A photo of Ioan Gruffudd (my husband of 14 years) was sent to me by someone this week.
I didn’t really look at it very closely at first — he was eating an ice cream on a bench in the South of France, where he’s shooting at the moment. He looked happy. I felt glad he was happy, even though we haven’t spoken to each other by phone or in person in almost 11 months.
I was about moving on, when I noticed the caption. It was his Instagram account, which was strange as he rarely posts. And his comment was: ‘Thank you for making me smile again.’
Huh? My mind went blank for a second. Then I realised he was sitting next to a young girl I’d never seen before. She was tagged by @iambiancawallace. That was when I felt that feeling. The feeling nobody in a relationship — even one that’s seen better days —wants to feel: My God. They are a married couple. He has a girlfriend. But, he’s my husband…
Devastated: Alice Evans split from Ioan Gruffudd, her husband of 20 years, this year. Here, the actress, 50 gives an account of the breakdown of her marriage
Who was this girl? I’d never seen her face. I had never heard her name. I did what any normal(ish) person would do — I went straight to Google.
Apparently the aspiring actress Bianca Wallace had worked on Ioan’s Australian show, Harrow, as an extra. At least for the last two seasons. My mouth became dry and I felt like my stomach was going to explode when I realized where she was: The Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. This was where my husband was staying during his six-month French shoot.
I clicked her Instagram link to see her in a tiny bikini that revealed a body similar to Angelina Jolie and Lara Croft. Suddenly, an awful lot of things began to fall into place in a very short time…
I opened Twitter by flipping open my laptop.
‘So it turns out that my husband, after two years of telling me I’m a bad person and I’m not exciting and he no longer wants to have sex with me and he just wants to be on set abroad… has been in a relationship for three years behind all our backs,’ I wrote, adding: ‘Good luck, Bianca.’
Why did I do it? The utter collapse of our marriage over the past 12 month is no secret. And that’s basically because I haven’t kept it one. By about month five of me asking him ‘what’s wrong?’ and him responding ‘nothing’, I’d started to think I was losing my mind.
My friends had started to lose theirs, too, after the 58th time I’d call them begging ‘what should I do? What did they think was wrong with me? Should I confront him?’
They didn’t have answers any more than I did. Evidently, something was wrong. We were in a pandemic. My daughters Ella (12 years old) and Elsie (8 years old) were supposedly doing online schooling. I was left at home.
After another fight that seemed to be about nothing, I was crying again, bawling on my bed in August 2020. I felt worthless, that I wasn’t valuable, and that he was going to leave me soon as he couldn’t bear it anymore.
I was shocked to see him sitting next to a young woman I had never seen before. She was tagged by @iambiancawallace. That feeling was what I felt. That feeling that no one in a relationship wants to feel, even one that has seen better days: My God. They are a couple. Pictured together: Ioan and Bianca in an Instagram post
I tapped her Instagram URL and there she was, in a tiny bikini with a figure that looked a lot like Angelina Jolie or Lara Croft. Suddenly, an awful lot of things began to fall into place in a very short time… Pictured: Ioan’s new girlfriend Bianca Wallace
Why did I do it? The utter collapse of our marriage over the past 12 month is no secret. And that’s basically because I haven’t kept it one. Pictured: Alice’s tweets were just minutes after Ioan made his official Instagram romance with Bianca official
I have lost the plot. I tweeted this: ‘Help. He’s told us he’s leaving us. I don’t know what to do.’
His immediate reaction was overwhelming. (He read all my tweets, because he said he ‘needed to keep an eye on me’). He grabbed my computer from me and deleted my tweet.
He was raging against me. He screamed at the top his voice. ‘How dare you?’ His eyes were wide and white — it was terrifying.
I turned around to look at him. I said ‘give me the laptop back’. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Not until you’ve calmed down and learned to control yourself.’ Again, I said: ‘It’s my laptop. Please give it back.’ He walked out of the room, with the laptop.
Something was breaking within me. I ran up and grabbed the laptop from his hand. ‘It’s my f***ing laptop,’ I said. ‘And it’s my life.’
I went back onto Twitter and re-posted what I’d written, explaining that he had deleted it but that it wasn’t a mistake. It was a huge, bloody cry for help.
The strangest thing happened next. He looked at me and watched me as I retweeted my plea for help.
Then he picked up his phone and called his parents. He began to weep. I didn’t understand what he was talking about, since he communicates in Welsh to his parents. However, it was clear that it was not good. There was no line.
The Daily Mail had picked up the story. I knew it wasn’t entirely the right thing to do, but as people started texting and the word got round, all I could feel was a huge gush of relief.
He started to get legal advice the next day. I was suddenly on Zoom meetings, with five or six legal experts. I was worried that I might lose custody. The advice was clear. I had to be quiet. Stop exposing my laundry to the public.
It may seem strange, but I felt more comfortable doing it than I did when I was being pushed, prodded, and told to.
Twitter helped me to see things from a different perspective. Women from all over the world would message me to say they’d had similar experiences. Without this outlet I might have lost my mind.
While some may accuse my of washing my dirty sheets in public, the truth is that I have found the internet to be my friend and refuge through these difficult months. It can also be torture. I remember the day he posted a picture of himself with his new girlfriend on Instagram earlier this week.
Let’s recap. I’d been on my own in Los Angeles throughout most of the pandemic lockdown, looking after our daughters. I don’t have any family here and not many friends. I’d had this sense for months that something wasn’t quite right. Ioan would always tell me that I was imagining things when I brought it up.
Then, something very strange happened. Ioan was in Australia filming Harrow when the pandemic panic set in. People all over the globe were desperately trying to get their families back from abroad when this happened.
I kept bringing up the fact that he had returned from Australia before there was an end to planes. But the panic I expected to see in my friend was not there. This is a man who panics about everything — but he kept saying: ‘At the end of the day what’s it going to be? Two months? Three months? It is paradise down there!
I was stunned! He hadn’t seen me or his children for seven months (minus a week at Christmas) and now he was all gung-ho about extending that to a year.
We managed to get him on board the last plane from Sydney in April 2020 with the help and assistance of many agents, the producer, our manager, and a few calls to a few random agencies.
It was a joyous reunion of the children and I was so happy to be able to see him. However, he was oddly morose and spent several hours in the bath after returning home.
I kept asking him questions, but that only made him more angry. At one point he stood up in the bath, stark naked, and shouted: ‘Do you realise we were only one episode away from the series finale and now it will never be finished?’ I felt like he blamed me for this, for wanting him home. I told him that the series would end and it did.
Then, it was funny, things started to settle down and we were able to have a really wonderful summer together, between April and mid-July 2020 when I returned to Australia. We laughed, had more sex than usual and he kept telling us how much he loved us. I believed that we were in love again, that everything was fine, and that everything was okay.
How wrong could I have been! Something had changed when he returned home at the end August 2020. I was giggling like an idiot as his car pulled up from the airport. My eyes were wide open and tears of joy were streaming down my face.
He got up and picked up the girls. Then it was my turn. I ran up and wrapped my arms around him, but he remained stiff. I kissed his cheek, and he reacted by kissing me back. I was stunned.
So in love: Our Mexican wedding took place on September 7, 2007 at a beach in Mexico. I wrote a poem which I read at the wedding. We began trying to have children while on honeymoon in Maldives. Pictured is Alice and Ioan on their wedding Day
He was uncommunicative and tired for the first few days. I became so upset that it turned into a flaming row. ‘Why can’t you just acknowledge I’ve said something?’ I said. It came. ‘Because sometimes I can’t stand you. You’re so annoying,’ he shouted.
I felt a burning lump in my throat, so I stared at him and tried not to cry. In my folly, I used the ‘baby’ voice we’d used for years and years when we first met (oh God) and said something like: ‘I know I can be annoying sometimes but you still wuv me though, don’t you?’
The silence lasted ten seconds and seemed to go on forever. Another ten seconds passed. My world was forever changed.
‘I’m sorry, Alice, but I’m afraid I don’t. I don’t love you any more.’
We had always said we’d be together for ever, I reminded him, but his eyes remained cold.
He slept on a sofa and said he needed space. His manner was chilly, and then he stated that he had just found an apartment and was moving.
He still denied he was seeing someone else, and sugar-coated it for the children by saying that maybe we wouldn’t get divorced. Had he been honest, had he said: ‘I have fallen in love with someone else,’ then perhaps I wouldn’t have been so tormented.
He moved out in January this year and I only found out he’d filed for divorce a few weeks later when I read it on a gossip website.
What a gullible fool I’d been! I felt like I was in a windowless room and couldn’t breathe.
After eight months filled with pain and confusion, it was finally time to get back online. I felt like no one understood my pain. I had to let it all out. My husband became distant and unfriendly and accused me of being boring and irritating.
Fat shaming: Alice also alleged in a Tweet that Ioan told her that he couldn’t abide ‘fatties’ would leave her if she ‘gained weight’
My tweets caused an outcry around the globe. It was quite an epiphany for me. Critics suggested that I should keep the details private. But I felt I was being treated badly by the man I had married and I needed somebody — heck, everybody! — to know.
Some commentators even branded my exposure of our problems as very ‘unfeminine’. They claimed it was not British to do what they did. My stiff upper lip? A psychologist magazine sent me a ridiculous open letter asking me what my daughters would think of my divorce 15 years later.
Fifteen years from now, do you really think that’s what they will be worried about?
So, you’re worried about my girls? But you’re not worried that their father left them? Can you imagine what other people would think if I left them and walked out on them? It would have been an outrage.
I’d have been the scarlet woman, their terrible mother. But Ioan and other men can go on with their lives, leaving behind their families and responsibilities. While I am left to fix the family’s broken pieces, I am the bad one.
I have also been criticised for telling my daughters about their father’s lies, but what am I supposed to do? Continue to tell his lies for him.
While some may accuse my of washing my dirty sheets in public, the sad truth is that I have found the internet to be my friend and refuge through these difficult months. It can also be torture. I remember the day he posted a picture of himself with his girlfriend on Instagram earlier this week.
Someone had mentioned online that Ioan likes slim girls. I agreed. He had, after all, told me several times over the years that he couldn’t abide fatties and that he would leave if I gained weight. ‘I guess he was true to his word this time,’ I tweeted.
If it wasn’t so terrible, it would be almost comical. How did it come to this? I still can’t work out how a love as strong as ours ended up going so badly wrong.
Ioan was my first encounter in 1999 while I was filming 102 Dalmatians. Although he was a bit cocky at the time, we became infatuated by him by the end. It was love. We lived together in London and moved to America in 2003 — for both our careers.
He was cast as Sir Lancelot in King Arthur, alongside Clive Owen (Keira Knightley). He lived in Dublin for eight month and I stayed in LA to continue my work.
Now I am heartbroken. I feel dead. He’s broken my heart twice. The first time he told me that he no longer loves me, and the second when he said that he was going to marry another woman.
Despite the distance, we made things work and loved so hard. I had just lost my mum to a heart attack, the day before Ioan met me. My father had divorced me when he remarried, so Ioan was both my rock and my best friend.
We talked about how we would spend the rest of our lives together. In 2005, we went to Havana, and he placed a diamond engagement band in my drink.
Our wedding took place on September 7, 2007, at a beach in Mexico. I wrote a poem that I recited at the wedding meal. We tried to have children while on honeymoon in Maldives. After many failed attempts, we decided to try IVF. We enjoyed a happy marriage and were thrilled to become pregnant in 2009.
I was happy to stay home and be a mom while he continued acting and became a star in shows like The Fantastic Four, Liar, and Hornblower.
Being a mom is my most important goal. I knew it wouldn’t work if there were two actors in a relationship.
How do you work when you’ve got small children? Acting is a 18-hour-a-day job, with most of it on shoots far from home. At my lowest point in my career, I took ten-years off. I honestly thought he’d be there for all of us for ever.
Now I am heartbroken. I feel dead. He’s broken my heart twice. He told me twice that he didn’t love me anymore, and the second was this week when he revealed that he had a new woman. Since the news broke about his relationship, I have not heard from him.
All of a sudden I’m on my own, but I’m pretty resilient. I wish he would have told me the truth sooner. I’m a problem solver, a realist and a pragmatist.
Of course, if that had happened, I would have been furious. But I would think, ‘OK, let’s sort this out’, and then we would have discussed, you know, how much he thought he was in love with this woman. How much?
I might have been capable of persuading him to save us. Let’s somehow be a two-parent family until our children were at least teenagers.
All I can do right now is to focus on my girls and make sure they have the best possible upbringing.
I’m certainly not interested in finding another man even though I do joke about it on Twitter.
I’m terrified of the future, but with time I hope to be able to reframe things. I’m desperately worried about money — can I be an actress again at my age?
I think I could. I love to write — maybe I’ll write a book? Whatever happens, I’ll get through this. I’m a tough old girl. I’m brave.
You know what they mean when they say, feel fear and do it anyway? That’s what I do.
I won’t be growing old with Ioan — he loves someone else. I just wish he’d been a bit more honest about it.
It wouldn’t have saved our marriage, but it might have saved me an awful lot of pain.