Julia Foster: ‘The children were called to the bedside because they thought I wasn’t going to survive’

Julia Foster spent the evening of her 76th birthday this week like every evening right now, vigorously singing and dancing on stage at the Bridge Theatre in central London, as part of the mainly septuagenarian cast of Alan Bennett’s latest play Allelujah!, set in a hospital geriatric ward.

“None of us had danced in 20 or 30 years, so the muscles were a bit slow to remember and it was a bit painful at first,” says Foster, a grandmother of five. “We have a special warm-up every night because they don’t want any of us pulling muscles. But the steps come back to you, it’s like riding a bicycle.”

In the 1960s, Foster was a huge star of stage and screen, playing downtrodden Gilda opposite Michael Caine in Alfie and perky Ann in Half A Sixpence with Tommy Steele.

But in recent years, she’s become better known as mother of television presenter and adventurer Ben Fogle, having stepped back from her career to bring up Ben and his sisters – graphic-designer Emily, 48, from her first brief marriage to Lionel Morton of pop group The Four Pennies, and clothes-designer Tamara, 40, with her second husband, renowned TV vet and author Bruce Fogle.

“For a long while I’d taken a break from acting,” Foster explains, sitting in The Bridge’s foyer bar, in chic black and white unrecognisable from her role as mousy, retired librarian Mary. “I wasn’t being asked to do the things I wanted to do, so the family became more important than one’s career.

“I can’t honestly remember how long it is since I last appeared on stage. But it’s so lovely to be back – you never lose the thrill of hearing an audience laugh or applaud at the end of a dance number. It’s magical, magical! And to be in an Alan Bennett play, directed by [former National Theatre boss] Nick Hytner, that’s an actor’s dream!”

Her comeback is all the more remarkable because, just a year ago, Foster was at death’s door, after routine back surgery went horribly wrong, a trauma only publicly revealed on Allelujah!’s first night three weeks ago, when Ben tweeted a picture of his mother on stage with the caption: “For anyone who wonders where I get my drive and energy. This time last year Mum was on life support in a coma in an Intense Care Unit.”

“I could almost cry when I talk about it,” says Foster now in her crystalline vowels. “I had back pain, a crumbly disc - nothing that wasn’t expected at my age, so I went into the [private] Lister hospital.

“An epidural was done, but he missed and punctured an artery. I had a massive internal bleed, every organ failed – my kidneys, my liver. I had to have a tracheotomy to keep me alive.”

For two weeks she was unconscious. “The children were all called to the bedside because they thought I wasn’t going to survive,” she says. Having come round, she spent five and a half weeks in intensive care, then another four months in hospital.

“They really let me out only because it was Christmas; I couldn’t walk; I couldn’t speak because of the tracheotomy. I had to relearn how to do both. They said ‘It’ll be 18 months minimum before you’re back to normal.’ But I said ‘Like hell …’”

Sure enough, though just three months ago Foster couldn’t get out of a chair without help, she’s now flinging herself into her energetic role. The irony of Allelujah! being set in an NHS hospital hasn’t escaped her; legal proceedings are underway regarding the botched epidural.

“When the costume department put this hospital gown on me I thought I’m not sure I can bear this. But I’m so grateful for this chance coming when it did, it’s helped so much with the recovery. Dr Theatre is so amazing.”

Clearly, Ben, 43, was spot on in hailing his mother’s drive. “I am very determined and always have been,” smiles Foster, the convent-educated daughter of a Brighton estate agent, who always loved to perform. In contrast, she says the young Ben “was very shy.

He wasn’t sporty or adventurous at all. Then he went off to boarding school, Bryanston, which nearly killed us, but which was the making of him. Before then he’d been a bit overshadowed, he had two very successful parents, an older sister who was very outgoing and a bit over-the-top and a younger one who was very clever. But at Bryanston he learned to do all the sports and found his feet.”

He became a star after appearing in the BBC’s prototypical reality show Castaway in 2000. “Castaway was meant to be a serious scientific experiment, where has all the good stuff on television gone today?” says Foster, rolling her wide, blue eyes.

Since then, he’s hosted everything from Countryfile to Crufts and undertaken endless feats of endurance, the latest of which was climbing Everest in May, during which he nearly died twice when his oxygen supplies failed (five other people died on the mountain that season).

“Ben’s still recovering from Everest. Mentally and physically the altitude took a toll, it was much tougher than he anticipated,” Foster says, with some understatement.

At least he completed the challenge, unlike his fellow climber, Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton, who was forced to abandon their ascent early on because of altitude sickness. She’s since been diagnosed with depression, ascribed to hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain.

“Poor Victoria is devastated. She is such a lovely woman, but her body just couldn’t cope. It was dreadful, they’d done everything right, they’d trained, they’d been up mountains, but a doctor came to look and said ‘Get her off, people die of altitude sickness’, which I don’t think I’d really realised before this.”

Overall, Foster’s remarkably sanguine about her son’s derring-do. “Whether it’s walking to the South Pole or crossing the Omani desert, there’s always a camera crew with him, so it’s not quite such a worry. Whatever he does my husband I usually both push him out the door, saying ‘Go on, do it do it do it!’

His wife, Marina is the same, she’s absolutely wonderful. People ask ‘How can you let him go off and leave you and the children? [Ludo, eight and Iona, six]?’ But she says ‘I knew what I was getting into when I married him.’

 The only time she lost her cool was in 2005 when Ben and Olympic oarsman James Cracknell single-handedly rowed across the Atlantic in a 21ft plywood boat. “We foolishly went to see him off in the Canary Islands but when I saw the boat I nearly died, it was tiny and so flimsy - like an Ikea flat-pack.

I thought if a wave goes over them in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean they’ll be gone. I didn’t sleep for eight weeks, worrying and worrying.”

 But by far the family’s worst ordeal was four years ago when, 32 weeks into pregnancy, Marina gave birth to a stillborn son, Willem. “It was absolutely devastating it’s never all right to lose a baby during pregnancy, but at eight months! The agony of it,” Foster says. “You can only be there for your child and understand.” She and Bruce live within walking distance of Ben’s house in in Notting Hill.

“Marina’s as close to her two sisters as sisters can be and they are also live just round the corner – we feel as if their children were our grandchildren. It was having close family all around them that helped them get through Willem dying”

Foster doesn’t know what Ben will do next. “But there will be something,” she laughs. In the meantime, however, it’s Grandma’s turn to shine. “The grandchildren can’t believe it, Grandma’s on stage dancing! I said to Tamara’s son Jack, who’s four, ‘I jive to ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly.’ He told Alexa to play it and on came Cliff Richard singing it, so I taught him all the steps.”

Allelujah! runs until the end of September, after which the cast, which includes 73-year-old Telegraph columnist Simon Williams, hopes it will transfer to the West End. “I’d certainly like to carry on,” says Foster. “I wouldn’t want anyone else getting their hands on my Mary!”

In the meantime, however, her agent’s phone is ringing non-stop again. “It’s so lovely, to have this second surge, knowing you can still do your thing and do it rather well,” she beams. “Let’s hope it’s the start of something wonderful.”  

Allelujah!, by Alan Bennett, is at the Bridge Theatre, London (bridgetheatre.co.uk), until September 29