Tracy-Ann Oberman is an actress and playwright. Known for roles in EastEnders, Friday Night Dinner, Toast of Lonon and Doctor Who, she was awarded an MBE in 2025 for services to Holocaust education and antisemitism activism. She lives in north London with her husband, the music producer Rob Cowan. They have one daughter, Annie, aged 19.
In 2014, after voicing Moominmamma for the animated film Moomins on the Riviera, I was invited to visit Finland with my family. I was treated like royalty and shown the best of the country. Helsinki is beautiful. We stayed at the chic art nouveau Home Hotel Jugend and a highlight was visiting the magnificent Temppeliaukio Church, which is carved into a large rock.
In Tampere we visited [the Moomins author] Tove Jansson’s house and ate one of the best meals I’ve ever had at the revolving restaurant on top of Nasinneula observation tower, which is like the set from a James Bond movie circa 1976. There’s only so much you can do with a lingonberry but somehow they found ways to do more, alongside some delicious reindeer and venison.
• Our full guide to Finland
As a child we’d often holiday in Bournemouth, staying at the Cumberland Hotel. My younger sister and I befriended the children of the hotel owners, who let us play in the office, where we raided the cupboard filled with Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut bars and KitKats. We were living the dream.
My first grown-up trip, aged 18, was interrailing post-A-levels with my long-term boyfriend, Richard, for a month. We went to Paris, Amsterdam and Viareggio in Tuscany, which was gorgeous, but we ran out of money halfway through. I still managed to have the best night’s sleep on a bench in Venice’s train station. Even though we screwed up on finances and slept rough on the streets of Florence, we had a great time.
Florence Cathedral dominates the city’s skyline
GETTY IMAGES
In 1991, while at Central School of Speech and Drama, I was one of six students to be picked — alongside Jennifer Ehle — to spend a term at the Moscow Art Theatre School, where Brian Cox was teaching. It was incredible.
Moscow was beautiful. It was just at the beginning of perestroika [the period of political and economic reform]. There was almost a riot on the streets when they decommissioned the 50 and 100-rouble notes overnight and shut the banks. People who had kept their money under their beds were suddenly left with a currency they couldn’t use. There were queues around the block for bread and the only items for sale in the main department store, GUM, were white T-shirts and jam. The absence of consumerist advertising was really interesting and it was so clean that you could eat your food off the floor in the Metro stations.
In the middle of murdering Dirty Den and burying him under the Queen Vic in 2004, EastEnders very kindly let me have ten days off to get married and go on honeymoon. I left the set, got married and at 3am we boarded a flight to Phuket. We stayed at the Banyan Tree and four days later, on Boxing Day, the tsunami hit. Our hotel was set back from the others and avoided the impact but that morning we experienced what felt like an earthquake. It was deathly quiet when we walked across the road and there was no beach any more. It looked like a nuclear bomb had hit and there was debris everywhere.
At that point we didn’t know what had happened and our brains couldn’t comprehend what we saw. We were quickly ushered back to the hotel, where lots of survivors were being brought in. We hired a minivan and bought a load of medicine and toys and helped out where we could. It was horrendous but it was a case of doing what you could. Body bags lined the streets and they were burning corpses at the temple because there were so many fatalities. It was really traumatic.
Oberman went to Moscow in the height of perestroika
GETTY IMAGES
A year later I was filming Doctor Who and we booked a second honeymoon to Kerala in southern India for three weeks. I’d had a couple of miscarriages and had been told it was unlikely I’d get pregnant again and that we should consider IVF treatment. We stayed in tiny, off-the-beaten-track hotels, watching amazing sunsets on the river, looking for tigers and trying various Ayurvedic treatments.
• Tracy-Ann Oberman: Why I’m back in EastEnders (it’s not for the money!)
I got close to a lovely woman who didn’t speak English but we managed to communicate. She kept saying to me, “You’re going to go home with a baby.” I said I didn’t think so but she told me she had prayed to the gods. Post-holiday I immediately returned to Wales to film Doctor Who and I felt really weird. I did a pregnancy test and it was positive. It was a real miracle.
Tracy-Ann Oberman is in The Assembled Parties at Hampstead Theatre, London, NW3 from October 17 to November 22 (hampsteadtheatre.com)
In our weekly My Hols interview, famous faces from the worlds of film, sport, politics, and more share their travel stories from childhood to the present day. Read more My Hols interviews here