Stockard Channing admitted she’s “happy being a recluse” as she reflected on her quiet lifestyle after fleeing the states for the United Kingdom.
The “Grease” star began living in London “just before COVID,” a move she envisioned after the 2014 death of her partner of 25 years, producer Daniel Gilham.
“I’ve lived alone since I lost Daniel and I’m happy being a recluse,” Channing wrote in an essay for The Sunday Times. “I was married four times before Daniel, and they all represent epochs of me.
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“I grew up in the sixties, reacting to that repressed notion of marriage and sexuality from the fifties kinda like Rizzo,” she noted. “Children were thought about and, yeah, I think about them now because it’d be great to have someone taking care of me. But, hey, children can be just as selfish as everybody else out there.”
Channing, 82, confessed that Gilham’s death “was more devastating than I realized; it had a lag effect.”
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“The pattern of my life shifted, so I shifted my life from Maine,” she wrote of the move, which also vaguely coincided with Trump’s second presidential bid.
“When I started playing ‘The West Wing’s first lady, Abbey Bartlet, in 1999, we were about to move to the second Bush administration,” she wrote. “The cast had a good look at that Washington world, and there seemed to be a level of honest, intelligent discourse that is missing from 2026.
“People look at ‘The West Wing’ and go, ‘Wow, wasn’t it great when politicians had an ounce of integrity?’ Abbey didn’t suffer fools, and she’s the character most like me in real life.”
Channing reflected on an interaction with director Aaron Sorkin, who said he “wrote Abbey as the person he saw in me.”
“I was quite short with him the first time we met,” she wrote. “He was saying all these nice things, and I said, ‘Look, I don’t have time for flattery.’ I didn’t mean to be rude it was just one of those days.”
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Her days of stardom are slightly different from now as the “Six Degrees of Separation” actress detailed her morning routine, which begins at 7 a.m. when her dog wakes her up.
“After he’s had his breakfast and I’ve made a strong pot of coffee, my dog walker takes him out and I go back to bed,” she wrote. “My ideal morning.”
“My duvet is covered in ink spots because for many years I’ve been keeping a diary. I sit there with my fountain pen and my thoughts. What do I feel about this or that?
“I only leave the bed when I need to go to the bathroom. At my age life is guided by bodily functions.”
By 10 a.m., Channing pursues a “bit of exercise,” but admitted that her “favorite exercise days are when I play hooky.”
“I know that exercising is the right thing to do but my brain tells me to go hide behind the bike sheds,” she wrote. “Lunch is my first meal of the day and I can follow a recipe, but if my ramen doesn’t work out I give it to the dog.
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“If I’m leaving the apartment I comb my hair, but I don’t have a wardrobe of designer outfits. Well, I do, but they’re all from the Eighties and Nineties. Do I care how I look? Most actors do although part of your job is not being self-conscious.
“But I’ve never considered myself as beautiful. And I’m not a celebrity ‘tart.’ I’m just me, take it or leave it.”
Channing’s fan base is vast, and she recognized how different age groups remember her as different characters.
“For younger girls it’s ‘Practical Magic,’ for grown-ups it’s ‘The West Wing,’ and for real grown-ups it’s ‘Grease,'” she wrote. “Although the critics weren’t kind about Grease, it made tons of money and it still gets streamed a lot.
“I guess films are like songs: they take you back to a particular time in your life. Maybe a more innocent time.”
