NEED TO KNOW
- The British actress recently shared how she and husband, producer and screenwriter Ed Sinclair still make their marriage work.
- The couple met at Cambridge in the 1990s, where he was studying law and she was in a teaching training college.
- The couple married in 2001 and share two sons and a daughter together.
She’s played queens, detectives, a chef and now, a fisherwoman in her latest movie Wicker, but Olivia Colman’s most enduring role is a personal one.
The actress has been married to screenwriter and producer Ed Sinclair since 2001. And while they prefer to keep their relationship mostly out of the spotlight, Olivia, 52, recently shared how she and Ed make their marriage work, 25 years in.
Her number one tip? “Be kind to each other,” she said during a recent interview with website Bustle.
Olivia added that she and Ed also wait for “a nice, gentle time” to raise any niggles.
Her example? “You know that thing on Tuesday? Can we talk about that in a calm way?” Often, she added, with a laugh, the answer is simply, “What thing?”
Olivia’s also no fan of blow-ups. “For some people arguing in the heat of the moment works for them, but it doesn’t work for me,” she explained.
Not that she or Ed are pushovers. “I’m not sure that I’m not a conflict person, nor is my husband,” Olivia also said. “But we’ve learned over the years to definitely try and talk.”
It was love at first sight for the couple. Their story began in the early 1990s at Cambridge University, where Ed was a third-year law student and Olivia was training as a teacher. Both joined a production of Table Manners, and she was smitten the second he walked in.
“There’s the bloke I’m going to marry,” she once told The Telegraph.
Olivia admits she wasn’t subtle, memorising his timetable and the lyrics of his favourite songs.
“I sort of stalked him,” she joked. “Which I don’t condone. It did work in our case.”
The couple now have two sons and a daughter and they also work together. Their production company, South of the River Pictures, is behind Olivia’s latest film Wicker. Ed also created and wrote the TV series Landscapers, which starred Olivia.
“I do my thing and he does his,” she has said of their easy-going co-working dynamic.
Olivia first won hearts in comedy with Peep Show, her TV breakthrough, in 2003. In 2014 she won a BAFTA for Broadchurch and in 2018, she won the Best Actress Oscar for playing Queen Anne in The Favourite – and Ed was right by her side when her name was called. Next came an Emmy and Golden Globe for playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. She has since earned Oscar nominations for The Father and The Lost Daughter.
Her newest film is a love story. In Wicker, Olivia plays an outcast fisherwoman who commissions a husband woven from wicker. Alexander Skarsgård plays the husband.
“This went straight in to my top three favourite scripts,” Olivia has said of why she took on the part. But even thought it depicts a fairytale romance, Olivia’s real-life love story still wins out!
“Ed is my best friend,” Olivia has also said of her husband. “I couldn’t have done any of it without him.”
