Miriam Margolyes: 'I always feel like my heart lifts when I come to Ireland'

Miriam Margolyes is back with a new tell-all memoir, as funny and outrageous as we’ve come to expect. Suzanne Harrington meets the irrepressible star ahead of a touch down in Dublin

Sun, 17 Sep, 2023 - 18:00

Suzanne Harrington

Shakespeare, Dickens, Black Adder, Harry Potter, Call The Midwife, Terry Wogan, Graham Norton, Martin Scorsese, Roald Dahl, Sister George, Babe, Cambridge Footlights, the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny, dozens of theatre productions, documentaries, audio books, Cameo messages, fan conventions, audio tapes for sex shops when still an unknown, naked but for two iced buns on the cover of July’s Vogue and now a second book.

Could Miriam Margolyes be the busiest Jewish lesbian in the history of the world?

“I have never been older or busier,” she confirms.

Now 82, and filming another documentary in Australia — she has dual UK/Australian citizenship, on account of her partner being from Oz — she has just published a follow-up to her first memoir, This Much Is True, with Oh Miriam!, another collection of recollections, observations, and stories from her insanely interesting life and career, full of profanity and profundity.

She’s doing a show in Dublin this October around the book. The title comes from all the people who have ever exclaimed her name in every tone from horror to hilarity; it’s snortingly funny, her unfiltered personality leaping off the page — honesty, kindness, generosity, sanity, erudition, outspokenness, all consistently sweary AF. She likes to break the ice in new conversations not by asking “and what do you do” but rather, “when did you have your first fuck?”

Miriam Margolyes during the filming of the Graham Norton Show at BBC's London Studios. Pic: Ian West/PA Wire

She says “there’s a thrill in getting a totally unrehearsed reaction” from people. She believes that her “rudery”, as she calls it, serves to relax those around her “because they unite in being appalled”.

She is genuinely interested in people, and what makes them tick — so she subverts the usual getting-to-know-you questions with a list of her own which you might try at your next dull dinner party to see what happens.

Her favourite insult is 'c***-face', which she shouts at bad drivers. She says she encounters a lot of bad drivers. Comparing the clitoris with the penis, she asks, “Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semi-automatic?”

She has lived a long, full, magnificent life, as yet undeterred by age or frailty, and is perfectly frank about why she wrote her second book: “The same reason as I wrote the first one — I did it for the money. But I’m glad you like it.”

Speed read it at your peril — it’s full of buried nuggets. Like the time as a student in Cambridge, queuing all night to get theatre tickets to see Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton perform. They walked past the queue and invited her for drinks.

“I’m not interested in celebrities unless they’re fabulously interesting people,” she says. “I do think Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were fabulously interesting. I was only with them for an hour, but the memory has stayed with me. They were outsize.”

As is Miriam herself, despite being four foot something. She has met everyone, worked with everyone, has opinions on everyone, mostly, but not always, good. Mike Jagger is a “smug c***” and the Monty Pythons, with whom she worked in Cambridge at the start of her career, were “total shits”.

She loathes Benjamin Netanyahu, and thinks he should be in jail, and hates the Tories even more.

Mostly however, she loves people — and people love her.

Especially Graham Norton, for whom she is a favoured guest on his show. “I really respect him,” she tells me via Zoom from somewhere remote in the Australian outback.

“His books are fabulous too.” She also loved Terry Wogan, whom she describes as “God’s first attempt at fashioning Graham Norton.” Her favourite places are Italy, where she has a house, and Ireland.

“Ireland is just beautiful,” she says. “And Irish people love the word. The writers of Ireland are probably the greatest writers of English, apart from Mr Dickens.

“I always feel like my heart lifts when I come to Ireland.”

Last year she made a documentary road trip with Senator Lynn Ruane, about the Abbey Theatre founder Lady Gregory; Senator Ruane called her Mimzo. They got along famously.

Actress Miriam Margolyes and Senator Lynn Ruane, during filming for Lady Gregory: Ireland’s First Social Influencer

Born in Oxford in 1941, Miriam was the only child of a doctor and a business woman, both of Eastern Europe heritage. Her parents, long dead, remain a constant presence.

“My parents were a central factor in my life” she says. “It was a full two-way relationship of love and drama and commitment and kindness. They’re still with me. My mother was an extraordinary woman — she was an artist, a businesswoman, a singer, a cook. She was powerful, wilful, difficult, and I absolutely adored her. I was lucky — some people have ghastly parents. I was blessed.”

Yet, she says she was a disappointment to them.

“I didn’t give them what they would have loved — grandchildren, or me being the Jewish mother they would have wanted. I’m conscious of that. So a lot of my life is spent trying to expiate the wrong that I did them by being gay and greedy.”

Her parents were not open-minded about her gayness, plus she says, her “drug of choice is cheesecake”. (When I tell her my partner is Jewish, she immediately says, “Never mind the religion, get the recipes!”)

“I try to live my life as they [her parents] would have approved — not all of it of course — but I do the best I can,” she says. “I live as a decent person.”

She tries to do lots of mitzvahs — Jewish for random acts of kindness. She imitates her late father’s Scottish accent (she’s brilliant at accents, and can also do a perfect Irish one): “Never cheat your taxes. Account for every penny.”

She pays her taxes in full, always has done. “Not many people can say that,” she says. Miriam is an interesting mix. An atheist who observes Yom Kippur and doesn’t eat pork or shellfish; a socialist who loves Charles and Camilla; a Jew who is pro-Palestinian. She refuses to be boxed in.

She has been with her beloved partner, Heather, an academic, since 1968, yet they live in different countries. Heather has not read her last book, and probably won’t read this one either.

“I hope that I am [an interesting mix], rather than just an inconsistent mess,” Miriam says, laughing. “I always try to see the other side. I want to make friends with the enemy. I can’t just write something off — you have to know more. People are people, everybody’s hurting, everybody’s frightened, everybody’s insecure and unfulfilled, and we all need comfort and trust. Life is getting harder.”

Miriam Margolyes with A Christmas Carol book by Charles Dickens at Gunnersbury Park Museum.

Of Charles and Camilla, she describes how she “got to know him a little bit, he’s not one of my intimate friends, but I think he’s a good man, a kind, thoughtful, worried man. He has a horrible job — he has no freedom. He’s a decent soul. I know goodness when I see it. And Camilla is sensationally funny, and down to earth, and honest. As a socialist, I look at the humanity in people.”

As a grammarian — she writes how the gerund takes the genitive, because it matters to her, along with the correct use of the apostrophe — she says the only thing about [being] transgender which confused her was the pronouns. “Because I love grammar so much, so to call a singular a plural somehow irked me,” she says. “And then someone explained to me that it mattered, and I thought, if you can make someone happy by calling them ‘they’, then do it! It’s not hard.

“We do have to stand up and be courageous. It’s easier for me. I’m not afraid to speak up and I have a fierce sense of morality. And I think the people who run us, the politicians, and the people who inform us, the newspaper owners — they are all liars.”

She does not believe in turning the other cheek either. “I’m not a saint,” she says. “If someone is behaving badly, fucking well tell them so. Call them out. Shame them. I’m not afraid to do that.”

But mostly, Miriam Margolyes lives a charmed, if extremely busy, life. And she knows it. “I’m grateful that I’ve been given the chance to use the gifts I have, principally a flexible and pleasant voice,” she says. “I’m just a lucky old lady. I can’t believe it sometimes.”

Oh Miriam!: Stories from an Extraordinary Life by Miriam Margolges is published in Trade Paperback by John Murray
Miriam Margolyes is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on October 30.

Miriam’s Conversational Openers

1. When did you have your first fuck?

2. How long do you want to live?

3. Your biggest mistake?

4. Your greatest triumph?

5. What enrages you about modern life?

6. The greatest sin?

7. Is religion useful?

8. Should inequality of income be abolished?

9. Create an alternative Ten Commandments.

10. Is space travel a waste of space?

11. Who should define madness?