Casual Vacancy actress: Being raised by two mums ‘ruined my life’
British actress Hetty Baynes has attacked Mary Portas for raising a child with her wife – and claims her own upbringing was ‘damaging and confusing’
In an article for the Mail, the actress – who appeared as Mo Johnson in the TV adaptation of JK Rowling novel The Casual Vacancy – revealed that she was brought up by her mother and lover Mary, who she describes as “a formidable and often frightening figure who was very much the ‘man of the house’.”
She wrote: To this day, describing mother as bisexual — for that is clearly what she was — still makes me feel uncomfortable.”
She wrote of her upbringing: “Far from being a healthy, nurturing state of affairs, this arrangement — where I was caught in a destructive, triangular battle for my mother’s affection with another woman, while forced to watch helplessly as my father was emasculated and airbrushed from our lives — was simultaneously damaging and confusing.
“Which is why, when I pick up the news-papers to read of retail guru Mary Portas, who has a two-year-old son with her wife Melanie Rickey, saying ‘motherhood is better without men’, my heart sinks. Those words could have come out of the mouths of either of my ‘two mothers’.”
When a fan questioned who said they had trouble “seeing Dumbledore like that”, she said: “Maybe because gay people just look like… people?”
How did this story make you feel?
