Audiobook review: This Much Is True, by Miriam Margolyes

The term “national treasure” is often bandied around a bit loosely these days. But make no mistake: at eighty, the actress Miriam’ Margolyes is undeniably worthy of the title. As this audiobook version of her autobiography confirms, she is a funny, sensitive and intelligent woman who has led a rich, eventful and rewarding life.

What is she actually most famous for? Well, as she herself admits, when the final curtain eventually falls, many tributes will begin by mentioning that she played Professor of Herbology, Pomora Sprout in two of the Harry Potter films. It is a small role in a star-studded saga which only came to Miriam as she entered her sixties, but such is the nature of the hugely successful franchise that virtually everyone who appeared in them, be they Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith or Robbie Coltrane, is automatically more famous for that than for anything else almost regardless of how busy or successful their career may otherwise have been. As she is not a fan of the series (she has not read any of the books nor seen any of the films, including either of the ones she is in herself) and does not like science fiction or fantasy, she admits this slightly grudgingly although she remains grateful as ever for the work and for being a small part of a story that means so much to so many people and will doubtless continue to be watched for many decades to come.

She has been astonishingly prolific though working consistently on stage, radio, TV and film since she left Cambridge University nearly sixty years’ ago. The Internet Movie Database credits her with 188 roles and while many of these were bit parts or voice only roles but this doesn’t even touch on the numerous radio, theatre and voiceover performances she has delivered and she discusses many of them here. This is a long book but even she cannot mention everything. In 2006, for example, she appeared as Mrs. Midge In one episode of the French and Saunders sitcom, Jam & Jerusalem and provided voices for the characters, Mrs Ashtrakhan and Rita’s Grandma in the high-profile animated films Happy Feet and Flushed Away. But I don’t think any of these roles are mentioned in this autobiography.

She had a run of 1990s Hollywood success. She was the nurse in Baz Luhmann’s Romeo + Juliet, probably the most successful Shakespeare film adaptation ever made. Oddly, one of her abiding memories of this is how smelly the young star, Leonardo DiCaprio was. She was the voice of Fly, the female sheepdog in both the Babe films. She won a BAFTA for her role as Mrs. Mingott in Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.

We have all probably seen and heard her in far more things than we realise. She was one of the most high-profile voiceover actresses of the 1980s. She was the voice of the sexy cartoon bunny on the Cadbury’s Caramel adverts (“Take it easy with Cadbury’s Caramel”). She vividly recreates her sexually suggestive vocal performance on one 1970s tobacco advert. She dubbed most of the female voices for the cult 1970s series, Monkey. I personally remember her first from watching the brilliant Blackadder II in which she played Edmund’s puritanical aunt, Lady Whiteadder (a character who, Margolyes relates, seems to have a curious effect on a certain breed of middle-aged man). I also once saw her on stage in a production of She Stoops To Conquer alongside an unlikely combination of Sir Donald Sinden and David Essex.

But the book’s not all about her career. Margolyes talks seriously and honestly about many things. She talks about her parents, her childhood in Oxford, her university days, her being Jewish, her lesbianism, her pain and regret about her experience of ‘coming out’ to her parents and her lifelong unhappiness with her own appearance. As the name of the book suggests, she is always very honest. She acknowledges her successes (she is especially proud of her one-woman show, Dickens’ Women in which she played a huge number of roles) but admits to her failures both major (cheating on her partner of fifty years) and minor (overreacting to a parking ticket or embarrassing herself when meeting the Queen).

Readers should perhaps be warned about her numerous sexual exploits and perhaps still more surprisingly, her eagerness to discuss them. Although a lesbian, a remarkable number of her anecdotes end with the phrase “and then I sucked him off.” This will doubtless offend some readers or listeners and amuse many more.

In fact, you could actually get very drunk playing a Miriam Margoyles Drinking Game imbibing every time the phrase “sucked off” comes up. Although too her credit, you would get drunker still if you downed a shot every time she ends a description of someone she has met during her life with some variation on the phrase “we remain friends and are still in touch to this day” or “we remained friends until they died.” She values friendship highly and has made and remained friends with many people. She says she has nearly 12,000 names in her phone book and clearly relished getting in touch with many of them to help her remember many of the events detailed in this narrative.

This, of course, suggests she is pleasant and easy to work with. It also adds credibility to her testimony against those who she does dislike who she condemns vigorously. She was treated very badly by Glenda Jackson during a union dispute during a disastrous stage production in the 1970s, singles out the late Terry Scott as a truly awful person and is venomous about the blatant sexism displayed by many of the future Goodies and Monty Pythom team at Footlights during the 1960s.

Some people still don’t like her today, of course, for a variety of reasons namely because she is a woman who talks freely about her sexuality, because she is a lesbian, because she holds left-wing views, because she holds left-wing views but has criticized Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Brexit and failure to tackle anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, because she is Jewish and yet has condemned Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians, because she is Jewish full stop, because she is a woman who speaks her mind freely and honestly, because she is an old woman or simply because she is a woman.

This book is not for them. For the rest of us this is a golden opportunity to enjoy a well-told story, which is honest, moving and often very funny about a rich life lived to the full.

In praise of Blackadder the Third

This article (written by me) has been reproduced with the kind permission of Chortle. It first appeared in 2012.

‘I want to be remembered when I’m dead. I want books written about me. I want songs sung about me. And then, hundreds of years from now, I want episodes of my life to be played out weekly at half past nine by some heroic actor of the age.’ (Edmund Blackadder, Dual and Duality).

It has now been a full quarter-century since the first screening of Blackadder The Third. Under normal circumstances, the anniversary of the third series of anything would not be a cause for comment. Yet Blackadder is not a normal programme and the third series alone must rank as one of the best sitcoms of the Eighties in its own right.

Continuing the slow social decline of the Blackadder family (from 15th Century royalty in the first series to a 20th Century Army officer by the fourth), Blackadder the Third, sees Edmund (Rowan Atkinson again) reduced to the role of butler to the idiotic foppish Prince Regent played by the then still-up-and-coming twenty-something Hugh Laurie. Despite having played two different roles in Blackadder II, as the drunken innuendo-obsessed Simon ‘Farters’ Partridge (‘Sounds a bit rude doesn’t it?’) in the acclaimed series 2 episode, ‘Beer’ and the cast’s Teutonic nemesis Mad Prince Ludwig in the final episode ‘Chains’ (‘Yes! I was one of the sheep!’), Laurie was reportedly tremendously nervous about taking on the part.

It’s easy to see why. The standard set by the second series had been incredibly high and with the regular cast slimmed down (Miranda ‘Queenie’ Richardson and Tim ‘Lord Percy’ McInnerny appear in only one episode each in new roles), a lot of weight was on Laurie and Atkinson’s shoulders, even with the excellent Tony Robinson returning as Baldrick (or rather ‘Mr S. Baldrick’). The introduction of a new character, pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Miggins (Helen Atkinson-Wood), a character referred to in Blackadder II but never seen, frankly doesn’t help the series much.

Thankfully, virtually everything else does. Hugh Laurie is perfect as Prince George, a good-natured, if lazy and spoilt clot who seems incapable of recognising his butler’s insults even when he says them directly to his face. The part would in fact be the perfect preparation for perhaps Laurie’s most successful Nineties role as Bertie Wooster, opposite a less hostile servant.

This is still not the best series of Blackadder, a position which still belongs to Blackadder II. Historically, it’s a bit confused – George is repeatedly referred to as the Prince Regent, a position he didn’t hold until 1811, by which time he was corpulent and in his fifties. Yet virtually everything else in terms of costumes and references suggests this is set in the 1780s or 1790s, while Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the subject of one episode, was published before the Prince was actually born.

Despite a few good lines and an excellent cameo by the late political reporter Vincent Hanna, the opening election-themed opening episode is perhaps also bit iffy by Blackadder standards. A few episodes also rely a bit too heavily on fictional versions of real characters such as Dr. Johnson (Robbie Coltrane) and the Duke of Wellington (Stephen Fry) being homicidal maniacs. They were not.

Happily, though, most of the series is sublime, reaching a peak with the brilliant closing episodes ‘Amy and Amiability’ and ‘Dual and Duality’. Blackadder’s run-in with a squirrel-hating highway woman and a memorable scene in which Hugh Laurie’s Prince is repeatedly punched make up two of the best Blackadder episodes ever produced.

And (is a spoiler alert necessary 25 years on?) the series uniquely sees a happy ending for Blackadder himself, with the butler rather confusingly replacing George as heir to the throne. Are we to assume all subsequent royals are in fact descended from him?

It hardly matters. What’s undeniable is that this remains one of the finest British sitcoms ever produced.

Read more: Third time’s a charm… : Correspondents 2012 : Chortle : The UK Comedy Guide