Miriam Margolyes interview: ‘John Cleese is irrelevant now – his personality has shrivelled’
“I’m not a comedian,” says Miriam Margolyes, mildly aff-ronted, when I bring up the c-word in her study in Clapham, south-west London. We’re surr-oun-ded by piles of books, scripts, artworks, photographs and awards (including the Bafta she won in 1994 for Best Supporting Actress in The Age of Innocence), and at the centre of it all, this provocative, colourful, irrepressibly funny octogen-arian. She’s already made one of the most unrepeatable remarks I’ve ever heard – involving herself, a different c-word and my bald head – and suggested to the make-up artist, “You’re quite common, aren’t you?”
This is the outrageous, unshockable woman one would expect to meet from the pages of her 2021 autobiography, This Much Is True, in which Margolyes writes about her life and career – including her time in the 1962 Cambridge Footlights Revue alongside John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Bill Oddie, when she was “sent to Coventry” by the boys’ club: “I was funny and they didn’t like it… they were total s---s,” she wrote. Monty Python, she noted, “didn’t feature funny women, only the occasional dolly bird”.
I wonder if Margolyes, with her instinctive comic timing, might have taken a different path had she come of age 20 years later, when French and Saunders were rolling back the possibilities for female comedians, but she has no doubts. “I love making people laugh. I’ve done that all my life,” she says, “but I don’t know how to describe myself other than as an actress.”
And what does she make of Cleese now, and his new stage adaptation of Fawlty Towers that’s running in the West End? “I hope it does well,” she says. “I think Fawlty Towers was John at his absolute best as a creator… but I just find him irrelevant now. This is prob-ably his attempt to retrieve what he had, and when he had it, he was a genius – but it’s a pity that his personality has shrivelled.”
Cleese, who returned to TV last year to host a talk show on GB News, is something of a bête noire for progressives generally, although he responds crossly to the suggestion that he is “Right-wing”. Margolyes has no such -anxiety. She leans to the Left, I suggest. “Heavily,” she says. “I just don’t see how there is any other way of looking at life.”
As an actress, of course, she has achieved success on screen and stage. She was nominated for an Olivier for her one-woman play Dickens’ Women in 1992 and, at 83, is taking a new show about the author to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. “When you know that you haven’t got long to live – and I’m probably going to die within the next five or six years, if not before,” she tells me, “I’m loath to leave behind performing. It’s such a joy.” She finds the physical constraints of old age “limiting and depressing”, she adds. “I want to be able to play parts that aren’t just sitting in wheelchairs, but I’m not strong enough.” She has spinal stenosis, which causes numbness and pain.
On her way to becoming what she jokingly refers to as a “national trinket”, Margolyes has given us many enduring characters, from the Nurse in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet to the Spanish Infanta in Blackadder and Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. She and J K Rowling have never met, she says, but she loves the idea that a writer can become one of the richest people in the country. Does she have thoughts about Rowling’s hotly discussed views on trans women? “I’m not going to make big statements about trans people,” she says.
“But what I do believe is that, in sport, people who are born with a male frame have an advantage. And that has to be dealt with, either with a separate category or handicap loading or something like that. It’s nonsense to say that somebody who’s become a woman, who’s -chosen to turn from being born one sex into another, doesn’t have characteristics which remain – they obviously do. So I feel for swimmers and runners and gymnasts who have to compete against people who are born stronger. But otherwise, you know, why are people so nasty? There are so few trans people. And I just think people should be allowed to get on and be who they are, or be who they want to be, without all this nastiness.”
As for the child stars of the Harry Potter films, who have voiced views that oppose Rowling’s but faced criticism because of her role in their careers, she says, “I think that’s unrealistic. Now they’re grown up and they have opinions. So why can’t they give their opinions? That’s fair to me. They shouldn’t be trammelled because they once were in a film that somebody wrote.”
We’re chatting on the day that Nigel Farage announces he is standing for Reform UK in a seat that he will go on to win. “I think he’s dangerous,” Margolyes says, “because he has some kind of power to influence people. And I think he influences them in a bad way. Also, I think he’s sly. He has acknowledged that [two of] his children are [half-] German, that they have European passports, [but] his stance on Europe is disgraceful; and his friendship with Trump.” Farage, she concludes, is “an absolutely contempt-ible human being.”
Politics is never far from the surface in a conversation with Margolyes, who these days spends less time in the UK than in Italy and Australia, where her partner, the historian Heather Sutherland, grew up. Margolyes was one of 151 “Jewish artists, filmmakers, writers, and creative professionals” who signed an open letter in April supporting the director Jonathan Glazer’s controversial speech at the 2024 Oscars ceremony suggesting that the Holocaust was being “hijacked by an occupation”. “All the time, I’m thinking in Gaza, they’ve been told to move and move and move. And they’re being bombed, and nobody’s doing anything,” she says. Margolyes compares the situation to the Second World War, when “people knew about the camps” but did nothing. “So the abused have become the abusers, which often happens in families. But it is a source of agony.”
She has visited both Israel and Gaza; she once worked on a kibbutz, but has long been a critic of the Israeli government. “I think Netanyahu should be in jail,” she says. “I think he is a) a war criminal, and b) just a criminal – he’s a common corrupt politician joining the many -others who are corrupt.”
Margolyes has faced stern criti-cism within the Jewish -community for her stance. “I am wounded that peo-ple call me a betrayer of my people,” she says. “And I’m wounded by the friends I’ve lost.” Yet, she insists, “There is anti-Semitism. I don’t think people like Jews, they never have, and what is -happening in Israel gives people a -wonderful opportunity to be anti-Semitic and to speak against Jews. And that is why I always wish to say I’m -Jewish. And I am absolutely pro-Palestinian.”
Margolyes’s comments regularly cause a stir, but it annoys her when the press make headlines out of throwaway remarks, such as how she thought Lily Allen “wasn’t friendly” towards her when they were both guests on the BBC’s The Graham Norton Show. “I say what I think,” she says, exasperatedly, “and I didn’t like her. I don’t think she liked me.”
She would much rather talk about Dickens, whom she describes as “the first man that I really thought was fascinating”. (Men usually get short shrift from Mar-golyes – “Poor blokes,” she says, “they haven’t been allowed to develop their souls and their emotions.”) The great 19th-century novelist, she stresses, was “a Georgian, he wasn’t a Victorian, so he was able to allow his passions and his emotions free rein. He wrote about emotion and he also felt it, and he felt hatred and disappointment and envy.” She has also suggested that his small, slight female characters are decidedly “iffy”, an inference she doesn’t press further today. “I think he liked slender women. He wouldn’t like me. I will say that.”
She’s looking forward to being back on stage with him, though, and she has strong views about some hot topics in theatreland, such as trigger warnings. “Theatres have stupidly said [to audiences before curtain up]: ‘There could be awkward subjects discussed’. Well, for f---’s sake, what else is the theatre supposed to do but to alarm, to probe, to scare? If you can’t take it, then you must leave. But I don’t think you should be warned. You’re not warned in life. Art is not a cushion. You might see someone hurt, you might see somebody fall in love, you might see somebody raped. Well, if you can’t take that, don’t go to the theatre.”
And there is only one solution to the proliferation of mobile-phone use among audience members, she insists, “I mean, I am addicted to my telephone. But if I go into a public place or if I’m working, I turn it off. It’s rude not to turn off your phone. If you go to the theatre, I think you have to make a choice. And it’s the same with children. I don’t think you should bring children to the theatre unless they can shut up. If they can behave, they’re welcome; if not, they’ll have to go.”
Take a topic and Margolyes will have a pithy view of it – from the direly prophetic (“the 1930s are galloping towards us”) to the peevish (“there is no kindness left in the British Isles”). She can be funny but rarely, one might humbly suggest, is she joking.
Margolyes & Dickens: The Best Bits is at the Exchange, Edinburgh (pleasance.co.uk) from Aug 7-15
