INTERVIEW: In the late 1960s, all she had to do was look pretty. Her comic talent was finally revealed in Ab Fab, but Shakespeare always eluded her. Joanna Lumley talks to Louise East.
When Joanna Lumley mentions meeting Jennifer Saunders for lunch two days previously, I can't help squeaking, "Ooo, go on, tell me what it's like. Did you shriek a lot?" Although the Joanna Lumley sitting in front of me is quite clearly different to her Absolutely Fabulous alter ego, Patsy Stone (Lumley's lipstick is all in place for a start, and she's not smoking a fag), I can't help getting a little giddy at the thought of Patsy and Edina having a girly lunch in real time. Lumley, the consummate professional, smiles regretfully and says "It's quite different. We know each other well. We've both got children, and in my case, grandchildren. We're both married and we both love the countryside."
Bah humbug. Gossip about the Countryside Alliance and potty-training was not quite what I had in mind. Still, in all other respects, meeting Joanna Lumley is very satisfactory. She's almost a caricature of herself; the creamy voice (if you're an AOL user, it's Lumley who informs you you've got mail), the huge eyes, the frequent use of expressions such as "holy smoke".
At 58, Joanna Lumley is as much a British institution as the British Library or the need to compare travel routes. She has been a Bond girl (described simply as "English girl" in On Her Majesty's Secret Service); played the helmet-haired Purdey in the cult television series, The New Avengers; spooked out the nation with that early precursor of The X-Files, Sapphire and Steel, and of course, drank, sniffed and smoked her way into our hearts as Patsy in Ab Fab.
Gay men love her, taxi-drivers fondly remember her as a castaway in Girl Friday, and even the Queen must have a soft spot for her, as she got an OBE in 1995. She could easily be an awful old luvvie, but is redeemed by her genuine warmth and a fine, self-deprecating sense of humour.
In the book of memoirs she has just written, No Room For Secrets (her first autobiography, Stare Back and Smile, was published pre-Ab Fab in 1989), Lumley decided to interview herself about her own life, frequently interrupting herself with interjections such as "Can't you see how boring this is?" Lumley came up with this structure herself and is fairly proud of it; "It's a device to puncture something really. It's me saying 'you're getting a bit pompous now'."
Born in Kashmir, India, where her father was an officer with the Gurkhas, Lumley's childhood was a colonial one of boarding schools and infrequent trips home. After school, she drifted into modelling and then acting, but, by her reckoning, there were nine years, what she calls "the pre-Purdey days" of bad jobs; "The kind where I hadn't a hope in hell of making them good. All I was asked to do was come in and look pretty. Sit with my legs crossed. Say 'Ooo, how kind of you Robert.' Give a flirtatious look." This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when her need for money was all the more acute as she was bringing up her son Jamie on her own. "The fact that I was a single mother didn't really come into it, it was the fact that I was a working parent. How do you take the jobs? Do you work during holidays? If you don't, you've got no money."
Although she says her Purdey was second-fiddle to those who came before her (including Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg), The New Avengers shot her into a different league, as well as providing the spooky experience of seeing her own mushroom hair-cut on every girl in London ("And I think it must have been compulsory in Holland"). Still, she was frustrated by the roles she was offered. "In the BBC, you're drama, comedy, sit-com or period drama. You got put into a pigeon hole, and they would never cross you over. For instance, I've never done Shakespeare professionally. Never, ever, even been asked, and the only reason I became an actress was to do Shakespeare. In a way, my career has been a complete failure." She laughs uproariously, but it's an idea she returns to again later, mourning the fact she is too old to play Rosalind and must settle for Hamlet's mother.
So when first Ruby Wax and then Jennifer Saunders approached her in 1992, offering bawdy, irreverent roles written just for her, she was overjoyed. When it first came out, Absolutely Fabulous was a bitingly funny satire on early 1990s consumerism, New Age humbug, and a whole generation of former-hippies, despaired of by their children. As former super-model Patsy, Lumley was a revelation, not least because she was unafraid to look really, really bad, slumped in a drunken heap at the kitchen table, leaking mascara and wrinkles. Wasn't she concerned about tarnishing her image? "Glamour? I never had glamour. I was put in glamorous roles, where I was dressed up, but I've always thought of myself as an actress."
Lumley muses that Patsy and Edina only work as comic characters because there's a bedrock of truth to them; reflecting not just the culture but elements of her and Saunders's own characters. "I brought a lot to the table for Patsy ... if not exactly my own experience, then certainly the experience of people I knew in those days. What's not me, is the excessive drinking and drug-taking. In real life, she'd be dead by now. Also, Patsy once had something sewn on which then fell off and she went back to being a woman. That's definitely not me. Mind you, part of me has always thought I looked jolly good in a moustache when I played Prince Charming in the school plays."
For Lumley, the real eye-opener was not the show itself, but the way Saunders, Wax and the other women who came from the world of stand-up comedy, did business. "I was astonished by their confidence. They've got their own companies, they want to be on top of things. As a generation ahead of them, I came from a world where the director's word was God. It was terribly heady to be caught up with them. I was amazed by what they could demand from institutions like the BBC, and I did feel slightly jealous, but realised it was too late for me to change."
Married to composer Stephen Barlow since 1986, Joanna Lumley now lives in south London, reading a lot, writing letters and adoring her soon-to-be two, grandchildren. In a business where everybody pays lip service to charity work, Lumley gets truly involved, travelling to Eritrea for Comic Relief, flogging her Ferrari in aid of the Born Free Foundation, and bringing a pig to parliament to highlight bad farming methods (she's a vegetarian).
Her life as an actor has been richer since her talents as a comic actor were revealed; in the autumn, she will appear in a new Miss Marple television adaptation, there'll be an Ab Fab special at Christmas, and she has just finished an animated film version of The Magic Roundabout with a stellar cast including Robbie Williams as Dougal, Kylie Minogue as Florence and Ian McKellan as Zebedee. In a piece of casting genius, Lumley plays Florence, the bossy pink cow.
When I ask her if writing her memoirs made her contemplative, she rather unexpectedly talks at length about death and her theory on reincarnation: "For some reason, I've always been terribly aware of how close death is to us, literally a paper-width away. Oddly, I find that very comforting I don't want to live forever, just to be alive. I want it to be a good life, and then go through the tissue paper and start again." She pauses, then laughs wickedly. "Of course, when I'm pushed up against it, I'll be going 'No. Save meeee'."
No Room for Secrets, by Joanna Lumley, is published by Michael Joseph (€23.99)