Rows over infidelity, a 'suicide bid' and a violent end of a very passionate affair

By Kathryn Knight

Last updated at 1:10 AM on 17th December 2011

A week after Lysette Anthony and the father of her son clash in court over her claims of domestic violence, the actress speaks out after magistrates found her ex-partner not guilty of assault.

As an actress of several decades standing, Lysette Anthony has experienced her fair share of drama both off screen and on. There have been, as she ruefully puts it, some ‘pretty bad films’, not to mention some equally rotten real-life romances.

Yet even by her standards, the highly-fraught domestic drama at which she has found herself the centre — and which came under the legal spotlight this week — is an astonishing one.

As the Mail reported on Wednesday, Ms Anthony’s personal life became all too public at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court when she accused acclaimed film composer Simon Boswell, her former long-term partner and father of her seven-year-old son Jimi, of assault.

Ups and downs: Lysette Anthony is still glamorous at 48

As proceedings unfolded, the court heard an unedifying tale of relationship breakdown, ongoing acrimony, an alleged affair on the part of Ms Anthony, 48, and, perhaps most shocking of all, the suggestion that the actress had tried to take her own life.

In the event, the three magistrates rejected Ms Anthony’s version of events and found 54-year-old Mr Boswell not guilty of assault, leaving the actress horribly humiliated.

You might, under the circumstances, expect her to want to disappear from the public gaze, but that is to underestimate her continuing fury.

‘I had no desire to put any of this into the public domain.

‘I didn’t invite the Press into court and I wish none of this had ever been put out there. I only ever did what I thought was right,’ she says.

‘But given everything that has been said, I want the chance to set the record straight. I’m not here to undertake character assassinations.

'But I do want to defend my reputation both as a woman and as a mother. It’s all too easy to see me as an over-emotional actress, but my friends will tell you that is not the person I am.

'More than anything, I need to make clear that I would never ever take my own life: I’ve got no history of mental illness, I’ve never even been on anti-depressants. Above all, though, I would never do that to my son, who I love more than anything on earth.’

Of course, unravelling the knotty threads of a failed relationship — and one thing neither party in this rather sad affair will dispute is that theirs has failed irretrievably  — is a messy and thankless business.

And, indisputably, the events of recent months have taken their toll on Lysette. Still beautiful at 48, she is stick-thin and fragile, her hands shaking throughout our meeting.

Her demeanour is in stark contrast to the glamorous woman the public would recognise.

Once feted by photographer David Bailey as the ‘face of the Eighties’ for her gamine features, she was a household name by the age of 20.

She found fame in the popular sitcom Three Up, Two Down before migrating to Hollywood, where she was cast by Woody Allen in his 1992 film Husbands And Wives.

In recent years, she has continued to work steadily, although since Jimi’s birth in 2004 her focus has, by her own admission, been largely on motherhood.

Yet for all her professional success, romantic stability has continued to elude her.

Her first marriage, to Dutch actor Luc Leestermaker, ended in divorce in 1995 after four years, while her second marriage, to American film director David Price, lasted only two years. ‘I think we can safely say that I have appalling taste in men,’ she says wryly.

Waif: Left, Lysette Anthony as she is now and right in her youth. She was a household name by the time she was 20

Against this backdrop, her relationship with Simon Boswell — a Bafta-nominated composer who has created the scores for dozens of films, including Shallow Grave, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and This Year’s Love — seemed, for a time, to be her happy ending.

The couple first crossed paths in the Nineties, when both were married — Lysette to David Price, and Simon to his wife of 23 years, by whom he has a 21-year-old son, Jack.

They finally got together as a couple in 2002. ‘I remember thinking, 'I like him',’ she recalls of their first meeting.

‘And so when I bumped into him a few years later when we were both by ourselves, I started some very heavy hinting about being taken out to dinner. The message eventually got through.’

It was a fast-burning affair: within months Lysette had moved into Simon’s bachelor flat in London’s Belsize Park, and by late 2003 she was pregnant.

After almost giving up on the prospect of ever becoming a mother after turning 40, conceiving was, says Lysette, a huge joy. ‘I was just delighted to have been given this chance.

‘As far as I was concerned there was room for all three of us in my heart and I told him that. I had enough love for all of us.’

Baby Jimi — whom Lysette describes as ‘looking like a Boswell through and through’ — arrived in May 2004, after which the family decamped to a beautiful four-storey Victorian house in an affluent area of North London.

To casual observers all appeared well. Behind the scenes, however, Lysette says the cracks were already starting to form. 

‘Simon is a genius, a brilliant man. His music can move me to tears. But the flipside of that is that brilliant men are difficult to live with,’ she says.

‘In some ways Simon is the typical flawed genius, and what flawed geniuses need is a traditional homemaker wife who can look after them and be there all the time for them.

‘I could be that some of the time, but not all of the time. There were lots of clashes. To say we were a volatile couple is like describing the Antarctic as a tad chilly.’

Happier days: Lysette with ex partner Simon Boswell in the home they both shared

There were, she says, scores of times when she felt like giving up and walking away, only to find herself confronting the reality of separating her son from his father.

‘You forgive a lot for your child’s sake,’ she says. ‘Any mother who has been in the situation I was will know how it feels. You want to make things work for them. I come from a broken home and I didn’t want that for my son.

‘The mistake I made was to assume that if you stick with something long enough then it will get better. As I’ve discovered, when it comes to relationships, they rarely do. It didn’t help that my confidence was at rock bottom. My self-esteem had been brought very low over the years.’

By 2009, the relationship had deteriorated and by summer that year, Lysette says, the couple were effectively living separate lives, with Simon moving out of the family home into a flat nearby.

‘I actually thought this was progress,’ she says. ‘I was trying, hoping, to unpick the relationship gently and against this backdrop. I thought we could get into a situation where we could have a civilised relationship for our child.’

But that same year, the couple’s relationship imploded again when Simon confronted Lysette with his unfounded suspicions that she’d been having an affair with an old friend.

‘For the record, I wish I had had an affair. In fact, it was a lovely friendship. It’s lovely to be told you’re wonderful by someone when you’re used to being told how awful you are.

‘In any case, Simon and I were living separately. But Simon had come to his own conclusions and he had convinced himself. It was ridiculous really.’

In the first instance, she says, he begged her to give the relationship another chance. ‘He was angry, but the shock had made him think. I wasn’t convinced, but for Jimi’s sake I agreed to give things another go.’

A pattern was set: Simon would move back in for a time, but then the relationship would deteriorate again and he would move back to his studio, returning to see his son. ‘It was exhausting,’ says Lysette. ‘As an actress, I get plenty of drama in my professional life. When I’m at home I want a peaceful life.’

Peaceful, of course, is not the word you might use to describe events of recent months. By April, the couple had once again agreed to separate and the family home had been put on the market. Arguments over how the proceeds would be disposed of, however, continued.

It is against this backdrop that events of early April unfolded. As the Mail reported, Lysette testified that she was repeatedly assaulted by Mr Boswell after he returned home in a ‘black mood’.

He began by demanding she tell him the sexual details of her alleged affair, she claimed, threatening to take money off the amount she would get from the sale of their home when she refused.

‘He was in a really, really dangerous mood,’ she told Highbury Magistrates. ‘It started about money and the house and how little he would give us. It was getting heated and I was frightened.

‘He would pick me up and throw me to the ground. At this point he would leave and that would be that but he came back and sat on the sofa and foolishly maybe, because I was accustomed to these activities, I sat on the sofa with him.

‘He then used his weight against me, screaming 'Did you like it?' and when I wouldn’t answer, he said, 'Right, that’s £100,000 off', and again 'Did you like it? OK, that’s £150,000 off'.

‘And then I replied 'Yes, I loved it' and he started punching and slapping me repeatedly. I tried to get him off at which point he flipped me over and started dragging me and I am desperately trying to hang onto the sofa.

‘I kicked him hard but he didn’t stop until my son came down saying: “Stop, stop!” My child has memories no child should. But thank God he came down.’

Mr Boswell, in turn, maintains that the bruises Lysette sustained — documented in a medical report at her doctors on April 14 —  were the result of his intervention to prevent her trying to take her own life.

After a heated argument about whether or not she could afford to buy another home, he told the court: ‘Ms Anthony became hysterical. She ran to one window in our bedroom on the top floor and she put one leg and her head outside. I was terrified and I pulled her back in.

‘She then ran to the window in the bathroom and did the same thing straddling the window sill. I managed to drag her back in.

‘I was preventing her from committing suicide. She was screaming and very volatile. I thought she was going to jump — it was a distinct possibility.

‘She then grabbed a wine glass, which was on the side of the bath, smashed it and began to draw it across her wrists.

‘I said, “For Christ’s sake! You have a son, what are you doing?” And she threw it at me and collapsed sobbing.’

After that, he said, the situation calmed down and they even shared a joke although he later spoke to Lysette’s friends because he was concerned for her mental state.

Lysette as she appeared in Channel Five series Hotel

Though he declined to comment on this article, Mr Boswell told the court that Lysette was ‘driven by insecurity and jealousy’ in bringing the assault charge to court.

Lysette, of course, vigorously disputes this. ‘I certainly didn’t go through the hell of going to court for revenge,’ she says. ‘I went because I thought it was the right thing to do. I never once tried to jump out of a window.

‘Something happened to me that weekend. I had bruises on my forehead, cheek, left elbow and my right knee.’

But her version of events was challenged by Mr Boswell’s defence barrister who successfully applied for the case to be dismissed and he was duly found not guilty of assault, leaving court with his reputation intact.

An attempt by Ms Anthony to secure a restraining order against her former partner was also rejected by the court and she was ordered to pay the defence costs. Ms Anthony, of course, cannot challenge the judgment — the court has had its say.

ll she can do, she says, is try to focus on the future.

The sale of the family home in October for £1.76 million has drawn a line of sorts: Lysette has bought a small flat with the £220,000 she received from the sale and will move in when it is habitable.

‘It’s very run down, but it’s a project and I am excited,’ she says. ‘At the moment I’ve had to rely on the hospitality of friends.

‘When the house was sold Jimi and I had nowhere to go.’ She has also set up a production company, Perfect Features, with a friend. ‘I have very few savings so I must earn my living,’ she says.

‘Eventually, I would love to return to acting, but at the moment, after everything he has been through, Jimi needs a mum who can pick him up from school every day more than I need my old career back.’

Her son will, she says, continue to spend time with his father and is, indeed, doing so this very weekend.

‘Jimi needs to see his father. I grew up not seeing my father and it is a hole in my heart that will never heal. So I will never sabotage their relationship.

'Whatever Simon is to me, he is a father to him and I want them to have a joyous relationship.’

It is a laudable sentiment, although you wonder whether it is remotely possible, given the acrimony between his mother and father.

For all that however, Lysette insists she has no regrets. ‘Getting together with Simon was my choice and without him I wouldn’t have my wonderful boy.

‘All I can say is that I tried to do my best, and I failed because the relationship  failed. What has happened is just terribly sad.’ There is no one who could disagree with that sentiment.