Louis Theroux Opens Up About His Wife Nancy Strang’s Miscarriages

Louis Theroux has gone from cult icon to national treasure with his award-winning, probing and often provocative documentaries. His trademark mind-mannered nature and gentle curiosity has helped him uncover incredible insights on complex topics like white supremacy and drug addiction.

Louis has been relatively private about his own life at home. However, in his first autobiography Gotta Get Theroux This, which was published this year, the documentary filmmaker opens up about the two miscarriages his wife TV producer Nancy Strang suffered before the birth of their third son, Walter, who is now four years old.

He wrote: ‘Getting to term [in her pregnancy] had been a trial, two had ended in miscarriage. There were tears on a weekend in Yosemite.’

The couple married in 2012 and also have two older sons named Albert,14, and Fred, 11. Louis spoke candidly about the struggle to find a way to deal with their loss. ‘We’d been through nothing like that before,’ he wrote. ‘A language of grief and the social forms I was versed in did not seem adequate to the occasion.’

He also admitted he couldn’t fully “understand what [Nancy] was going through. It still seemed abstract to me whereas for Nancy the babies had been real.”

After the two tragedies, their youngest son was born, but Louis revealed that the birth was also ‘traumatic’. Walter was born by c-section, of which Louis wrote: ‘When they raised the baby’s head, tiny, cross faced and smeared like a bagel in what looked like cream cheese and jam I glanced at Nancy… I thought, “We’re not doing this again”.

'Nancy looked half-dead afterwards, as pale as a vampire. The procedure had been delayed and delayed for various reasons.’

Earlier this year, while promoting his documentary Mothers on the Edge, Louis also revealed his feelings about the complexities that go with the joy of being a parent, saying that it also brings feelings of ‘impotence and futility.’

He shared in his interview with Grazia, ‘[As much as having kids] can be wonderful, transporting and unlike anything that you’ve ever been through before, it’s also a bit like warfare at times – the feelings of deprivation and confusion. You feel like a failure a lot of the time.’

The new book which also sees Louis discuss his work life is available now.

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