I wanted to do Shakespeare, be at the National, admired as an actress. “I think I’m underused, undervalued and slightly despised. “I’m not happy with what I’ve given to the world,” she told Kirsty Young. Margolyes was funny and phlegmatic on Desert Island Discs, but there was something profoundly sad about it, too.
She has a fabulous gift for accents, voicing everything from animated movies (the border collie Fly in Babe) to lubricious commercials (Manikin cigars in the 1970s) and soft porn (Sexy Sonia: Leaves from my Schoolgirl Notebook). There were also legendary cameos (Lady Whiteadder and Infanta Maria Escalosa in Blackadder), appearances in the Harry Potter films as Professor Sprout and moments of true glory (a best supporting actress Bafta for Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in 1994). Back then, Margolyes was a successful character actor and a regular in costume dramas such as Vanity Fair and Little Dorrit. There is one other time I remember Margolyes being moderate with her expletives – on Desert Island Discs in 2008. I don’t want to embarrass and upset people.
#BITCH I DONT FUCK WITH YOU SERIES#
The only time I’ve been moderate with expressing myself is when I was in America because my adorable Jewish agent said, ‘Miriam, you’re in America now, you can’t talk about being gay and all that stuff, just button up and don’t wear shorts.’” She did button up, hid the true Margolyes, and she failed – her 1992 TV series Frannie’s Turn was cancelled after five episodes. If I want to say something, I’m going to say it.” At 72 or 62, would she have given one? “Oh no.
“What can I do? I have to say what I believe to be the truth,” she says. “Hehehe! Good, because that’s part of who I am.” And now, she says, is hardly the time to start holding back, whether it’s on Israel and Palestine, the Tories and Labour, Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger, or circumcision and smegma – just a few of the topics we touch on over the next couple of hours. With chapter titles such as The Joy of Bottoms, Adventures in Heavy Petting and Always Be a Cunt, I tell her fans of mucky Miriam are unlikely to feel short-changed. I don’t just want to be a foul-mouthed old biddy. But I think the things I say in it are again absolutely true, and perhaps more serious. “I don’t think it’s as rude as my first book, therefore I suspect it won’t do as well. She’s worried that Oh Miriam! is a little strait-laced. “‘Can I come back next week and bring my friends?’ he asked as he left.” What makes her so funny is that she tells these stories in a cut-glass, upper-class RP – every magnificently enunciated syllable sharp as a stab. And I said, ‘Would you like to follow me to my college and I’ll suck you off?’” Sure enough, he followed. She’s also famously filthy – perhaps most memorably telling the story, on Graham Norton’s show in 2011, of how, when riding her bike as a student in Cambridge, she stopped at the traffic lights by an open car with an American soldier inside. And the older she gets, the straighter she tells it. But I thought I cannot turn down such a huge amount of money because I’m going to need it for carers. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” An advance of £250,000, seeing as you’re asking. Why did she feel the need to write it? “I have to say the reason I did it is exactly the same reason I did the first one. Whereas This Much Is True was a (relatively) conventional autobiography, Oh Miriam! is more of a self-help guide: Margolyes’s manifesto for a fulfilled life. Two years on, the actor, documentarian and raconteur extraordinaire has written another – of sorts. It took Miriam Margolyes 80 years to write her memoir.
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