When H&H met the fun, flirty and simply fabulous Dame Jilly Cooper: ‘I just love horses – I go and talk to them on my walks’

Following the sad news of Dame Jilly Cooper’s passing, age 88, here is an exclusive interview with the bestselling author from October 2024, when she told H&H’s Martha Terry about her own showjumping exploits, who were the real-life inspirations for her famous characters, and the day she lost the Riders manuscript on a bus

“Isn’t he the handsomest man in England?” Dame Jilly Cooper cocks her head to one side and asks me playfully. She’s sitting on a sofa in a London hotel next to actor Alex Hassell, who plays her caddish hero Rupert Campbell-Black in the new TV adaptation of her 1988 bestseller, Rivals.

While I splutter some sort of affirmative response, she purrs on, blue eyes twinkling. “Rupert is the handsomest man in England, though rather beastly, and look at this darling child! He is gorgeous isn’t he?”

It’s hard not to feel I’ve been transplanted into playing Hugh Grant in Notting Hill here. In a hotel room with a superstar (or two) and trying to talk about horses in a film that doesn’t really have an equestrian theme – except that I really do work for Horse & Hound.

Soothingly, Jilly validates my presence, pulling out a piece of paper from a canvas bag, branded National Racehorse Week, which she’d attended the previous week.

“I wanted to bring you this,” she says and hands me a photocopy of the first page of the first novel in the Rutshire Chronicles, Riders, pointing to the text where “tattered piles of Horse & Hound” lie on Jake Lovell’s floor.

Because Jilly absolutely adores horses. Starting out with showjumping in Riders in 1985, Jilly has returned to horse sport again and again throughout her oeuvre, from Polo (1991) to the National Hunt world in Jump! (2010) and Flat racing in Mount! (2016).

“You know, I don’t have a very good imagination, I like to have been there,” she smiles. “And I just love horses. They are so beautiful. I go and talk to them on my walks and stroke them.”

Early riding ambitions cut short

Growing up in the era of Pat Smythe and Anneli Drummond-Hay, Jilly was herself a keen showjumper as a girl, but serious injury put paid to her achieving the dizzy heights of her protagonists.

“Do you showjump? Do you play polo?” she asks, peppering questions at me as she does throughout the interview. “I loved showjumping as a child. I’m 87 and eventing didn’t really exist in those days, showjumping was the big one so that’s what we all did – it was terribly exciting. It was a thrill with lots of rosettes flapping around my pony. I had a heavenly pony called Willow, who was always absolutely covered in rosettes.

“One day when I was about 14, I was showing off. My friend Jane had a pony called Jeldi, who she couldn’t get over the parallel bars at a Pony Club meet. We were just fooling around, but I said, ‘Oh get off, I’ll get Jeldi to do it,’ and of course Jeldi stopped and I went into the parallel bars.

“I trapped the nerve in my arm and it was paralysed for ages,” she says, pulling up the cashmere sleeve on her right arm to reveal a long scar. “I was in hospital for a long time and it was lovely missing so much school, but I couldn’t ride again. So I wrote Riders instead, which probably did me better in later life.

“I used to go all over the country and abroad with the incredibly glamorous Harvey Smith, David Broome and the Whitakers for my research. But I probably wouldn’t set Rupert Campbell-Black in the showjumping world of today; it’s different now.”

Riders itself almost never came to be.

“I lost the book on a bus!” she chuckles. “Such an embarrassing story! I’d written 120,000 words and took it out to lunch in Soho with a friend. We got p*ssed and I remember afterwards going to Selfridges and trying on a lot of scent, then got on the number 22 bus back to Putney and forgot it. So I had to start all over again, which was a horror but I think the characterisation was better second time round.”

Jilly Cooper’s most famous character

Rupert Campbell-Black is arguably Jilly’s most famous character – and I suspect the one with whom she herself is in love. In Rivals, the former top showjumper has a new career as a Tory MP and sports minister under Margaret Thatcher. But he remains the same dashing womaniser, with roguish charm and dubious morals. She freely names the real-life men she used as inspiration.

“Andrew Parker Bowles helped me a lot – he’s a very good rider; a jockey and polo player, so he was definitely one of the Rupert muses,” she says fondly. “And then when we moved to the countryside, I met all these grand men. There was gorgeous Mickey Suffolk, the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire. He used to ring up and say, ‘Hello Jilly, how are you? It’s Rupert here,’” Jilly mimics in a deep, pompous voice. “He loved being Rupert, loved it.

“And then there was [fashion designer] Rupert Lycett-Green, who was married to Candida Betjeman, and who is absolutely lovely, too. So they were all sort of muses, but not in their behaviour, they never did anything naughty.”

The “real” Rupert has been portrayed by only one actor prior to Alex Hassell, namely Marcus Gilbert, who played the Olympic showjumper version in a 1993 adaptation of Riders. It’s fair to say he didn’t quite cut Jilly’s mustard.

“It’s an awful story, which I shouldn’t tell,” says Jilly – but she does anyway. “They started filming Riders in Hyde Park with little showjumps. On the first day, the director said, ‘Come along Jilly and meet Rupert,’ and this gorgeous blond man came storming towards me.

“I said, ‘Oh, are you my Rupert? How gorgeous you are!’ He said, ‘How very gracious of you,’ and I thought, ‘No! No! “Very gracious” is not right.’ He was a sweet man, but ‘very gracious’ was a terrible expression for a Rupert. But I do feel mean repeating that story.”

The new Rupert is much more Jilly’s vibe, though Alex plays down the emphasis on his character’s good looks.

“In our script, he’s referred to as the most eligible bachelor, which is slightly less pressure for me than being the most handsome man in England,” he laughs. “I can handle that. It’s a pleasure to play such a brilliant, complex and multifaceted character. And the fact that Jilly has been so supportive of all the casting has been really helpful.”

Fans of the Rutshire Chronicles may be surprised that Alex is dark and swarthy – more Jake Lovell’s complexion than Rupert’s, but Jilly glints: “I had Rupert down as blond and blue-eyed, but then this beauty turns up.”

She takes Alex’s hand and turns it palm upwards for me to examine: “Look at his lines – a very good life line and a very good sex line. So that’s what he’s got: sex appeal.”

Alex adds: “I think they felt I could portray some essential Rupertness that was more important than blond hair and blue eyes.”

What was harder for him to portray is Rupert’s skill as a rider. Alex had only ridden once before, “American cowboy style”, for another TV show. He had a crash course with Mark Atkinson, riding his stunt horses, and a double stood in for the jumping and hunting parts.

“Rupert absolutely loves his animals, his six dogs and his horse Rocky, so I had to understand how to express that, and I found it wonderful,” he says. “Those relationships are so important to Rupert and therefore to me.”

Jilly Cooper’s love of dogs

The talk of dogs sends Jilly off on a canine tangent – “Do you have a dog?” she asks both of us. “I don’t at the moment, but as soon as all this publicity is over, I’m going to get a retired greyhound. Rupert loves his black Labrador, but they are such pigs – to keep a Labrador thin is impossible. But I love the bit in the TV show when the dogs fall all over him. When I wrote the book, I didn’t realise how lonely Rupert was…”

Jilly’s books have sold more than 11 million copies in the UK alone. She’s written a TV sitcom herself, It’s Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling, with Joanna Lumley as the star. But while she is an executive producer on the Rivals series, it was a light-touch involvement.

“We didn’t collaborate, though I read the script and visited the set,” she says. “Sometimes I put my foot down a bit – only with the class things really.”

Jilly, known for hosting wild parties over the years at her Cotswold home, threw one recently for the Rivals cast – and while it might not have been as riotous as in the past, “love” was the overarching theme.

“All the millions of people on that set all seemed to be having a lovely time, and the lovely thing was that these beautiful men – Alex, Aidan Turner and David Tennant – all loved each other. Normally when you do a film like this, they are terribly jealous of each other, but there was no rivalry.

“The whole thing is magic! I am very, very over-excited. I try not to be, one mustn’t get too excited. I just go round touching wood the whole time. I used to touch men, now I touch wood,” she giggles.

A British national treasure

Flirty and full of mischief, Jilly Cooper can get away with these risqué comments because she’s a kind, fun and witty octogenarian, who is woven into Britain’s fabric as a national treasure. We horse people count her as one of our own, as it all began in our familiar world of hay barns and tack rooms (though less muck and mud; more glamour and, ahem, escapism).

And there’s scope for more; Jilly is pondering writing another book. I hopefully suggest she sets it in the eventing world, but another whim comes into her head. Alex mentions he trained as a dancer.

“Ballet,” she says conclusively, patting Alex on the knee. “You have very good legs, you can do Swan Lake.”

Whether Jilly’s next doorstopper is set on stage, in space or underwater, as Hugh Grant once said, “The readers of Horse & Hound will be absolutely delighted.”

• This interview was first published in 17 October 2024 issue of Horse & Hound magazine, ahead of the premiere of Rivals on 18 October, which was exclusively available on Disney+

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