Emily Atack has recalled how her close family bond with Sir Paul McCartney almost led to a chance meeting with Michael Jackson.
The actress, 36, McCartney’s first cousin twice removed, says the Beatles legend was a constant during her youth and harbours fond memories of visiting the musician and his late wife Linda at their rural estate in East Sussex, where they kept a stable of horses.
And it was here, Atack says, that his friendship with Jackson almost led to a chance encounter with the pop star.
‘Growing up for me, he was hugely a part of my childhood,’ she told the How To Fail podcast with Elizabeth Day. ‘I remember Linda really well. She used to take us out on her horses.
‘They used to have beautiful, amazing, acres of land that we’d all play on and actually, I remember once arriving at his house for Sunday lunch and he said, “Oh, you’ve just missed Michael Jackson.”
‘I was fuming, and he was like, “Oh, sorry, is it not enough that, you know, you’re related to a Beatle?” I was like, “No, I want to meet Michael Jackson.”
Emily Atack has recalled how her close family bond with cousin Sir Paul McCartney almost led to a chance meeting with Michael Jackson
McCartney famously collaborated with Jackson on The Girl Is Mine, one of seven hit singles to feature from the late pop star’s groundbreaking 1982 album, Thriller, but three years later their friendship soured after Jackson bought the lucrative publishing rights to The Beatles’ back catalogue.
‘He was very much a part of my childhood,’ Atack said of McCartney. ‘He’s a lovely man, and he’s a family man. The relation is he’s first cousins with my grandma, Betty, who’s not with us anymore.
‘But he writes about my grandma in all his books, and every opportunity he gets, he talks about my grandma and my granddad because they were such key figures in his life when he lost his mum really young.’
While the actress witnessed McCartney’s considerable impact long after The Beatles’ disbandment, her mother – actress and comedienne Kate Robbins – experienced Beatlemania first hand while growing up in Liverpool.
‘He was very much a part of my mum’s childhood on Mount Road, in that madhouse,’ she recalled. ‘Oh my God, so many memories in that house. The back door was always open. People would be coming and going all the time.
‘My mum grew up in Beatlemania, and she said it was just the most insane thing. Actually, she said one of her earliest memories was John Lennon was babysitting them.
‘Paul and John would come around and babysit them whilst my grandma and granddad worked in the pub. It was an interesting childhood for my mum, and really unusual, and creative and insane.
‘Paul, he was like a sibling to them really. He was a bit older and I think, because my grandma was quite a lot older than him, he really saw her as an auntie figure really.’
The actress is McCartney’s first cousin twice removed (pictured with Atack’s mother, Kate Robbins)
Atack previously described her connection to McCartney as ‘the coolest thing on earth’ while tracing her family ancestry on BBC genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are?
During the episode, the actress uncovered a letter written by the musician more than 60-years earlier to his relative Mike Robbins, entertainments manager and Redcoat at Butlins, in which he tried to get a job at the holiday resort.
The young Sir Paul joked that him and two friends were looking for a good time that summer, ‘but we don’t mind missing this if we go to Butlin’s’.
Atack said: ‘I was brought up knowing I was from a very cool family. I am related to the McCartneys and it’s the coolest thing on earth.’
