KEY POINTS:
Miriam Margolyes, whose naughty face you may or may not recognise, is bringing her show, Dickens' Women, to New Zealand and she says if you are a bit thick this will not interest you in the slightest.
"It's not a show for stupid people," she proclaims, at the
top of her posh Oxford voice. We are at lunch in a Melbourne restaurant much loved by theatre types and everyone here knows who Margolyes is.
Just in case you don't, a very potted CV: she was Mrs Mingott in The Age of Innocence; Peg Sellers in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers; the voice of Fly, the mother sheep dog in Babe and various saucy ladies in Blackadder among many other roles.
She is what is known as a character actress. "What is a character actress, actually?" I ask her. "A great actress," she says, grinning, yes, greatly.
She was in a film called End of Days with Arnold Schwarzenegger and she got to throw him into a wall. "Yes, it was a violent sort of part. I played Satan's sister. I'm not used to doing physical stuff ... so I was quite grateful for the tuition that Arnold Schwarzenegger gave, although I didn't like him personally. He was rude and sort of grand, you know. I didn't care for it. I just thought he was a bit of a pig, really."
That, I think, is a better definition of a character actress: an actress who, during an interview, will call Arnie a pig.
She was Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, too, and that's when she began to be recognised as Miriam Margolyes and not just as somebody whose face you know you know but can't quite place.
In Dickens' Women (it opens in Auckland on November 29) she plays, well, the women in Dickens and talks about his life and the books. It is her great thing, this one-woman play, and the culmination of her relationship with Dickens which began with Oliver Twist when she was 11.
The show is, she says, "a hard sell. One woman on a stage. They're trapped!". She loves the idea of talking to trapped people for two hours. The very thought makes her eyes gleam.
If you see her about in Auckland, do go up to her. She likes that, too. She has a great knack of making you feel from the first minute as though you have known her all your life and this has to do with her ability to talk.
We are supposed to be having this lunch before the interview, an unwieldy arrangement at the best of times and an impossible one when Margolyes is involved.
Eating and scribbling in a notebook is an inelegant art but you have to attempt it because from that minute of meeting she talks: hard, fast and funny. And so much I fear she may have run out of steam by the time we actually get to an interview - which will turn out to be three hours later.
There is little danger of this. If there was nobody to talk to, she'd talk to some stranger on the street. I know this, because at one stage we are standing on the street and I'm keeping my eye out for the photographer and so not giving her my full attention.
"I love your outfit," she booms at some hapless woman walking past. The woman gives her the sort of look you might give to a slightly bonkers but harmless street person and scurries on by, as you might well do if you were accosted by Margolyes. She is, I think, a celebrity of sorts, one who does not dress up for lunch and is a bit bread-crumby down the front.
At the table, someone said, "Shall we order a salad to share?" and she shouted, "I want my own salad. I'm not sharing." She was just playing up. She did give me some caramelised walnuts from the bowl. I don't think she liked them much but it may have been that she thought I was looking longingly at them. Really I was mesmerised watching her eating her salad with gusto, with her hands.
She is not at all like a celebrity and she is not much interested in the idea of celebrity, although she adores being recognised.
She is well-enough known to attract - once we've retired to a hotel lobby for something approximating a proper interview - the attention of a woman and her daughter. She spots the woman, an English teacher from Perth, peering and summons her over.
"Aah, madam! I would like you to tell me, since I'm having an interview and being asked questions: Why are you a fan of mine?"
Then she says: "Have you got a mobile with a camera?" The fan says, "I've got a camera." "Well, get your camera and we'll make a picture and then we've got proof that we've met. Now, I'm sure Michele won't mind taking your photograph."
Of course I don't mind; who would? It does cross my mind to say, "actually, I would", just to see what she'd say. This thought was swiftly dismissed because, who would dare? She is five foot tall - "if I was an inch shorter I'd be a dwarf and I played a dwarf. I bent down, but I didn't need to" - and still manages to be quite imperious.
This is the word you use when you mean a grand character actress is bloody bossy. It's partly that voice, which sounds bossy and posh. She says she is not posh at all but everyone who grew up in Oxford talks like her. She can also, I hazard, get a bit cross.
"Yes, testy. I've got quite a bad temper but it disperses itself fairly quickly. Well, I was furious today. I wanted to go for a swim and a man was putting chemicals in the pool and it probably means I won't be able to have a swim today because I must have a nap and there isn't time for a swim and a nap. So I said, 'You've ****** up my day.' And he said, 'Well, I'm very sorry about that, madam.' I said, 'Can't you wait half an hour?' and he said, 'No, I can't' and I thought ... "
No, I can't tell you what she thought, it's far too rude, as were quite a few of the things she said and they sounded all the ruder for coming out of her posh-sounding mouth. Needless to say, I took the picture.
One of the things she's supposed to get testy about is talking about being gay (she has been with her partner Heather, an Australian academic working in Europe, for 40 years) but she wasn't at all. She thinks Ian McKellen is quite wrong to go on and on about being gay and wanting everyone gay to sing it from the rooftops. This probably has quite a bit to do with her parents' response to her telling them she was gay which "caused them enormous distress and anxiety".
She was their only child and they were a close, loving family so I wondered if they were so distressed because they thought her sexuality might cause her unhappiness.
"No. They just thought it was utterly disgusting." They got over this - "in a sense they did, because I just hid that part of my life completely". She is not at all bitter or hurt. "I just thought, you know, some people can't handle this. This is where Ian and I disagree completely because he thinks everybody should come out and everybody should tell everybody. Well, I don't agree with that and it is cruel and unnecessary to put them through it if they are your parents and they love you."
It is tiresome to go on about your sexuality, she says. "Because it's one adjective out of many, just like fat or Jewish or short."
She once said, "fatness is not a state of mind and mustn't be allowed to become so". When I read this back to her, she says, "I think it's a brilliant remark! I think people who are fat can think of themselves as fat and nothing but fat and that's a pity if so."
She means that being fat can define you. "In a severe way, yes. So of course I'm fat. I know I'm fat, but I'm so much more." Does she mind being fat? "I wish I weren't but my life isn't ruined by it. I know there's something about my shape and my face which is very appealing."
I thought she'd be very appealing, partly because I read a quote from her on her role as Professor Sprout. It was: "I'm delighted with it. I thought I was terribly good." This is not the sort of thing actors go about saying. "Well, I honestly thought I was! And I thought maybe nobody else would say it." She could put it on her posters. "Yes! An irrefutable source!"
I accused her of behaving like a spoiled celebrity during the pool man episode and she says she absolutely was, but "I would have done it whether I was a celebrity or not". Is she a celebrity? "Just a small one. Not a major celebrity. Minor."
I can't imagine any sort of celebrity, or anyone, come to think of it, demanding of their interviewer: "Do you like me? What do you think of me?"
"Honestly, you can't ask me that!" I say.
"Why can't I? I didn't know there was a rule."
She'll just have to wait and see, I say. She already knows, of course, how appealing I've found her. Because who am I to argue with an irrefutable source?
