Abandoned at 14 by my starlet mother
Mum was a celebrated beauty, dad a famous actor. So why did they BOTH reject the daughter who only now, in her 50s, is ready to forgive . . .
ON PAPER, Kerry horwitz had the kind of childhood any little girl would dream of. her mother, Anne Aubrey, was a Sixties siren and film actress who enthralled men with her blonde good looks, while her actor father Derren Nesbitt sprang to fame alongside hollywood’s A-list in the film Where Eagles Dare and appeared in the popular TV series Special Branch.
Together, they were one of the decade’s most charismatic couples, their daughter raised against a backdrop of paparazzi bulbs as she accompanied them on location all over the world.
It should have been magical. Yet, away from the spotlight, Kerry maintains her childhood was a toxic mess: her mother remote and disinterested; her father arrogant and prone to violence.
While all these years later she keeps in occasional contact with Derren, who lives in Worthing, West Sussex, with his fourth wife Miranda, it is Kerry’s relationship with her mother that appears fractured beyond repair.
The reason, Kerry maintains — though this is disputed by her mother — is that at the tender age of 14, Anne threw her out of the family home.
Except for a series of brief encounters when Kerry was in her early 20s, the two women have not set eyes on each other since.
That was nearly 30 years ago. Only now, aged 54 and in ill health, has Kerry finally been able to face up to a poignant realisation: that whatever bad blood there has been between them, she is desperate to be reunited with the woman who she says all but abandoned her.
‘I was angry with my mum for a long time, but now I am older I see things differently,’ she says.
‘She was not always a very good mum, but now I realise she must have been very unhappy. When I look at my daughter I feel such a sense of joy and happiness. It makes me sad to think that my own mother never seemed to feel that.
‘Wherever she is now, I want to say to her that I forgive her and I would like us to be friends.’
Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Kerry is Anne and Derren’s only child, delivered the year after their 1961 marriage by George Pinker, who would go on to be Princess Diana’s obstetrician.
By then, Derren was a rising star, having gained acclaim for his memorable performance as Dirk Bogarde’s blackmailer in the film thriller Victim. Anne, meanwhile, had acted alongside the likes of Robert Taylor and Anthony Newley, with whom she appeared in Killers Of Kilimanjaro.
Yet following their marriage, Derren had forbidden her to work. Even as a child, Kerry could sense her mother’s unhappiness and frustration.
‘She was a very beautiful woman. She had gone from being feted, adored by men and given presents of furs and jewels, to being in a flat in Putney, SouthWest London, with a small child she didn’t really relate to,’ she says.
‘I don’t think I was what she was expecting. She wanted a bubbly little showbusiness child, but she got this thoughtful, quiet little thing.
‘We never really bonded. I remember looking at her as I sat in my pushchair and thinking: “Why is that lady so unhappy?” In some ways, I realise the answer lay in the question: to me, she was “that lady”, not Mummy.’
Those feelings were all the more poignant given how glamorous Kerry’s childhood must have appeared from the outside.
AS hER father’s career took off, Kerry and her mother accompanied him on location all over Europe. They went to Denmark, where Derren filmed The Naked Runner alongside Frank Sinatra, and Austria for Where Eagles Dare.
It was there that the family were snowed in alongside Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
‘I don’t remember much of that, sadly, but I recall being in Spain and the actress Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s daughter, complimenting me on my freckles, which I hated. Dad had obviously put her up to it, which was rather sweet,’ says Kerry.
The money from Derren’s film work enabled the family to move to a rambling house in Stevenage, hertfordshire, and, Kerry recalls, in those early days her parents seemed happy.
But as the Sixties wore on their relationship started to fracture, buckling under what Kerry calls the ‘twin monsters’ of fame and money.
By 1969, her father was playing Chief Inspector Jordan in the TV show Special Branch. It was a role that brought him even wider fame and, she says, changed him.
‘Dad had always been volatile, but he became violent. he would get in a rage over something and nothing, throw things and smash up furniture. I remember crouching behind the stairs and hearing Mum screaming. One time he took all my toys out to the garden and shot them with the air gun he used for target practice.’
Only now, she says, does she appreciate how terrifying this must have been for her mother.
‘Looking back, I think Mum did try to protect me. She bore the brunt of Dad’s anger.’
The rows were frequent, Kerry says, and came to a head in the autumn of 1972 when her parents had a furious fight that culminated with the police being called to the family home.
ThE ten-year-old Kerry did not know it at the time, but her father had thrashed her mother with a leather strap after discovering she was having an affair.
‘Later she took me into the bathroom and said: “I need to show you what your father has done to me.” She lifted her top and she was black and blue with bruises.
‘It was horrible. I was very confused. I adored my father, but I knew it was wrong,’ she says.
Nesbitt was later fined £250 and bound over to keep the peace after pleading guilty to two charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
It marked the end of the couple’s relationship, and in 1973 mother and daughter moved into the hitchin home of Anne’s lover, local businessman Peter Blatchley, who she would go on to marry in 1975.
Yet this new chapter was far from the fresh start Kerry yearned for. ‘I didn’t like Peter from the start,’ she says. ‘he made me feel uncomfortable.’
Moreover, her already tricky relationship with her mother worsened.
‘I think Mum resented me being there with them. It didn’t help that I looked a lot like Dad. I reminded her of him, and after everything she had been through that must have been hard.
‘But they were still mean. They would ban me from the house until 10pm each night, so I would be roaming the streets.’
Following their bitter divorce, meanwhile, her father had moved to London, eventually setting up home with his second wife, Susan, with whom he shared a modest flat in hampstead.
At first, Kerry visited him regularly, taking the train from hitchin to London every other Saturday. ‘It was hard to accept what he had done, but he was still my Daddy,’ she says.
Whether or not her mother resented her daughter’s ongoing closeness to her father after everything that had happened, Kerry is unable to say.
What she does say is that one day, aged just 14, her mother asked her to leave.
‘She threw me out,’ Kerry recalls quietly. ‘She told me she didn’t want me there any more, and to go and live with my father. I think she decided that I had taken sides. Either way, she didn’t want me there.’
According to Kerry, the impact, unsurprisingly, was devastating.
‘Whatever my relationship with her, she was still my mum. To be told I wasn’t wanted was hurtful beyond belief. It’s hard to love yourself when your own mother doesn’t.’
Yet there was little in the way of sanctuary at her father’s home. After a few short weeks, his new wife asked her to leave. ‘It sounds harsh, but I don’t blame her. She and Dad had a baby of their own by then, and I had become difficult. You don’t go through everything I went
through and come out unaffected. Susan had her own things to deal with and I wasn’t making it easy for her. Many years later she apologised.’
With nowhere else to go, Kerry ended up living rough.
‘Part of me didn’t believe that I was worth any better. I went into survival mode.’
For many months she slept on the streets, begging and taking charity where she could, before she was eventually taken into care.
‘I’m lucky — I never got into drugs or drink. There were plenty I knew who did and who didn’t survive to tell the tale. I remember going to a squat full of heroin addicts and seeing the squalor. It was a fork-in-the-road moment.’
Aged 16, she got a job in the wardrobe department at London’s Apollo Theatre and, as her teens wore on, she toured with assorted theatre compa- nies, finally earning a secure enough living to rent a flat of her own.
Mother and daughter would not see each other again for another five years — until, in her early 20s, Kerry felt able to extend an olive branch.
‘It felt like enough water had gone under the bridge,’ she says. ‘I knew she was still in Hertfordshire, so I arranged to go to see her.’
HoWever, it was not to prove an emotionally fulfilling reunion. ‘There was no way then of repairing something that was not whole in the first place,’ says Kerry. As with so many fractured relationships, time served to make the fault lines deeper. Unable to forgive her mother, Kerry vowed to go it alone — even when, two years after that encounter, she became pregnant with her daughter, rachel. The pregnancy was not planned.
‘I’d been unceremoniously dumped by rachel’s father and, given my upbringing, I was so scared. I read book after book, trying to teach myself how to be a mum. Yet the moment rachel was put into my arms, I just felt this overwhelming surge of love, and that has grown every day since.’
She did not, she admits, feel any desire to tell her mother she had become a grandmother, not even when, 20 years ago, her mother wrote an emotional piece for the Mail in which she claimed it was Kerry who had chosen to abandon her.
Anne claimed her 14-year-old daughter had walked out on her without a backward glance, choosing to live with her father. Her desperate attempts to trace her had ended in failure.
At the time, Kerry declined to give her side of the story. She says she was anxious not to be drawn into a public slanging match and felt unable to reconcile herself with her mother’s version of events.
recent circumstances, however, have made her think again.
Kerry has had two decades of chronic health issues, including the autoimmune disease lupus; Hughes syndrome, which causes an increased risk of blood clots; osteoporosis; and a fractured spine a few months ago, which means she has to use a wheelchair. She requires full-time residential care.
Her medical problems have been difficult, but they have also led to a time of reflection. ‘over the past few months I have dreamed about my mother a lot. I realised that those dreams were telling me something — that I needed to find her.
‘There will always be things my mother and I do not really understand about each other, but I think I am ready to lovingly accept her for who she is.’ And, happily, it appears her mother may feel the same. This week, the Mail traced Anne, now 77, to the comfortable riverside home in Wroxham, Norfolk, she shares with Peter, with whom she will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary next year.
Surprised but delighted to hear her daughter wanted to make contact, she told the Mail that while their versions of what happened in Kerry’s early life may differ, she, too, would love nothing more than to see her again.
‘Kerry was a sweet girl and we adored each other,’ says Anne. ‘Sadly, when Derren and I got divorced she took sides, and it was permanent.
‘I did not throw her out and would never have done such a thing, whatever she says. She left of her own accord, which was devastating.
‘I have never forgotten her and have tried to find her ever since.
‘She is my daughter and I will always love her, and I would love nothing more than to be a grandmother to her daughter.’
A sentiment that will, you think, be music to Kerry’s ears. For all the tumult over the years, there is a chance that this unorthodox family may have their happy ending.