The Importance of Being Miriam Margolyes

Popular character actress Miriam  Margolyes, currently touring Australia in her brand new one-woman show The Importance of Being Miriam, chats with Coral Drouyn.

Miriam Margolyes shares her initials with one of the great stars of the 20^th Century, Marilyn Monroe, but that’s where the similarity ends. Miriam is a brilliant character actress, but she would be the first to concede she is no sex symbol.

Noted for calling a spade a shovel, and with language far fruitier than the average health bar fruit salad, she is only 1.55 metres tall…with an additional 15 centimetres of wilful grey curls. She also emits a three-metre aura of charisma … a “Mantle of Awesome”.

Miriam Margolyes is a legend. She has graced stages around the world; brought incredible stature to many movies, including the Harry Potter series, and Scorsese’s Age of Innocence (for which she won a BAFTA – the British Academy Award); played 23 different roles in Dickens’ Women – the definitive exploration of Charles Dickens and the female characters who shaped his world - and even played Queen Victoria in “Blackadder” – a role of which she is justifiably proud and happy to be remembered for.

“I loved working with those boys (Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie and Co). They were just lovely and so generous to me.”

She is a star – though she doesn’t like the word – one of the few character actresses to become so, and, though jetlagged, she generously invited me to her apartment for an hour and a half’s chat. She has just woken up from a nap and is mortified that she can’t offer me even a cup of tea. It doesn’t matter. It’s not tea I came for.

Our conversation darts backwards and forwards and covers many subjects. She is super-smart, as you would expect from someone who has a degree in literature (Dickens was her specialised author) and might well have become an academic.

“I went ‘up’ to Cambridge with absolutely no idea of what I was going to do with the degree when I got it. That’s how I’ve always been. I don’t have any grand agenda, and I didn’t then. I deal with what is here, now, without looking beyond it,” she tells me.

She might have seemed just a nerdy well-spoken college girl, most of whom have wealthy parents, but that was far from the truth. Her parents were distinctly middle class; her father a soft-spoken Glaswegian G.P. (she breaks into a few words in his accent) – her mother was a businesswoman, and an absolute powerhouse.

“I think the term is ‘larger than life’,” she tells me, seemingly unaware that the label has often been used for her. “She had such strong ideas, such vision, that I rarely argued with her. We were incredibly close and it simply didn’t occur to me as a child to rebel. My thinking was her thinking. She was an amazing presence in my life.”

Sadly her mother suffered a stroke from which she never recovered, within days of Miriam coming “out” to her. It’s taken years for her to rationalise the connection and deal with the guilt.

It was her mother that suggested elocution lessons while she was still in primary school.

“Thinking about it now, everyone in Oxford, where I grew up, already spoke very gentrified English.” Nevertheless the lessons released ‘The Voice’ for which she is famous – pure, mellifluous, every word enunciated.

“I think my voice is different because it has authority, yet is not threatening, and it can be vulnerable without losing its strength. I’ve certainly been lucky, and it’s served me well…or perhaps I have served it.”

The voice is, beyond doubt, a thing of beauty, though Miriam, in a pragmatic way, sees nothing physically beautiful about herself.

“I’m a fat, old Jewish woman, those are physical facts. I am not bitter about it – bitterness is the great enemy of creation. If one spends time looking back, bitterly reviewing the parts you didn’t get, the looks you didn’t get, the people who didn’t love you, you cannot create with what you have now. It’s hard to delineate the creative process, you don’t need to add any extra obstacles.”

Miriam knew she wasn’t going to get to play the pretty ingénue, but she quickly discovered that those are not the best roles anyway.

Cambridge provided an outlet for all the stored up creativity in the young Margolyes. By the end of her three years as a student, Miriam had appeared in more than 20 productions.

“I learned my craft just being onstage, and I’m sure much of it was trial and error, but slowly I grew.”

It was both the best of times and the worst of times – the worst coming from her experiences with The Cambridge Footlights revue where she was less than welcomed by the likes of John Cleese and Bill Oddie. She doesn’t give details but concedes she was deeply hurt, and even though she has let go of it as being personal, part of that memory still survives.

“I mourn the sadness that my young self had to endure,” she tells me, and a knot forms in my throat.

We talk about that complete lack of any formal training, though Miriam fondly recalls her days in Rep (Repertory Theatre) as being the best possible training. Acting is, after all, she says, “About truth and passion. You can be a good actor with technique (we don’t want to see it, but it’s nice to know it’s there) but you can never be a GREAT actor without passion. Sometimes I think that some actors are too cloistered and theatre companies that are heavily subsidised are perhaps too cushioned. There’s a danger they may not burn with the same intensity. I don’t get much chance when I’m here to see other theatre, but I just adore what I’ve seen of Red Stitch. You can feel the intensity.”

Miriam’s career escalated quickly to include films both in Britain and America, including the role of Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter franchise and television roles such as Aunt Prudence in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (“she’s a delicious old cow,” says Miriam). She’s been nominated for Olivier awards on stage, and has even played Madame Morrible in the West End and on Broadway opposite Idina Menzel. She was the voice of Fly, the sheepdog, in the movie Babe – the long and illustrious list of credits spans nearly fifty years.

“I have done jobs just for the money, parts I knew were crap…but I always tried to find some truth. You have to look for whatever it is in the character that will make it live for you.”

Oddly, Miriam’s first television appearance was as a panel member for Newnham College on the popular quiz show University Challenge in 1963. She was 22 years old and swore out loud when getting a question wrong. The epithet had to be bleeped out, but possibly that’s where the reputation for swearing comes from. It was certainly at Newnham that she first conceived the idea of Dickens’ Women – though it was more than 20 years later that it became something more.

“I told my friend Sonia Fraser about my fascination with the idea and she said ‘Well, we must do it.’ So we took it to Frank Dunlop (director) who had taken over at the Edinburgh Festival and I was astounded when he said yes, and commissioned it. Then we had to get it written; it really was no more than an idea. So we hired a very well known writer and when we got the script it was DIRE, just AWFUL. And Sonia said to me, ‘we’re going to have to do this ourselves’. And we did. We opened the show in a medical lecture hall in Edinburgh and it just…well, it worked.”

It was during the Australian tour of the production that Miriam worked with pianist John Martin. Whilst doing the play I’ll Eat You Last for MTC last year (in which she was simply brilliant) she and John caught up to reminisce about the fun they had together on stage and how marvellous it would be to do it all again.

“John said that he was willing if I was, and I certainly was.”

They approached producer Andrew McKinnon and, with the same serendipity she experienced in Edinburgh, he said yes. The result is The Importance of Being Miriam (she worries that some will find the title pretentious. It wasn’t her idea, but “An Evening With…was considered too clichéd). The show plays all over Australia throughout March and April.

“I worry about it because I’m not sure I am important. I’m still working out what I am but I am comfortable with that person. I’m certainly not a star … I’m not simply a gay woman… though I am lucky to be loved. I’m not a political activist, I’m a concerned human being. I’m just Miriam…I’m ME.”

And that’s all that anyone can ask for.

More details - beingmiriam.com.au

Images (from top): The Importance of Being Miriam (photo by Gavin D Andrew), Footlights, Blood Wedding, Endgame & I'll Eat You Last (photo by Jeff Busby).

Originally published in the March / April 2015 edition of Stage Whispers.