As fewer people tie the knot, four well-known married couples share their secrets, from film director Bruce Robinson and artist Sophie Windham to writers Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman
Bruce Robinson – best known as the writer and director of Withnail and I – met artist Sophie Windham at an Italian restaurant in London in 1982. He proposed three days later. They have been married for 42 years and still live and work side by side in the Welsh borders. They have two grownup children, Lily and Willoughby.
Sophie
Bruce has been writing obsessively since I met him – and anybody who wasn’t creative themselves would have found that hard to put up with. We cut short our honeymoon after only three days because he had a script deadline, and today he still works until 10pm many nights. Because I’m a painter I can relate to that. He’s not pissed off if I vanish into my studio for the day.
When our children were little, I was very much “mum looking after the kids” and managing to illustrate books in my time off, and Bruce’s work came first. He was writing script after script, which was just as well because I couldn’t support a family on what I was earning. Now that our children have left home, things are more settled; we both spend the same number of hours working. Sometimes that means we spend all day apart and only come together at dinner time. Bruce likes good food, but if I’m not there he won’t eat. I think it’s because he spent so many years swilling red wine and chain-smoking. If you’re drinking a lot of wine, you don’t want to eat. Bruce isn’t drinking at the moment and quit the fags years ago, but he still never thinks about food. At lunchtime sometimes he will eat a pickled onion or an ice-cream. Then I cook a meal for us both in the evening.
