Samantha Morton: ‘I felt a lot of anger when I was a teenager in care’

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The actress, director and activist opens up to Jane Graham about her younger years, sharing her experiences of living in care

By Jane Graham /14 Feb 2019

At 16 I was living in a homeless hostel in Nottingham – it was called an independence unit but basically it was a dumping ground for kids who had to leave care. We were just forgotten about really, with no support or follow-up. The people who ran the unit were great, they were as helpful as they could be with helping you get your money or applying for college. But it was a very tough time. I felt a lot of anger when I was a teenager. I’d been in care since I was a baby, so it had been a massive part of my life.

I was angry at the system, the state, for failing to take care of me in the most basic common-sense way. Why was I being abused by residential social workers but I couldn’t stay the night at my friend’s house because their parents hadn’t been checked out? Of course I was angry.

My stepfather, who I adored, was Glaswegian and very outgoing. If I’m anyone’s child it’s not my mother’s or my father’s, it’s my stepfather’s. I’m very like him – he was very outspoken and a real character.

Despite my unstable upbringing, I was never shy. I loved fighting for the right to do or say something. I always had my hand up in class. And my stepfather supported me in everything I did. I lost touch with him for certain reasons. But when I was with him I did say thank you. He knew how grateful I was.

I told him I wasn’t into crime any more and I’d cleaned up my act,

Sometimes all you need to turn a child’s life around is one person who notices, who cares, who goes the extra mile. For me it was Mr Thompson at my junior school. He saw something in me. He knew I liked doing school plays and he encouraged me to visit the Central Junior Television Workshop run by Ian Smith. So I went to an audition and the rest is history. I found drama and I found Ian Smith.

Ian became my teacher, my mentor. He was the guy I phoned when I was in the cells again. He was incredible to me. I was in and out of the Workshop from age 14 and when I was 16, and ready to really turn my life around, I got back in touch with him. I told him I wasn’t into crime any more and I’d cleaned up my act, having been part of the rave scene. He put me back into the Workshop, got me to auditions, and I started to get proper speaking parts. I owe so much to those two teachers. 

1993: The year Samantha turns 16

  • Cult leader David Koresh is among 77 killed at Waco
  • The Queen opens up Buckingham Palace to the public for £8 a visit
  • Jurassic Park is released

 

If I hadn’t found drama I still believe I’d have had an amazing life. It would probably have been in socialist politics or activism but I always had a feeling I was going to be alright. I was bright and determined. By 16 I had found an inner strength, I felt I’d sorted myself by then, I’d found a calm. People have a misconception about kids in care. They assume they have no love in their life. The state were no help to me but I did feel love and support by certain individuals who were trying to do their best for me. So I always had hope. That’s what the film I made, The Unloved, was all about.

If I could go back in time and really impress the 16-year-old Sam I’d tell her about the family she’s going to have. Not the movies, the Oscar nominations – that world would seem shallow to young Sam. But she would be so excited to think that one day she’d have a family that she loved and loved her in return.

It was bloody hard work being a mum. And it was scary.

If I really wanted to show her a great achievement I’d show her Esme, my first child. It was bloody hard work being a mum. And it was scary. Having had 12 foster parents I didn’t have any reference points for that consistent kind of family. But I loved it from the start. I have three children and I’m proud of all of them and I feel dead lucky.  

When I had a daughter I didn’t feel sad for my younger self. What I felt was angry at the lack of support for my mother when she was suffering. She was in a very abusive marriage and when she tried to find help with her children everybody turned her away. And she didn’t know who to go to when she was running away. Now I think, God if I could go back and grab my mum and say, right Pam, this is what you need to do. Here are the agencies who can help. 

Read more ‘Letters To My Younger Self’ here

I think I’ve had some real close shaves. As a young unaccompanied actress going to auditions with strange people in strange places, being asked to do things that were not in the script but not feeling able to say no. I remember when I was in Band of Gold [the ITV series from the mid-Nineties), there was a scene a particular director wanted me to do topless, though that wasn’t in the script. I was 16 years old. Sixteen! And I was having a sex scene with a man in his sixties. I was sobbing in the trailer and it was all, ‘Sam’s being tricky…’ I didn’t understand that I had a right to say I didn’t feel comfortable. I felt I was from the streets and I’d won the lottery even being in the show, rather than feeling I had earned the right to be there. Some of the male directors working in TV drama in the Nineties were delicate and kind. And some were bullies and brutal. 

Once I started making films in America I’d started speaking out about the industry and lots of people just didn’t employ me. If, for instance, I saw crew being overworked, not being properly paid, having accidents because they’re so tired, I’d speak up against it. And lots of people don’t like that, they don’t like trouble causers. And there are plenty of people who are media trained and they go to work and they’re just not themselves. They put on a smile and they play the game. But if you grow up in the care system then work in the film industry, which is basically an old boys’ club… it used to put my back up quite a lot. 

I sometimes get very tired looking back at a life which was once… I feel like I lived 100 lives before I was 16. Now I don’t like big drama in my life, I like it to be smooth. So for me the good thing that come with age is peace inside. But with that peace is the fear of mortality. I think, I’m 41. If I’m lucky I might get to 80. Oh… I’ve done half my life.

I do for various reasons live each day as if it were my last. Which can be very intense. But I try to be in the moment as much as possible. I think I’m still very ambitious as I feel as an actress I get better as I get older. So I’m hungry for the big parts. But in my private life, I want to relax and enjoy it. I know what makes me happy now. And I feel lucky.

Source: Samantha Morton: ‘I felt a lot of anger when I was a teenager in care’

Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China

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His speech was a mashup of charges that aren’t supported by the documents he released.

By Tom Nichols

President Trump addressed the American people tonight and told them that their elections are at the mercy of foreign actors—especially China. He called the current situation a “crisis” and vowed to prevent any future elections from being “stolen.” He directed the public to a website where people can peruse documents that he says prove not only that bad actors have influenced U.S. elections, but that all of this was kept from him by “deep state” malefactors during his first term.

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Foreign powers do, in fact, try to influence American elections, but that was about all that the president—who seems shocked that other nations have preferences about who wins elected office in the United States—got right. The rest was a mishmash: Much of the previously classified material that Trump just splattered on the internet does not support his accusations, and in some cases, these declassified documents actually undermine and refute his charges.

Trump’s speech tonight rested on a few solid facts submerged in wild, and even somewhat paranoid, extrapolations. It’s true that bad actors have accessed basic data about the names and addresses of voters in several states. It’s also true that China has some pretty strong views about Trump and probably didn’t want him to be reelected in 2020. (The Chinese wanted him out because, Trump said, “I was wise to them,” which does not explain how he was nonetheless hoodwinked.)

From there, however, we slip the surly bonds of Earth and head into the dark and cold of the space of conspiracy theories. Trump strongly implied that in 2018, China was on the attack and trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and that American intelligence operatives plotted to keep that from him while he was in the Oval Office. He said that attempts to rectify all of this have fallen “catastrophically short” but that he will take “swift” action in the coming days.

The documents he offered tonight, though, tell a different story—so different that they raise the question of whether Trump, or anyone else in the White House, actually read them.

For example, one of the memos from the National Intelligence Council (the analytical group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) said in 2020 that the group in charge of cyber-issues and threats to U.S. elections “assesses that Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the President’s reelection chances by denigrating him and shaping voter perceptions.”

That sounds pretty bad. Except that (as often happens in the intelligence community) this group was representing a minority view, as it says in the very next sentence: “Their assessment differs from the IC’s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.”

So, which is it? The IC (shorthand for intelligence community) seems to have reached a pretty firm judgment in these documents: “The IC,” one of the memos says (with some passages redacted),

has seen no evidence that Beijing is engaged in an effort to influence the outcome of the presidential election, nor has it observed activity that it assesses is likely the result of such an effort by Beijing. While we have seen Beijing develop other options that could be used to influence the election, we have not seen these capabilities deployed.

Note that what these documents discuss are influence operations—propaganda, proxies who speak for foreign interests, fake stories, and so on—rather than interference, which would involve actual manipulation of data or sabotaging of electoral infrastructure. These classified revelations, despite Trump’s assertions, show that the intelligence community didn’t even agree that China was fully engaged even in these more limited influence operations.

One document says, with more firmness, that the Chinese were attempting to undermine Trump’s chances and to pressure business partners into withdrawing support for the president’s reelection. This is perfectly plausible behavior from a U.S. adversary. Of course, Trump skipped over the part about other nations, including one where “senior officials” and their leader were seeking to “covertly influence US politicians’ and political candidates’ thinking” about the election.

That nation? Turkey.

On one point, however, the declassified reports are clear. One country, more than any other, actively engaged in operations against the 2020 elections: Russia. And the Russians had a clear preference:

We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment. For example, it is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Vice President Biden. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.

This isn’t news, but Trump carefully cherry-picked his way around it. In charts provided by the White House itself that compare Russia, China, and Iran, only Russia is judged to be actively involved in such efforts.

Trump not only ignored these multiple (and much more categorical judgments); he interpreted the normal in-house fighting that goes on every day in the intelligence community as evidence of some sort of plot against him. He made much of a comment in a group email—these conspirators were pretty relaxed about sending their nefarious ideas around to everyone—about “massaging” the President’s Daily Brief to take out references to the 2020 election. But the conversation was clearly about which product would include such issues, and how strongly the minority view would be stated. Like so much else in the speech and the documents, Trump threw everything he could find at the wall and in the hope that some of it would stick.

So what, then, was the point of Trump’s speech? First, he is almost certainly trying to soothe his wounded ego over the 2020 election. He is obsessed with his loss to Biden and wants to blame it on foreign manipulation. But Trump might also have a darker motive, attacking the integrity of American elections because he wants to delegitimize the coming midterms—and perhaps even create the predicate for interfering in them.

The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and many other enemies of the United States clearly hope to undermine the faith of every American citizen in their own elections. But no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight.

Source: Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China – The Atlantic

“She’ll never leave me”

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Donald Trump’s quote, “She’ll never leave me,” refers to his close relationship with his executive assistant and aide, Natalie Harp

According to the book “Regime Change” by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump contrasted Harp’s dedication with that of other staffers, reportedly saying, “All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me.” He also told his staff that she loved him as much as his own wife and children.