Painting has helped one of Britain’s most revered actors survive Covid restrictions and the loss of a child. We join the actor for an art class that never quite happens

If you go down to the woods today, you may just come across Juliet Stevenson dangling from a branch, fumbling to photograph the light falling through a caterpillar hole on a particularly disobliging leaf, with her partner Hugh chuckling, resigned, as yet another quick stroll turns into a day trip. Upside down Juliet Stevenson has been a rare constant of Suffolk’s lockdown landscape, even as snow buried it and tides hacked away at its crumbling coastline. The 64-year-old has been all over the East Anglian country, leaving a trail of snow angels on her quest to find its most picturesque – and acrobatic – angles.

What’s an actor to do when the West End goes dark? All that creative energy must go somewhere – and this actor is training the newly discovered painter’s eye that has kept her sane over lockdown. “By the time you get to my age,” she says, when I question why painting would be the basis of our interview, “you become too settled into the skills you know you have. I can sort of do my job. I know quite a lot about parenting. But to be absolutely at the beginning of something – at square one – it’s just a great feeling.”