“We live in sh**e times, don’t we, darling?” says Miriam Margolyes.
We’ve just been talking about the thrill of performing in front of a live audience, and how this is the joy that revives and delights her most.
“It’s funny to realise that that’s what I love, but it is. It is exactly what I love. It’s what I want to do. I want to entertain. I want to bring a smile to the lips of people who are quivering with nerves, anxiety, disappointment and fear.”
This is where the sh**e times come in. Margolyes is about to embark on her From A to Z tour to promote The Little Book of Miriam, which the Oxford-born actress – “never actor” – cheerfully admits has been designed “with your smallest room in mind”. She’s not had any trouble selling tickets.
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“And that’s very gratifying. I mean, I don’t sell tickets like Taylor Swift sells tickets, but selling tickets like Miriam Margolyes sells tickets is okay. I’m happy.”
Audiences want more from her than just the gasp-provoking “rudery” she has generously served up while appearing on programmes like The Graham Norton Show, she says.
“They want what they know I can do, which is naughty stories. But they also do ask for the things that I want to tell them about the state of the world. They ask, ‘How do you feel about Israel? What do you think about Nigel Farage?’ So I’m think I’m getting across to them as a whole human being and not just a potty mouth. They can see that there’s a person here who is concerned about the world that I live in. I’m pleased about that, because I don’t want just to be a sort of silly-billy, and I’m not.”
In The Little Book of Miriam – which gives alphabetical glimpses into her life – she highlights the sense of optimism she felt when she was an anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1960s. Does she really feel more pessimistic now?
“I honestly do. I’m sorry to say it, but I do. I feel scared that the wrong people are in power in many countries, and that lies are being peddled about groups of people. It’s very disappointing, because I was brought up in an atmosphere of confidence, and that’s not there any more. We don’t have that. We’re scared, we’re frightened.”
Margolyes, who is Jewish, has regularly spoken out against Israel’s actions in Gaza. This has attracted the condemnation of a British group called the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which has called for her to be stripped of her OBE.
“People always think of me as a kind of, you know, funny lady. Someone who’s going to make them laugh and forget the worries they have. And I hope that I can and that I do. But it would be a lie if I ignored the things that are going on in the world, and especially the things that are connected to me,” she says.
“What do these Israelis think that their actions are doing? They’re making the hatred last forever and ever. If you were a young Palestinian seeing your parents being killed and the devastation of your country, and then you see reports that it’s likely to be made into a seaside resort for a foreign entity, what can you feel but rage and hatred? And these are emotions that sustain and continue.”
She notes again that, as far as her public persona is concerned, she’s not supposed to be angry, that she’s “supposed to be a little roly-poly sunshine baby”. Her readers, however, will know that “roly-poly” is the adjective she loathes most.
“Oh, I do hate it profoundly. It’s the worst, because it is not only a harsh description, but a belittling description. It reduces me.”
Targets entertainingly skewered in The Little Book of Miriam – her third book in five years – span from star signs, queue-jumpers and limelight-hogging actors to requests to fart on demand, people who don’t own up to farting in a lift, the concept of moderation and the car park at Sydney Opera House. Things she loves, meanwhile, include onions, tennis, being famous, having young lodgers, doing things on impulse, “ar**hole” as an insult, the phrase “as the actress said to the bishop”, and the works of Charles Dickens.
Maureen [Lipman] won’t speak to me now, because of Israel, you know, but we were very good friends at that time
— Miriam Margolyes
For the past two years, her Margolyes & Dickens show has sold out at the Edinburgh fringe, and she is still recovering from August’s string of performances as she speaks to me over Zoom from her London home and explains her admiration for his vivid writing.
“Dickens opens the 19th century to us. Although it was 200 years ago, we can peep in through his windows and experience what it was like. We can actually travel through time into another world with him, through his brilliance, and that is exciting to me. This is how people talked. This is how they lived their lives, not very differently from ours.”
But there is one difference between Dickens and modern writers, she says – the extent to which good and evil are clearly delineated.
“If you want to go into a morally clear atmosphere and understand what is good, what is evil, and why and how evil works, Dickens will tell you.”
Margolyes was conceived in an air raid. Her father and pregnant mother fled Plaistow in east London in early 1941 as German bombs were blitzing the city. The family settled in Oxford, where her high-minded, conscientious father was a GP and her funny, shrewd, theatre-loving mother let out the rooms above his surgery to students. Her parents were loving and attentive, she says, and wanted their only child to have every advantage they had been denied.
She misbehaved at school, though she writes in her autobiography, This Much is True, that it was after she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, in October 1960 that she truly became herself, taking up pipe-smoking, making left-wing friends and swearing “all the time”.
Women were only allowed to be “guests”, not members, of the Cambridge Footlights, the sketch comedy troupe seen as a launch pad to an acting career, and she found the atmosphere toxic. The only woman performer in a Footlights show called Double Take in 1962 – an era when no one wanted “the girl” to be funny – some rather ungentlemanly future luminaries of British light entertainment treated her as though she was invisible.
Double Take nevertheless led to her first professional roles in BBC radio dramas, which in turn proved the catalyst for a long screen acting career that has encompassed the best of British television from Blackadder to Call the Midwife, as well as Hollywood film credits such as Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
She proudly subscribes to Noël Coward’s “learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture” school of acting, she says.
“You mustn’t take yourself too seriously. And that’s something all artists tend to do. We think that we carry the world on our shoulders.”
In The Little Book of Miriam, she writes that she “doesn’t really want to talk about Harry Potter any more” – she was Prof Sprout in the films – so I ask her instead about the first drama series I saw her in: the mildly devastating 1987 television adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic riches-to-rags novel A Little Princess, in which she played the meek sister of Maureen Lipman’s cruel Miss Minchin.
“Maureen won’t speak to me now, because of Israel, you know, but we were very good friends at that time.”
I’ve obliterated America from the map – from me – because of Mr Trump
— Miriam Margolyes
We also chat about her belated entry into the Doctor Who universe in 2023. Decades after the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, campaigned for her to be cast as his companion in the late 1970s, the show’s producers finally came calling, asking her to voice a winsome, wheedling monster known as the Meep.
“It was great fun. I was very chuffed to be asked to do that,” she says.
She is keen to attend a Doctor Who fan convention – “you make good money, and you meet all these weird people” – though she won’t go to one in the US.
“Not now, under any circumstances. I’ve obliterated America from the map – from me – because of Mr Trump.”
She remains in demand both as a voice actor and on screen and spent a large part of 2024 and this year in New Zealand – “a gorgeous place” – making her latest BBC travelogue and playing a nun in an upcoming film called Holy Days alongside “two absolutely brilliant actresses”, Jacki Weaver and Judy Davis.
More usually, she splits her time between the UK, Australia and Italy.
“I don’t know anybody who leads a life like mine, so I haven’t got any examples to learn from,” she says.
“My partner [Heather] and I own a house in Australia with her sister, and we own a house in Italy, with a friend of ours. I own a house in London, on my own, and she owns a house in Amsterdam, which she shares with my ex-boyfriend and his second wife. So my life is somewhat complicated, reeling around between these residences, all of which are beautiful, unpretentious and delightful.”
She fell in love with Heather – a historian and “incredibly private” person originally from Canberra, Australia – in 1968, two years after realising she was a lesbian, and the couple have been together for 57 years. Recently, they both published a book in the same year: “Hers was about trade in Southeast Asia and mine was about me.”
Margolyes has held dual UK and Australian citizenship since 2013, though she and Heather have never lived together for long periods.
“We’re still loving and close and we want to spend the rest of our lives together in one place. I hope we manage to do that,” she says.
Their home in Tuscany, which they bought in the early 1970s, is “where we’ve decided we want to be”, but as a consequence of the “insanity” of Brexit, she can now only spend 90 days in any 180-day period in Italy.
Farage, a “senior culprit in this matter”, gets both barrels. In the week we speak, the Reform UK leader has been busy outlining his plans for mass deportations from Britain if elected.
“It’s dismaying and it’s baffling and it’s very bad for everybody. I’m worried about it.”
She’s incredulous, too, that Farage is active on Cameo, the website where Margolyes and other entertainers charge small sums to deliver personalised video messages to fans.
“What the f**k is he doing on Cameo? It’s not a proper thing for a politician to be on. I do it because I earn some money from it, and I do it well, and I cheer people up. What’s he doing it for?”
She’s looking forward to returning to Ireland for her sold-out dates in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. Her past visits include a blissful, hitchhiking adventure in 1963 and a TV road trip in 2022 to make Kite Entertainment’s two-part RTÉ documentary series Lady Gregory: Ireland’s First Social Influencer alongside Senator Lynn Ruane.
“Oh, she’s exceptional. I foretell that she will be the president one day,” Margolyes says of Ruane. “Really, we haven’t got anyone like her in England. We are sadly lacking.”
There is “a magic” about Ireland that she attributes to both the pain of the colonised past and the power of Irish writers to illuminate the human experience – two years ago, she met the poet Colm Keegan and “thought he was a genius”, so she has invited him to read at her upcoming Dublin show.
Margolyes, now 84, has become more political as she’s got older – or, as she puts it, she’s “billowed”, rather than mellowed.
“If you’re lucky, that is the way it should be. We shouldn’t just dwindle into the depths. We have to pulsate. We have to experience. We have to be alive as long as we can. Recently, there has been some activity to try to make out that I’m dying. There’s been reports from newspapers who should know better. Unchecked, unnotified. [They] never came back to me. And so I was reading about my own death with some surprise, I may say,” she says, laughing.
It was even suggested in one report that she was unlikely to still be alive for the Edinburgh fringe run she has just completed.
“But so far I am confounding all expectation and continuing to live and work at a ferocious rate.”
She did have “an amazing heart procedure” two years ago and she has a condition called spinal stenosis, which affects her mobility and means that if she does more acting jobs, they will have to be “sitting down” roles.
“But it doesn’t stop me. You know, I’m writing, I’m still talking, I’m still travelling. I’m all systems go.”
I ask if she has regrets.
“Oh, I do indeed have regrets. I regret I didn’t lose weight when I was much younger. I regret that I didn’t do pelvic floor exercises earlier. I regret certain plays that I turned down, and other ones that I did. But then, you know, everybody regrets something. I don’t have major regrets. I found the person I needed in my life, because I did definitely need someone. And I found her, and I kept her.”
Cautioning in advance that she might find the term horrifying, I ask if she thinks she might even be a role model.
“I don’t know, because I haven’t fixed my ideas about everything yet. I’m still a work in progress. I don’t know if people should admire me and follow me, because I’m still working it out. I like to think that I’m a good example. It’s good for people to see someone in a wheelchair, you know, doing extraordinary things, talking to extraordinary people, going to cemeteries. Going to cemeteries and coming back from them, that’s the thing.”
The Little Book of Miriam by Miriam Margolyes, published by John Murray, is out now.
