Dominic West on his natural swimming pool: ‘When I’m in the mood I do a spot of underwater gardening’

As a Bafta-award-winning actor, Dominic West is known for the diversity of roles he’s played over his long and successful career, from the tragic Jean Valjean in the BBC adaptation of Les Misérables, to the former Prince Charles in the Netflix series The Crown, the troubled writer Noah Solloway in the Sky Atlantic series The Affair and the anti-hero Jimmy McNulty in HBO’s The Wire.

But the actor also has a hidden talent – wild-swimming pool builder.

West is married to the Irish garden designer Catherine FitzGerald, who he met while studying at Trinity College Dublin, and they have four children: Dora, Senan, Francis and Christabel (Senan played a young Prince William in season five of the Crown). The couple split their time between their family homes in the Cotswolds and London, as well as Catherine’s ancestral home, Glin Castle in Co Limerick. The couple acquired the home following the death of FitzGerald’s father Desmond, the 29th Knight of Glin.

It’s at their Cotswold home that West, who is soon to reprise the role of Eddie in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge on London’s West End in May,first discovered his love of natural swimming pools. Here, he masterminded the creation of a very large and exceptionally beautiful one in its large country garden, just months before the pandemic made so many people around the world enviously dream of doing something similar.

A famous actor builds a swimming pool… what’s new about that? some might say. To which the answer is, that West’s pool is nothing like your conventional Hollywood swimming pool. Put out of your mind, for example, any thoughts of the legendary pool belonging to Hollywood’s Beverley Hills Hotel, beside whose glittering aquamarine waters the actress Faye