The Greatest Roles Of Their Lives

They’re famous, successful and happily married to each other. What more could actors sarah parish and james murray want? Try a £4m children’s a&e unit in southampton. Faith eckersall hears about the motivation behind their mission.

ONE day, in the not too distant future, sick and injured children won’t have to be treated in the Accident and Emergency department at Southampton General Hospital. They’ll have their own bright, purpose-built ward, staffed with doctors and nurses specially trained to deal with paediatric emergencies and healthcare.

The reason they’ll have this and – eventually – the south coast’s first and only children’s hospital is because of a baby girl called EllaJayne. And her parents, actors Sarah Parish and Jim Murray, who live near Alresford.

Sarah has just finished appearing in the final series of Broadchurch and Jim is known for parts in ITV’s Primeval, Channel 4’s Cucumber, Syfy’s Defiance and, most recently, the ITV drama Him.

Ella-Jayne was their longed-for first child and she died just eight months after being born in 2009, of complications related to Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome, a condition which affects around one in 125,000-300,000 babies and which can cause congenital heart defects.

Pictures of Ella-Jayne sit alongside those of their seven-year-old daughter, Nell, in their village home, close to the River Itchen, but her little life will touch the lives of babies who aren’t even born yet, thanks to The Murray Parish Trust, set up in her memory to fundraise for a Paediatric Accident and Emergency ward at Southampton General.

“I went for a scan at 33 weeks and that’s when we found out,” says Sarah, describing the moment the doctors realised their baby had something seriously wrong with her heart. So wrong, in fact, she was delivered five weeks prematurely by emergency Caesarean and within an hour of her birth at Winchester’s Royal Hants, was whisked away to Southampton General, where the staff fought a Herculean battle to diagnose and save her.