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Having my baby in America proved an expensive nightmare

When actress Helen McCrory had her second child, she opted to give birth near where husband Damian Lewis was filming — in LA’s smartest hospital. Now, as her own new film opens, she reveals the appalling standard of care she received

HELEN McCRORY looks radiant but exhausted. With two children under two (Manon, 19 months, and Gulliver, five months), she doesn’t get much sleep. And just last week she finished filming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — as Narcissa Malfoy, wife of villainous Lucius Malfoy.

A teeny figure dressed in black, she arrives armed with her beloved roll-ups and orders a proper breakfast. The actress, who is married to Damian Lewis, star of The Forsyte Saga and Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, is lovely, teasing company.

There is a feisty independence to McCrory, 38, whose past boyfriends include Rufus Sewell and James Murray (now married to Sarah Parish). She and Lewis have a pact not to discuss their relationship. But she becomes animated on: “The terrible jealousies and pangs of desire you feel when you first fall in love. But then as you learn to trust the person, and as you learn to love them, you become far more accepting. Rather than screaming, `How could you have slept with her?’ you’re like, `Well, I had a past’ . ” She admits she was never broody until she met Lewis.

Apart from shadows under her eyes, she insists she has never been happier. After a two-year break from theatre (she was nominated for an Olivier Award for her Rosalind in As You Like It in 2005), she will be back on stage next month in the Almeida’s much-anticipated production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.

She has already lost the baby weight from Gulliver — unpacking boxes as she and Lewis moved into their new five-bedroom house in Tufnell Park (they also have a house in Wales, where Lewis partly grew up).

Yet having a second child so quickly was a shock. She was enjoying rave reviews for her role as Cherie Blair in The Queen. And planning her wedding to Lewis (memorably she delayed it until after Manon’s birth, claiming she’d rather be “skinny and drunk” than “fat and sober”) when she discovered she was pregnant again. “I suddenly stopped being able to breastfeed Manon easily,” says McCrory, “I found out it was because I was three months pregnant and my body was knackered.” She recounts how she was preparing for the Oscars last year and found she was struggling to fit into her dress. “The bulge was little Gulliver on his way.”

Roles were put on hold. But it meant she could join Lewis in the States while he was filming the lead in the American TV police drama series Life. The couple, who have been together for five years, met on stage at the Almeida in 2003, playing lovers in Five Gold Rings. Six months into her pregnancy with Gulliver, she finally gave up the fantasy of being a thin bride and they married quietly in Kensington and Chelsea register office. Afterwards, she says, they “walked down the King’s Road and had lunch in a nice restaurant around the corner with 11 people. A very romantic day”.

Of course, if Damian was to be present at Gulliver’s birth it meant McCrory faced the prospect of having her baby in a foreign country. But she wasn’t worried about giving birth in America. After all, she was booked into the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the cream of Los Angeles hospitals. Admittedly she’d had a tricky time with Manon: the baby was breech and dangerously high so her doctors at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, couldn’t risk a spontaneous labour. Manon was born by Caesarean, weighing a healthy 7lb. But with Gulliver McCrory was hoping to have a natural birth. British doctors agreed it was safe. What McCrory hadn’t reckoned on was the intransigence of the American medical system. When she went into Cedars-Sinai, for an initial consultation, doctors were adamant she would have to have another C-section.

But surely British film stars get the best treatment in the States, where you can expect to pay upwards of $15,000 for a Caesarean birth? Not so, says McCrory. “Oh my God, I was really shocked at the level of care, it’s appalling. Because you’re paying, you think you’ll be getting a superior form of private medicine.”

It was, she says, a bit like being in Paris: where only rudeness gets results. “And that’s not how I work in life, because I think it’s unnecessary. But actually, I realised, when people were barking down this corridor with million-dollar diamond rings on each finger, everybody was running. Someone like me who sits and says [she adopts a demure tone], `When you have time could you possibly get me a painkiller, I’ve just passed out’, you don’t get anything.”

Things didn’t improve when it came to pain management: “They couldn’t recommend me a drug because, of course, it’s all private.” Everyone is terrified of being sued? “Yes, so you’re supposed to know everything about your own drugs.”

EVEN after the birth: “I sat in the hospital for five-and-a-half hours before they had enough nurses on duty that my child could be brought to me. Then, when Gulliver didn’t breastfeed immediately they were insistent: “No, we’re just going to bottle-feed him, we are taking this child away.’ We were told, `God wants him to feed on the bottle.’ ”

Childbirth was not the only experience that put McCrory off healthcare, American-style. During the early part of their stay in LA, older daughter Manon developed a fever. “Damian was working 18 hours a day,” says McCrory, “and she was so hot she was 105F for five days. I’d sit with this huge pregnant stomach in lukewarm water, take her out, put her in again. For five days I didn’t sleep. They won’t even do a home call. And when you take children to the doctor’s, they will do one test that takes seven days to come back, and charge you $350 for a urine sample. And this was Cedars-Sinai.”

It has given her a renewed passion for British hospitals. “Can you please make the title of the piece `God save the National Health’?” she says, suddenly solemn. “People are literally dying in America because they can’t afford to live. You hear, `Oh the Americans are so vain, this is why they are so health-conscious.’ No it isn’t: they can’t afford to be ill. If you have the wrong insurance, they will not put you in the ambulance. I think you judge a society by how they treat their poor and old.”

In contrast, after she had Manon in London, the health worker came to her house four times: weighed the baby, checked her hips and her eyes, and talked to McCrory to check for signs of postnatal depression. “In the States you have to have a paediatric report that costs you $1,000. You’re not allowed to leave the hospital without it. It takes two minutes, and the doctor is only doing exactly what our nurses do for free. And that’s it, you don’t see a doctor again, unless you pay.”

British nurses and doctors are just far more caring, she insists. “You know it’s a vocation. Gulliver had his jabs and his temperature went up to 104F — so they took him to the Whittington Hospital and got a consultant on a motorcycle over from Guy’s. He was there in 45 minutes. We had a lumbar puncture, a urinary tract test, lungs, everything, on the NHS, all by 3.30pm the same afternoon that we’d taken him in at 11am. And then the next day, the doctor phoned us at home and gave us his mobile number as it was his day off and said if there were any problems to call him.”

With her impish looks and genuine intelligence, McCrory is the actress most directors want to work with. But pregnancy nearly jinxed her recent film roles. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix she was cast as Bellatrix Lestrange but had to withdraw because the insurers wouldn’t allow a pregnant McCrory to do the f lying stunts (Helena Bonham Carter took the role). Then director David Yates offered her Narcissa — sister of Bellatrix — in the Half-Blood Prince and the film after that. Once again she got pregnant. But undeterred Yates scheduled all her filming right at the end of the shoot.

There’s nothing luvvie about McCrory. Despite being one of our great classical actresses — she is openly compared to Judi Dench — she is rarely recognised in the street. She’s even been at dinner parties where people raved about The Queen without realising she was in it. It’s a tribute to her chameleon acting skills, although she admits: “It is becoming rather irritating.”

SHE HAD a peripatetic childhood — which explains why she copes well with change. Her father was a Scottish diplomat and they lived in Cameroon, Tanzania, France and Scandinavia. Her mother was a physiotherapist at the Royal Free Hospital when her parents first met — which explains McCrory’s passion for the NHS.

For years she has been the Next Big Thing. Finally this may be her moment. She was hand-picked by Daniel Craig for a role in his new movie, Flashbacks of a Fool (which she filmed in South Africa while pregnant with Gulliver). A 1970s coming-of-age memoir, it’s the debut of British director Baillie Walsh. “Baillie sent me this fantastic script, it’s like a beautiful little poem.”

In the film, she plays Craig’s mannish aunt with her hair cut short and dyed black. “I based it on Elvis, the later years,” she hoots. “I was going to do Sun City 1968, but — seven months pregnant — I knew it had to be the Vegas years.”

In May she plays ” new woman” Rebecca West in Rosmersholm (the production went on hold for a year when she was pregnant with Gulliver: director Anthony Page was adamant he wouldn’t cast anyone else).

But I am interested in Harry Potter. What does this versatile actress look like as Narcissa? McCrory gulps. “If I told you that they’d shoot you as you walked away from this building. No I’m not joking.” Then she reveals: “It’s like working for MI5. When you film, a man comes in with a wand. You do the scene, and as soon as it’s finished, it’s locked in a cupboard. At first you think: `Why?’ And then you see the eyes of the kids being shown round the set and you think: `Oh that’s why.’ Because if it’s not nailed down, it’s going to disappear.”

It will also be the role that finally grants McCrory the recognition she deserves, even if it is among eight-year-old girls.

Flashbacks of A Fool is released on Friday. Rosmersholm opens at the Almeida on 15 May (booking on 020 7359 4404)