This Much is True by Miriam Margolyes review: provocative, potty-mouthed and exhilarating
Raucous, pushy, attention-seeking, potty-mouthed – “My farts are legendary amongst my friends” – Miriam Margolyes is not relaxing company. She is startling, thought-provoking, exhilarating and fun. Actors traditionally describe their colleagues in saccharine terms. Not so Miriam. She finds “the Footlights boys” – John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Graham Chapman – “total s---s”; Glenda Jackson “has little patience and no humility” and Arnold Schwarzenegger is “a pig of a man… awfully gropey with women”.
She was born in 1941, an only child, doted on by her parents. Her father was a GP, first in east London then, after the Blitz, in Oxford (it was widely believed at the time that Hitler would never bomb Oxford). He was a good and conscientious doctor but, according to Margolyes, a weak man who always deferred to her mother, a tornado of energy, an indefatigable social climber and entrepreneur. When they moved to Oxford, Margolyes’s mother started letting spare rooms to students and ended up owning seven houses, and also building a new one for the family. Margolyes was sent to the best girls’ school, Oxford High, which she loved – she can still name every girl in her school photos and keeps in touch with many of them.
Margolyes was pretty enterprising herself. While still at school, she saw Augustus John on television and wrote to him volunteering to be his model. His wife Dorelia rang her mother and said did she realise it would be nude, and Mrs Margolyes (incredibly) said fine. So she went to Fordingbridge, Augustus John and Dorelia gave her tea, then she went to John’s studio where he sketched her climbing up and down a ladder, naked. Unfortunately, his sketches didn’t survive.
Margolyes was always naughty at school and “a little bit thick” but she still won an exhibition scholarship to Newnham, Cambridge. She claims this was due to some string-pulling by her mother. Mrs Margolyes noticed that her husband had a patient called Sir Isaiah Berlin who was some sort of university big shot and she insisted that he invite Sir Isaiah to dinner. Dr Margolyes protested that this was most improper, but of course Mrs Margolyes got her way, and they had a jolly dinner and Sir Isaiah gladly signed Miriam’s sponsorship papers.
She read English at Cambridge (she was a devoted Leavisite) and achieved a 2:2 but “Acting became the focus of my Cambridge world... Oh, and sucking people off.” As a good Jewish girl, she obeyed her parents’ injunction not to have sex before marriage, but she was not averse to pleasing men by other means. “Oral skill enhances your popularity,” she opines, “and, if I’m honest, I think I enjoyed the power it lent me.”
She had several boyfriends at Cambridge and afterwards in London but in the summer of 1966 she was picked up by a girl on the Tube and finally realised that she was a lesbian. Soon afterwards she met an Australian academic based in Amsterdam called Heather (she doesn’t give her surname, though Wikipedia does) and knew at once she was the One. They have been together for 53 years and are in a civil partnership. They don’t live together – Heather lives in Amsterdam – but phone each other every day, and spend holidays in their homes in Tuscany and Australia. Margolyes declares that “I wouldn’t want to be straight for the world.”
Her agent warned her not to mention her lesbianism in interviews because it would hamper her career, but nothing would stop her telling her mother. It was a disaster. Her mother told her father and they were both so appalled they made Margolyes swear on the Torah that she would never have relations with a woman again. She swore, though knew she would not obey. A few days later her mother suffered a minor stroke, and then three months later a devastating one that left her speechless and partly paralysed for seven years until she died. Margolyes still blames herself.
Despite her lack of training, she quickly became well-established as an actress. She joined the BBC radio repertory company straight from Cambridge and also started doing voiceovers for commercials – her first was for Ann Summers’s sex shop, in which she played Sexy Sonia and had to simulate orgasm. By the mid-1980s she was the highest-paid female voiceover artist in the country. She also did radio, theatre, films (she won a Bafta for her role in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence) and has recently made several television documentaries. But the great irony of her career, she says, is that despite all her other work she will always be best remembered as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. She never read the books, was not impressed by the scripts and slept through the premieres, but she is recognised by Harry Potter fans all over the world.
At one point she remarks, “I’m a more serious person than people give me credit for”, and this is obviously true. One of the first things she did at Cambridge was to join a prison visitors’ club because, she says, she enjoyed talking to criminals. Her parents voted Tory but she supported Labour and at one point even joined the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and went to their summer camp – but was indignant when she found that no one was allowed to leave. Although never religious, she was proud of her Jewish heritage and worked on a kibbutz before Cambridge. She has never tasted bacon and thinks about the Holocaust every day.
She talks so freely, and listens so sympathetically, that other people often tell her things they have never told anyone else. When she was only 17, she had private Latin tutorials from a Magdalen professor called CE Stevens. After a few months he announced that he had something to tell her. She thought maybe he would profess undying love, but instead he said: “I want to be a woman.” He pulled up his trouser leg and showed her that he was wearing stockings underneath, and explained that his true name was Agatha. He wrote her letters as Agatha and they remained friends till he died. Another surprising revelation came from her psychotherapist, Margaret Branch. She told Miriam that she had killed a previous patient, Jacqueline du Pré. The cellist had asked her to help end her life when it became unbearable, and she did as she was asked.
Her psychotherapist used to tell her, “Don’t be glib, Miriam”, and I sometimes felt the same while reading This Much Is True. She hops from subject to subject like a grasshopper because she obviously has an entertainer’s fear of being boring. In fact she is never boring and her personality is so likable, she can only leave you wanting more.
This Much is True is published by John Murray at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
