'I love being gay, though I don't do it very much now': Out, proud and extremely loud, actress MIRIAM MARGOLYES, 82, is renowned for telling it as she sees it. She talks love and death... as well as laying off JK Rowling
Miriam Margolyes wants me to know she’s just sold out the London Palladium. And the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. And got ‘standing ovations at every single theatre’ on her nationwide book tour to promote Oh Miriam!, a second volume of scandalous, scatological autobiography detailing her life as an actress – a self-described short, fat, flatulent Jewish lesbian, a woman who will say anything to anyone, usually in words of four letters.
Now 82, Margolyes has been a familiar face and voice for decades, show-stealing in the Harry Potter movies and Blackadder, voicing Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, winning a Bafta for her role in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. But the 2016 reality show The Real Marigold Hotel, in which a group of elderly celebrities toured India, showed us the true Miriam – out, proud, loud and unfiltered.
It led to a new kind of fame as a TV documentarian with the gift of empathy, and becoming a reliably outrageous fixture on This Morning and The Graham Norton Show, bound to talk about sex or other bodily functions.
Her reputation was cemented when she swore about Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (‘f*ck you, you bastard’) on Radio 4’s Today programme. Margolyes would prefer to be known primarily as a serious actress and a theatrical interpreter of Charles Dickens – ‘I wish I was regarded with awe rather than affection’ – but is clearly enjoying her late-onset celebrity. Her recent British Vogue cover hangs on the wall between us. ‘I’m an egotist,’ she says happily.
When publishers courted her to pen her first autobiography, This Much is True, she readily agreed – although writing it was ‘agony, like an obituary you write yourself’. Why did she do it, then? ‘Money,’ she says bluntly. The advance was £250,000 and when the book sold well she was offered the same for a follow-up. Given we meet in the basement flat of her grand house near London’s Clapham Common, and that she also owns properties in Italy and Australia, what will she do with the extra cash?
‘Well, I’ll pay a lot of tax, which I do willingly as my father instructed me to,’ she says, ‘and I’ll save the rest for carers, which I’ll need.’ Margolyes has spinal stenosis, has had a knee replaced and a heart valve transplant.
She admits she is lazy and greedy which makes her poor health worse, and says, ‘I haven’t quite processed being 82.’ Her partner of 54 years Heather Sutherland, an academic based in Amsterdam, also has health problems. And although Margolyes exudes a child-like glee and curiosity, she is pessimistic about her future and the world’s.
The only child of beloved Jewish parents, a Glaswegian doctor and a Liverpudlian landlady with roots in Poland and Belarus, she is ‘a child of a war, conceived in an air raid, as my mother told me. And I really do think we could be on the brink of a war now that could engulf everything. I feel old, frightened, occasionally in despair.’ She beams suddenly, ‘But the minute I step on the stage, I feel immensely powerful.’
In the book she rails against right-wing governments here and abroad. She describes Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as evil (partly, in Johnson’s case, because Brexit has prevented her and Sutherland living in their Italian house for more than 90 days of the year). ‘I don’t think the Tory party was always corrupt and incompetent. But it is now,’ she tells me. ‘And it’s very sad for people who are lifelong Tories. I don’t hate those people. I feel pity for them, actually. Where do they go? What do they do with their misplaced enthusiasms?’
Of US Republicans she says, ‘How can any grown-up human being, who can read and write, honestly think that Trump won the last election?’ Margolyes took out Australian citizenship in 2013 but calls Australia ‘the most racist country in the world’, its recent decision to deny Aboriginals a voice in parliament a ‘stinker’ that was engineered by ‘wicked people’.
The only subject she steers clear of is the current conflict in Gaza although, as a secular Jew, she has been a vocal critic of Israel in general and Benjamin Netanyahu in particular in the past. ‘I’ve learnt that it’s best to be quiet about it,’ she says. ‘To show my pain and my sadness for all the horrible deaths and betrayals, but otherwise say nothing.’
Margolyes fell out with her friend Maureen Lipman, who is pro-Israel, even before the current conflict. ‘To lose a friend is sad. Losing a child, losing a family member, losing a human being, a life, that’s very much more important. So, I’m not going to fan the flames.’
The book and its 2021 predecessor also take unusually honest pot shots at colleagues she regards as unpleasant: Steve Martin was ‘horrid’ making Little Shop of Horrors, several future members of the Pythons and the Goodies were rude and patronising to her when they were in Cambridge Footlights together.
Steve Buscemi and Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, are praised for their courtesy and kindness – though she won’t go to see Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon ‘because I can’t go four hours without going to the loo’. She is still friends with contemporaries from her bluestocking education at Oxford High School for girls and has 11,000 contacts in her phone.
If there is one lesson she wants us to take from the book, it’s that friendliness, openness and kindness are the cardinal virtues. She wishes people were kinder to J K Rowling, who’s been pilloried for her views on gender, but also kinder to the trans community.
‘Some of us have vaginas and some of us have penises and some be on the way there, and some be on the way back. Just enjoy it all and find what you want,’ she says. ‘I can’t forget the woman I met in Australia, Francine, who was 79 and had just had the chop and she was crying with happiness at having become who she wanted to be. How can you not glory in that?’
She also thinks public reaction to Phillip Schofield’s affair with a younger colleague was ‘too quick, too venomous, too damaging. I think cancel culture is rubbish. People will probably want to cancel me, but they haven’t so far.’ What could she say that would get her cancelled? ‘F*ck off!’ she says. ‘Or the fat thing.’ In a world of body positivity, Margolyes insists on referring to herself and anyone similarly sized as ‘fat’.
She thinks gay men still face prejudice in showbusiness but regards her own lesbianism as a sort of superpower that enabled her creativity and stopped her being ‘mired in children and stuff’.
‘I love being gay,’ she says, ‘though I don’t do it much now.’ She came out in her late 20s, but in both books writes about performing oral sex with a lot of men beforehand. ‘That was just part of my developing sexuality,’ she beams, ‘and I was really good at it! And when you know you’re really good at something you tend to flaunt it. At least, you do if you are Jewish.’
She and Sutherland, who avoids publicity, met in the late 60s and have been together ever since, bar one separation caused by an infidelity of which Margolyes is ashamed. In old age they may finally live together though not, as they’d hoped, in Italy. ‘Two lesbians together for 54 years is not to be sniffed at,’ she says. ‘I found the perfect person. She is better than I am in every way – as a human being, as a lesbian, as a writer, as a thinker.’
Margolyes is prouder of Sutherland’s latest historical tome, about trade in Southeast Asia, 1600-1906, than of her own two books. But she is already planning a third. ‘I’d like to write a children’s book. Even though,’ she adds confidingly, ‘I don’t really like children. I want to call it Queen of Farts…’
Oh Miriam! Stories from an Extraordinary Life is published by John Murray Press, £25. To order a copy for £21.25 until 10 December, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
