Hugh Bonneville reveals the moment he learned his secret spy mum died

Hugh Bonneville has revealed the heartbreaking moment he discovered his secret spy mother had died while he was thousands of miles away from home.

The Downton Abbey star, 62, has described for the first time how he received the devastating news about his mother, Patricia - who worked for the UK's secret intelligence service MI6 - while on holiday in the Maldives at Christmas in 2014.

'I woke up to two missed calls from my brother. I thought my father's died, and I rang him, and my mother had died,' Hugh said on the Travel Secrets podcast.

'That was a heck of a heck of a moment, which is imprinted in that way - where you were when JFK was shot sort of way.'

The actor described the 'extraordinary sensation' of assuming it would be his father who had passed, only to learn it was his mother instead.

He added: 'There was a whole sort of few days of organising getting home and that sort of thing. And then the journey home... When you've lost someone, there's nothing you can do, but the journey to get to the place where you are.

'Then with your other relatives, [it] takes on a strange significance and you go through the rolodex in your brain of the life that's gone and what needs to happen next.'

Hugh's mother Patricia - whom he only learned later in life worked for MI6 - died aged 85. It marked the beginning of a prolonged period of family loss that would deeply affect the actor.

His brother Nigel died unexpectedly in his sleep two years later, followed by his father John, a surgeon, in 2020 at the age of 93.

The tragedy of losing his entire immediate family over just five years forced Hugh to become what he described as 'quite good at death'.

'Frankly, we all do it,' he said. 'I became very good at the administration of death - you know, we've got to do this, we've got to do that. And so actually, the necessity of grieving can get kicked down the road.'

Hugh, who is also known for his film roles in Paddington and Notting Hill, reflected on the particular grief of losing both parents. 'When you become an orphan, when both your parents are gone, that's a significant shift,' he said.

In a particularly poignant admission, the actor revealed that while his sister Clare and brother Nigel read the countless condolence letters that poured in after their mother's death, he was too consumed with practical matters to process them emotionally.

'I can remember literally hundreds of letters coming in about my mum - and not reading them,' Hugh confessed. 

'My brother and my sister did and I was so busy doing death certificates and this, that, and the other... I literally put them in a plastic bag.'

It wasn't until three years later, while filming Viceroy's House with director Gurinder Chadha in Jodhpur, India, that Hugh finally allowed himself to truly grieve.

The actor - who played Lord Mountbatten in the film opposite Gillian Anderson as his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten - took the unopened letters with him to a peaceful desert hotel called Mihir Garh, about an hour southwest of Jodhpur.

'I thought now is the time just to go on my own... I'll just go and read all these letters and have that cathartic experience, and it was,' he recalled.

'It was beautiful, and I realised how much my mum had meant to so many different people from more walks of life.'

The actor described the remote hotel as 'an oasis in the desert' with just 20 or 30 rooms, where he finally felt ready to confront his grief in solitude.

'I had a good, good, good cry and let it out,' Hugh admitted. 'Grief is a funny thing, isn't it? In the way that it ebbs and flows like waves on the shore, and sometimes the same memory can trigger laughter.

'And then the next time that same memory occurs to you, you can be in a veil of tears.'

Hugh, who has a 21-year-old son, Felix, with his ex-wife, Lucinda Williams, also revealed fascinating details about his mother's secret career, which he only discovered years after she began working.

'She worked for I can't remember how long, maybe ten years. And then many, many years later, when both she and my dad had retired, I opened the newspaper one evening and it said, MI6 building to be sold off. And I said, that's my mum's office.'

The revelation led to him being invited to speak at MI6's Riverhouse headquarters, where he met someone who had worked with his mother.

The former male colleague shared memories of her in charge of what was known as P-section, revealing how junior staff would scramble to look busy when they heard her distinctive footsteps approaching.

'He said, we always used to hang around doing crosswords, and then we'd suddenly hear her footsteps coming along the corridor. We'd go, "quick, there's Pat!" And get to work,' Hugh recounted.

'And it was the way he described the footsteps, and I suddenly remembered my mum's footsteps, and we were linked by this sound, and it was very, very evocative.'

He continued: 'At the funeral, I said to my dad, did she ever talk about it? He said, no, absolutely not, never. And then my sister came up to me and said, you know, there's a few people here from MI6 here.

'She said, two of them live in the mum and dad's valley locally. I said, you're kidding? She said, yeah, her over there, him over there. And I said, what, Derek? He's the most boring man on the planet. And she said, well, yeah, duh.'