Ruby Wax: Losing my TV career was a like death | Daily Mail Online:
She was the queen of brash comedy – until Britain got bored of it. Then Ruby Wax’s depression took over and she ended up in The Priory.
Now she’s turned her darkest days into her comeback show.
Ruby Wax is talking about marriage.
Or rather, what a miracle it is hers has lasted 22 years. If it wasn’t for the kids, she says, it would have been over years ago.
Ruby has three children – Max, 22, Maddie, 20, and Marina, 17 – with her third husband, BBC producer Ed Bye, who she says ‘made our kids normal’.
Finding it again: Ruby Wax is starring in a show about her depression called Losing It
But marriage can be tricky, particularly when you’re married to a firecracker like Ruby.
‘I give him hell,’ she says. ‘I’m a nag. I’ll give him instructions without saying “please”.
'I’ll just say, “Fix the window.” He’ll say, “Could you say that nicer?”’ So does she? Nope.
'It sounds exhausting. Have they ever wanted to chuck in the towel? ‘If I didn’t have kids, yeah,’ she says. ‘But the way those kids are… he gave me those genes. When it’s just two people, marriage only lasts five years. Unless it’s a freak incident, you grow apart.’
'I wonder if Ed’s some sort of saint to… er… ‘Stand me?’ she asks. Yes, to be blunt.
‘He is a really sweet man,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t had a lot of sweet men before. He comes from a really lovely, lovely family so he wanted a rollercoaster and he got one.’ He certainly did.
Ruby is the brilliantly brash funny girl who made a career out of being a bit of a bully.
‘I just barked at people,’ she concedes. Until six years ago when barking at people stopped being funny and, as she says, ‘television gave me up’.
She tried to hang on, even having a stab at reality TV on ITV’s Celebrity Shark Bait, but it wasn’t very funny. So she stopped trying and started a degree in psychology and philosophy.
Soon, the brash bully had become the victim (although she’d hate to be thought of as such), suffering with depression and checking herself into The Priory.
Fast forward six years and she’s back. Now Ruby is using her own personal story in a show called Losing It, a mixture of music, comedy and confessional with singer-songwriter Judith Owen, also a sufferer of depression.
‘It’s about not having a manual,’ she says, ‘falling off the cliff and thinking everybody else knows how to do life. I question envy. I tear out the pages of Hello! magazine saying, “Die, die.” I’m not happy for anyone else who has a job I want.
Happy family: Ruby with her husband, Ed Bye, and children Max, Maddie and Marina
‘I talk about marriage and love and get to the bottom line. It’s a negotiated deal so I give prices for what you have to do. Household appliances have manuals but we don’t,’ she says. ‘I take you into what happens when you really don’t have a guide book and you have depression.’
Now Ruby is smiling really sweetly as she says this. She’s told me earlier that she’s learnt to say ‘brush’ before walking into a room, so her face and mind are set properly.
When she begins to feel stressed, she repeats ‘brush, brush, brush,’ which all sounds a bit bonkers, but is, I suppose, better than barking.
Mental illness seems to be the new celebrity black since Stephen Fry confessed to suffering with bi-polar. Is Ruby just jumping on the bandwagon?
‘You can’t fake depression,’ she says.
‘Your personality leaves town and you’re replaced by something very dark. You’re no longer you, which is really scary. When you’re out, you’re out. I used to hope a car would hit me.
'I didn’t plan anything, but anything would have been better than that pain. It isn’t even pain, it’s indescribable hopelessness – bigger than that. And, it goes on for months and months.
‘But I’m not depressed now. It’s like herpes.
'You don’t always have it. I hate people who say, “I’m a depressive” or, “I’m an alcoholic”. That’s not an identity, that’s a label. When people yabber on about being an alcoholic, it’s like being a feminist, or Jewish. We know. Now shut up.’
Ruby was brought up on labels: ‘failure’, ‘useless’, ‘idiot’, ‘braindead’. Her father, Edward Wachs, was Chicago’s sausage king.
He had escaped from Austria with his wife Berta in 1938 and set about building an empire around sausage casings made from pig intestines.
Her mother was obsessed with cleanliness, covering the furniture in plastic and worrying about smudged door handles.
Her father was a strict disciplinarian and there was lots of slapping and screaming in the family home. Ruby couldn’t wait to get away.
'Embodiment of punishment:' Ruby with her parents Edward and Berta Wachs in 1992
In her autobiography How Do You Want Me? she wrote, ‘To me, he was the embodiment of punishment. His job was to control and terrorise.’
Ruby’s father died in a rest home in Miami, Florida, seven years ago, following an emotional reconciliation with his daughter. ‘I did hug my dad and say I love you,’ she says.
She never said the same to her mother, who died three years later. ‘My mother died in a coma. She couldn’t speak. She was out of it. She was really old – in her 90s. She was so angry, so bitter with everything. I never asked her why. To the end she thought something was wrong with me.
'There was always criticism. We didn’t really relate.
‘I completely understand what they went through now. It’s too bad I didn’t when they were alive, but they were too red hot. My mother was the most beautiful woman in Vienna and she had to go to cowboy country, so she never got over that one. Now I feel really sorry for her.’
She pauses – ‘brush, brush, brush’ – before smiling. ‘We’re the best mothers, those of us who came from dodgy mothers, because we know what not to do.
'I back my children. I don’t make judgments. They’re totally different people to me. I don’t understand who or what they are, but I think, “How interesting.” My mum thought I was a replica. She wanted to tell me what to eat and who to go out with.
‘You can see your children are not too clever in certain areas, but you keep your mouth shut. I was told by the school that my son was slow. My parents would have had a nervous breakdown.
'He studies physics now because nobody said he was stupid except that idiot woman.
'Kids’ brains change all the time. The important thing is to give them confidence and self-belief.’
I wonder if Ruby thinks her mother’s death triggered her depression. The past few years have been particularly tough for Ruby, with her close friend and co-writer on Absolutely Fabulous Jennifer Saunders being diagnosed with breast cancer and her sister in-law Julia Canning being killed by a train while walking her dogs.
The best mums are those who had bad mothers. We know what not to do
‘That was a shock,’ she says about her sister-in-law’s death. ‘Sometimes you’re slapped in the face with the big picture.
'With Jennifer, I was obviously upset but I knew she’d be OK. That girl’s really resilient. She knows how I love her. But depression isn’t about something that’s happened.’
Indeed, Ruby’s depression is largely due to the cortisol levels in her brain. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal gland and released in response to stress.
Abnormal levels of it have been linked to clinical depression and memory loss. She now knows that she’s been sick since she was a child, but her condition wasn’t diagnosed until she suffered a five-month depression following the birth of her youngest child and was prescribed a cocktail of drugs.
But the bouts of depression continued.
She concedes that the loss of her TV career was devastating. ‘TV had always been my ambition, so leaving was a death,’ she says. ‘If I don’t do anything I go berserk. I can’t just sit and read a book. I also have to support my kids. Ed works but he’s a BBC director. Need I say more? If we were in LA we’d be laughing.
‘I started to feel as if I had two lives. Graham Norton, if you could wake him up at 2am, he’d still be Graham Norton. You could wake me up at 2am and I wasn’t the person on TV. I was an introvert.
'I am funny, but if I’m not switched on, or I don’t like the person, it won’t come. If I interviewed somebody who was on Big Brother I’d just cry. I couldn’t fake it. It just didn’t happen.
'Then you could see my face on TV and it wasn’t good. On the shark show the way they edited it was humiliating and then I did a circus show and that was humiliating for me.
You could see the misery.
‘I was going through what every human being goes through. We pretend to act grown-up but we don’t know what that means. I’m an adult, but I’m not conscious of it.
'I don’t know how to act. I tell my daughter sometimes, “I really like your boyfriend. I think he’s sexy.” That’s just weird. But people are nuts.’
Ruby decided to take her nuttiness in hand three years ago when the length of the depressions increased.
She booked herself into The Priory for six weeks and began to learn how to manage her condition. ‘I suppose there was a bit of thinking about my mother and deciding, “I’m not going to end up like that.”
Depression isn't like just being sad. It's being a zombie. The walking dead
'Have you noticed with friends that whatever their flaws are they get more and more exaggerated? Something has to stop you in your tracks.
‘Depression is like a tsunami. Now I can feel certain triggers in my head. When my heart starts beating and my mouth goes dry I know I’m in trouble. But before I couldn’t.
'By the time you’re obviously sick, it isn’t like just being sad. It’s being a zombie, the walking dead.
‘The kids came to see me in The Priory and could see other people who had depression who were very intelligent. I said to them, “You know this might be in the genes? But there are ways of dealing with it. You have to be aware.”’
After all she’s been through, there’s a lot riding on the success of Losing It for Ruby. Is she nervous? ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘But being famous isn’t my thing any more. I mean, I love the upgrades. Recently I went to New York and Ralph Fiennes was on the plane.
'He was whisked off, so I put my arm in his and said, “I’m with him.” We went straight through customs.
'I used him like I was hitching. He was laughing. That’s adorable to have that service.
'But my comedy’s different now. I no longer want to just shock. I want the audience to think, “That’s me.” To know they’re not alone.
‘Lots of us wonder what our role is in life.
'How do we know how to deal with envy, how to be Mummy, how to act when you’re married.’
Which is – apart from churning out kids?
‘Oh, I’m hilarious,’ she says. ‘So he forgives me for a lot of things.’
Ruby Wax – Losing It, Menier Chocolate Factory, London from 15 February. www.menierchocolate factory.com
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