Getting pregnant at 44 is not that common, but it happened to Claire Danes, who is immediately 46 years old. In addition to her older children, 12-year-old Cyrus and 7-year-old Rowan, The Beast in Me star Danes is mother to a 2-year-old daughter whose name she has kept private.
When she got pregnant, it came as something of a shock to her, she said on the SmartLess podcast in an episode published November 17. “We had this oopsy-daisy third baby,” she said. A pregnancy at an advanced age can be emotionally complex. “I was so ‘old’ when it happened. I was 44,” she recounted, adding that “I didn’t think it was possible” to get pregnant at that age.
Initially, she was surprised and even embarrassed by the news, mainly because of her age and the social stigma attached to it, and also because neither she nor her husband Hugh Dancy, who is 50, was trying to have another child.
“I did not foresee this at all, and it was weird. Suddenly I felt a kind of funny shame,” she explained. “Like I was naughty. Like I had been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to. No, it was weird, like I had discovered an edge I wasn’t quite conscious of, like I was going outside the parameters a little bit.”
Since her third pregnancy came after two sons, Danes expected to have another boy, she said. “I got really, really lucky. I mean, my OB-GYN was like, ‘You know you’re having another boy.’ But no!” she recounted. “I would have been delighted” to have another boy, she said, “but I am more delighted” with her daughter. “She’s pretty cool. She loves a tutu.”
Danes and Dancy met in 2006 on the set of Evening, where they played two lovers. In a 2017 interview with Marie Claire, the actress recalled realizing during a bike ride with Dancy in Rhode Island that she was in love. “I just had this dumb epiphany, like, I’m really just happy,” she said of the moment. They were married in France in 2009, four years before the birth of their first child.
In a 2013 interview, she confessed that she was glad she waited to have children until later in her life, when she was more mature and could take the time she wanted and needed to focus on her family. “I’ve always wanted to have kids, but I’m glad I didn’t until immediately,” she said then. “When I was thinking about [working and being a mother] originally, I was really nervous about it. I think I would make a lousy stay-at-home mom.”
She said that she didn’t think it would “suit” her, and emphasized her love of her chosen career. “I feel so fortunate, in that I’ve had this arrow-straight focus that I wanted to act.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair Italia.
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