend, Neil Randhawa, a consultant
anaesthetist.
“He said, ‘It’s really important you call me.’ I wasn’t at all worried about
Martin because I’d had this lovely message from him. I thought there must be
something wrong with Neil, so I rang just to check he was all right.
“When I got through, he said, ‘Are you alone?’ I guess Neil didn’t know how to
tell me. He kept saying everyone did everything they could and I remember
thinking, ‘What on earth is he talking about?’ It was the most surreal
moment of my life. It occurred to me that maybe he was asleep - it was one
in the morning in London - and he was rambling.
“I walked across the road towards my trailer and it must have suddenly hit me
on some level. I did that thing I thought people only did in movies - I
dropped the phone and my knees sort of buckled under me. A lovely woman
called Nancy, who is David Duchovny’s assistant, ran up to me. I told her
the boys were over in the gym and asked her to fetch them. I got into my
trailer and called Neil again. I knew I was going to have to tell the kids.
I thought of trying to suspend time or wait and not tell them for a day but
I couldn’t bear the idea of other people knowing and them not. I remember
looking out of the window and seeing them chasing after each other with huge
squeals of delight and thinking, ‘I’m about to shatter their world.’ They
came in and they were like little boys are, full of energy and excitement,
and I told them what had happened. And then the clouds descended . . . it
was awful.”
Fast-forward almost four months and we are sitting in Bibendum, Terence
Conran’s stylish restaurant in South Kensington. McElhone, 36, is wearing a
red velvet scarf her mother wore when she was pregnant with her: “It’s
stayed the course well, don’t you think?”
She is even more beautiful than the publicity pictures suggest, with her
sculpted cheekbones and eyes of clear, dark blue. There is nothing to
suggest the grieving widow, except a fleeting closure of her eyes and a
silence after she describes telling her sons they had lost their father.
If the mark of a fine actress is an almost superhuman control over her
emotions, McElhone must be up there with the best of them. Her serene smile
hides what must be the most dreadful turmoil. In the days after Kelly died,
she wrote a heartrending tribute: “I just can’t believe I won’t feel his
skin any more, how is that possible?” Now, she professes to be “moving on” -
working diligently through the legalities, because Kelly had not made a
will, and preparing for the new baby, due in four weeks - though she admits
to still feeling dazed. “It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being hit by an
avalanche.”
She attributes her sense of calm and practicality to the children. “I haven’t
been able to go off into a corner and be self-indulgent,” she says. “All the
decisions have been made for me in that respect. There’s no ‘Shall I crumble
or shall I rise, phoenix-like, from all this and take on the world?’ -
clearly, I can only do the latter. My boys are like little Duracell
batteries that slot in in the morning and I’m charged up for the day. I’m
lucky.”
Still, she has surprised even herself by how optimistic she feels about the
future. “Martin is really, really present, which I’m surprised by and
delighted by. I’ve never been one to believe in spirits, but I feel we’re
all suffused with him in different ways and that will live on, in me, in the
kids, in this new little one that’s just coming along. The amazing thing is
how you can keep going if you have to. You can see that by looking at people
in far worse situations, in disasters or war-torn countries . . . and that
is how you feel, a bit like a refugee, as if everything that belongs to you
has been broken.”
Before he died, Kelly had been working with fellow surgeons on developing a
gel to treat postoperative scarring, appropriately called Heal. In testing
it on patients, they found that it not only reduced scarring but could be
used to treat everyday injuries such as sprains, sunburn and bruises. They
believed it deserved a place in every bathroom cabinet. McElhone, who was
helping with testing, used it on her son’s sunburn and says the redness
disappeared within hours.
Heal gel is available online, and if it seems incongruous that, having so
recently lost her husband, she is out promoting his product, McElhone
doesn’t see it that way. “A lot of people said to me, ‘For God’s sake,
Natascha, be realistic - you don’t know what’s happening financially, you
don’t know when your next job is, you’ve got a baby coming and the boys and
your own grieving and you can’t take on what he’s left behind.’ But to me
it’s all I can do: Heal is his poem, his legacy, part of his contribution to
the world, and if I don’t do what I can, I’ll be failing him.”
The couple had known each other for 20 years. When McElhone was 16 and
studying for her A-levels in north London, she had a weekend job as a
greeter in a restaurant. One of the barmen was a student who lived in
Camden, near her school, and told her she should drop round. Kelly was one
of his flatmates.
“This Adonis opened the door and I was slightly gobsmacked,” she says. “He was
very casual but he claimed, many years later, that his heart skipped a beat
too when he saw me. I can’t quite believe that. He was about 21, and that’s
such a big difference at that age. He was a medical student and he’d already
achieved so much.”
Born to a French father and Irish mother, Martin Hirigoyen (he later adopted
his mother’s maiden name because patients found his name so tricky)
was educated in Paris and at Winchester college. By the time he and McElhone
got together, in 1996, he was a senior house officer and she had just made
her first major film, Surviving Picasso, with Anthony Hopkins. She went on
to star in The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey, and Solaris, with George
Clooney.
Soon afterwards the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières was
looking for a volunteer team of surgeons to do facial surgery in
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and Kelly flew to Kabul. “It was a pretty
dangerous place and I remember being really worried about him and thinking,
‘Why am I so worried? I must really love him’,” says McElhone.
One of the children Kelly came across was four-year-old Hadisa Husain, whose
skull had not fused in the womb, leaving part of her brain exposed. She had
no nose and her left eye was obscured by folds of flesh. Kelly discovered
that she was known as “devil child” and had been stoned by villagers.
Conditions were not sophisticated enough to operate on her in Kabul, so he
raised funds for her to be flown to Britain.
A little while later McElhone was filming in Cambodia with Gérard Depardieu
and Matt Dillon when she came across Beat Richner, a Swiss paediatrician and
cellist, who had founded four children’s hospitals. “Martin visited and saw
craniofacial deformities that never got treated, families who were
ostracised, and he determined to do something,” says McElhone. “We’d always
had this thing of, ‘Oh, when we’re old and grey we’ll go and live in the
Third World’ and I would try and teach English or do something useful and he
could train local surgeons. And he said, ‘Well, why wait? Let’s try and find
a way of doing some of this now.’ ” The result was Facing the World, a
charity founded with a group of leading craniofacial surgeons, which has
treated children with disfigurements from around the globe. Meanwhile, Kelly
was steadily climbing the career ladder, appointed consultant to both the
Chelsea and Westminster and the Royal Marsden hospital, where he
reconstructed faces after cancer surgery. His private work made him a
favourite among London’s glitterati - he is reputed to have repaired Tara
Palmer-Tomkinson’s nose after it collapsed through cocaine use.
No wonder McElhone’s tribute painted him as a Renaissance man. He continued to
play with fellow surgeons in a band called Tuck That and was a keen
sportsman. “He taught [the boys] chess, surfing, drawing, foreign languages,
his version of truth, what it is to risk, to have integrity, manners -
beautiful, manly manners - and how to leap into the unknown at least once a
day, because not knowing what you might find was the real gift of life,”
according to McElhone. Her greatest sadness was how much their sons would
lose out on. “Their world for now has been halved: I cannot become him,” she
said.
At first she found it difficult even to speak about Kelly. “I was talking to
Elizabeth Waterhouse, who is married to Norman, Martin’s mentor, and said I
felt that every time I shared thoughts and memories, every time I opened the
bottle of him, as it were, I lost a little bit of the scent. I wanted to
keep it corked and sealed so it retained its potency.
“She said, ‘I don’t know why you’re afraid of losing any of the memories or
losing him in your life.’ She said she remembered the first time she’d met
me. Martin and I were quite young and we were goofing around in the garden,
climbing on top of each other, not realising anyone was watching. She said,
‘I was struck at your wedding that he’d adopted so much of what was you and
you’d adopted so much of what was him.’ So as well as having children who’d
fused us, it was comforting to think that some of what was him had rubbed
off on me, so it’s in me as well as in the boys.
“We went to see Martin’s father last weekend. His great-grandfather was an
engineer during the industrial revolution and Theo was just sitting
listening to stories about him, spellbound. So it’s lovely that even though
his dad’s gone, there’s this legacy. He likes the idea of being a nuclear
physicist and he can think, ‘That’s okay, I can be interested in science
because all the men in my family are interested too.’ ” She has made memory
boxes for the children. “I only started doing two, and I suddenly thought:
poor little lamb!” she says, patting her stomach. “I was lucky - they had
exactly the same leather-bound box left in the shop.” Kelly’s best friends
have recorded CDs of his favourite music and written letters to the children
so they will get an idea of what their father was like.
After his funeral McElhone held a wake. She could not trust herself to speak,
so she put together a film of Kelly’s life and times. “We’ve got a little
projector and a screen and six people at a time went upstairs and watched it
on a loop. It was supposed to make everyone laugh but of course they all
came down in floods of tears,” she says.
There is a copy of the film in each of the children’s boxes, along with
pictures they drew and notes recording their thoughts and impressions after
their father’s death. McElhone is there if they want to talk about him, but
they don’t dwell on it. “I had this irrational fear at first that by moving
on I would be leaving him behind. But that’s obviously what you must do, as
a parent. I have grabbed life by the throat and I am packing in as much as I
can and trying to keep things fun for the boys, actually. They seem to be
responding in a very positive way. From what I can tell, and it is so hard
with kids to know, I don’t think they feel that a door’s closed. I think
they still feel there are many doors to be opened and I want to keep that
alive.”
She thinks Kelly would approve. “On our last weekend together we took the boys
up to the sequoia forest in California. Funnily enough, we spent much of
that weekend discussing Heal and how I could help . . . Martin, as always,
was full of verve and energy, looking to the future. We climbed high up,
onto these huge logs. And that’s my lasting image of him, sitting, swinging
his legs, smiling down at me.”
For more information on Heal visit: www.healgel.com
