Olivier-winning actor Dame Harriet Walter says that her mother was ‘belittled’ by male relatives despite having done confidential work for naval intelligence in her episode of Who Do You Think You Are?
The Downton Abbey and Killing Eve actor will trace her family history on this week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, airing at 9pm on Thursday 30 July 2026 on BBC One.
At the start of the episode, Harriet says that she has a “patchy” knowledge of her family history.
She knows a lot about her paternal relatives, the Walter family, who founded the Times newspaper in the 19th century, but less about her mother’s side of the family.
She says that her mother, Xandra Carandini Lee, was “a very sweet woman” with “the most amazing sense of humour” but was “slightly belittled by the men in [her] family”.
She also says that she knows that Xandra worked for admiralty intelligence during the Second World War.
“She said you would never in a million years tell your best friend, your husband, anybody what you were doing,” Harriet says. “You just would not do it. She said she was one of thousands of cogs in the machine and I just want to know much more about exactly what that machine was doing and what her part in it was.”
Harriet also wants to find out about her family connections to the Italian aristocracy via her maternal grandmother, Estelle Carandini.
