Rachel Argyll
An imperious and impeccable heiress. Rachel is the matriarch of the Argyll family and founder of “The Argyll Trust for Orphans and Neglected Children”. She has dedicated her life to philanthropy and raising her five adopted children. On Christmas Eve 1954 she is brutally murdered.
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Anna Chancellor on Rachel
Who is Rachel Argyll and how are we first introduced to her in Ordeal By Innocence?
Her drive for the perfect family, that desire to keep the façade going, starts to bubble up inside her and she starts to become quite mad
Rachel is an heiress who married someone very dashing and handsome, maybe not quite of her station. I believe she was probably an only child of some very, very rich parents. She is an isolated person. Perhaps she adopts children in order to create a brood for herself, but because she is not familiar being in a family environment this turns out not to work so well. When the kids all go off and play together, Rachel doesn’t feel this is right and that she is the person left out of the fun. Fun is happening at the perimeter with her and this feels painful to her, she feels the need to break it up. What is happening within this household is very much of its time. That 1950's period - a family papering over the cracks.
What is Rachel’s relationship like with her children?
The outward manifestation of life is very important to her, maybe without even knowing it. She chooses these incredibly good-looking kids who she wants to save. She wants to mould them into something she can be proud of, that will reflect well on her. Rachel has very high standards of how you should behave and appear and so she treats them in a way that will produce those standards.
How does the family dynamic develop?
It is a really understandable thing to want to be surrounded by your family and to want it all perfect. In that way Rachel is quite identifiable. You could however feel very unsympathetic toward her. It is hard to feel compassion when you see her being anything other than quite controlling, there isn’t a warm, soft side to her, there may be deep within her, but she is focused on keeping that perfectionism and control going. Her drive for the perfect family, that desire to keep the façade going, starts to bubble up inside her and she starts to become quite mad. She does not have the facility within her to understand that this is not the way to behave. She doesn’t ask herself ‘what other options do I have in dealing with this situation?’
How would you describe Leo and Rachel’s marriage? Is there any respect between them or was their relationship always doomed to fail?
I think sometimes in a relationship one person can take all the bad behaviour. Rachel becomes more and more withheld, uptight and more rejected. She believes that he married her for her money, which he probably did, but there might have been a moment when they were happy.
