Dracula star Dolly Wells didn’t know her real father until she was 18
She was the cool, calm and collected nun with a pun among the supernatural slaughter and bloodthirsty one-liners.
As the inquisitive voice of reason desperate to discover the secrets of the undead in BBC1’s new hit horror drama Dracula, Sister Agatha Van Helsing stole every scene she was in.
And it turns out that Dolly Wells, the actress who plays her, not only grew up in a convent school but was also surrounded by secrets, albeit of a less supernatural kind.
The youngest of her mother Teresa’s six children, Dolly always had a close relationship with her mum’s second husband, John Wells, the satirist famed for his impressions of Denis Thatcher.
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But it was only when she was 18 that she learned the actor and writer was actually her real father.
That fact was hidden for the first few years of her life because she was the result of an affair during her mum’s first marriage to aristocrat Edward Gatacre.
Dolly said: “When my mother got pregnant with me with my real dad, John, she was married to her first husband.
“So it was a secret. I was bought up to be her husband’s child.”
The first clue to her real parentage was gleaned when she was ten, five years after her mother’s first marriage ended in divorce and she married John.
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When Dolly said she’d be jealous if she and her new stepdad went on to have a child, her mum revealed she “sort of” already had. It was a bombshell. But Dolly pushed it to back of her mind.
“My first thought was it might be me. You can sense funny things when you’re little and, somewhere, I kind of knew he was my dad. I’d always felt very easy with him. We even looked the same.
“But it was really confusing dealing with those feelings at a very young age.”
All the while John knew he was her father but went along with the pretence.
But why the secret continued years after her biological parents married is a mystery which remains until today.
Discussing the subject in an interview about her famous father, Dolly was asked why she thought he might have gone along with the lie for so long.
“That’s a very good question – I’d like to tap his coffin,” she said.
She bears absolutely no resentment towards her mother for the tangled truth of her upbringing.
“Everyone f***s up all the time,” said Dolly, 48. “You get different moments to be good and bad and making up for what you did is a long road.
“My mum might have got things wrong but I can’t be cross with her. It was not dealt with perfectly but I certainly don’t bear any ill-will towards my parents for not telling me sooner.
Dolly said she now understands the situation and feels for her parents because it didn’t involve just her but her siblings, too.
But the outcome was that growing up she had “two very sweet fathers”.
Finally hearing the truth was a huge relief. Just as Sister Agatha’s identity as Dracula’s nemesis Van Helsing was hidden at first, Dolly changed her surname to Wells in her teens.
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A favourite memory is the joy on her father’s face when she called him Dad for the first time in front of a university friend.
But the happiness and long-sought feelings of security were short lived.
John – a Private Eye founder and the star of hit play and ITV sitcom Anyone for Denis? – died in 1998 at the age of 61. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma when Dolly was a teenager. She said: “It started in his neck, then it went away.
“When it came back it went everywhere – his lung, and finally the brain like a forest fire.”
It left Dolly devastated and longing for explanations about her early life which she could never have.
“It was a very short time to know that he was my dad. Very short.
“So that did make his death more painful, for sure. It was just a slightly complicated situation.” Dolly, who starred with best friend Emily Mortimer in hit comedy Doll & Em, has a close-knit family.
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Her two brothers run the Jellycat toy company, two sisters are artists, another is also an actress and her cousin is Four Weddings star Anna Chancellor.
But the fall-out from her complicated upbringing has impacted on Dolly’s own family life. Married to photographer Mischa Richter, she lives in New York with their children, Elsie, 17, and Ezra, 14, and she ensured they knew the whole truth.
Dolly said: “I think my choice of husband was a sort of reaction to all that happened before in that Mischa is pretty straightforward and honest and I think I searched for that.
“I’d been with him for about three years when my father died and I suppose I was looking for stability. I wanted to know that he was going to stick around and that we were going to create our own little family.”
Dolly, who appears as Melissa McCarthy’s love interest in Oscar-nominated film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, has yet more parallels with her nun character.
She went to a Catholic convent school and although she says she was full of “awful scruples”, for a time she wanted to devote her
life to religion.
“Until I was about 12, I wanted to be a nun,” she said.
“I’m not really religious any more but I’m not saying it won’t come back. I’m religious enough in that if something great happened, I would say a prayer.
“Of course, religion has ruined so many things but, you know, there’s no harm in trying to treat people well.”
With Dracula showing sure signs of being another big hit, Dolly’s career is on the ascent.
But wherever her acting and writing work takes her, she will always be touched with a certain sadness.
“Sometimes I wish I could have put my dad in things I wrote, or even written things with him.
“That’s a real shame and can be really tough sometimes. I think about him a lot and talk about him, too.
“And without being too soppy, I think that he’s somewhere and everywhere around me.”
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