Stars brave heat, fever and cobras
SOPHIA Loren is “grateful” she’s done it well, Jamie Lee Curtis says it’s “natural” and Dame Helen Mirren says she “doesn’t give a damn about it”.
But one star isn’t quite so keen to embrace ageing. For refreshingly frank Amanda Redman, there was no reason to celebrate turning the big 6-0.
“What’s to celebrate? I didn’t,” laughs the Bafta-nominated star of hit shows such as New Tricks, At Home With The Braithwaites, and The Good Karma Hospital, which returns this month.
“I just had dinner with my husband and a friend. We were in Sri Lanka because I was working on Good Karma, and that suited me fine.
“I remember realising when I was 31, ‘Oh my God, I’m not a girl any more’. And then it gets a thousand times worse.”
Amanda has been married to mobile phone designer Damian Schnabel for seven years, a man 15 years her junior.
She was previously married to Spooks actor Robert Glenister, with whom she has a 30-year-old daughter, Emily.
She’s no stranger to grief, having lost her father Ronald when she was 23, her ALTHOUGH set in southern India, The Good Karma Hospital is filmed in the 40C heat of Sri Lanka.
On top of the sweltering temperatures, the cast – including Amanda, Neil Morrissey and Phyllis Logan – also face the threat of dengue fever, spread by mosquitos. The film crew was hit by a huge outbreak this year. Neil said: “There was a lot of cases. It’s a full week of pain and horridness.”
And then there is flooding from monsoons and visits from snakes. Amanda came face to face with a cobra outside her bedroom and added: “There were loads more snakes on set this year. All the crews get brooms and sweep them away.”
brother Tim in 2012 after a battle with alcoholism, and her mother Joan in 2014 – within 24 hours of friend and Braithwaites co-star Lynda Bellingham dying.
It’s preying on her mind since turning 60 last August. “There are a ton of things that go with getting older,” she says. “You lose friends you love, family you love.”
There’s a more practical reason she doesn’t like being in her 60s – the entertainment industry seems to write you off.
She plays feisty Dr Lydia Fonseca in The Good Karma Hospital, a medic working in a rundown Indian outpost.
The hit first series pulled in more than seven million viewers a week, not least because of her character’s romance with barman Greg, played by Neil Morrissey.
She has no qualms about sex scenes, saying: “I find it refreshing. We still have sex at our age. It should be represented.”
But she thinks it’s one of the rare good roles for actresses her age in Britain.
“It’s basically just luck,” says Amanda, who wears the 50:50 badge supporting the Equal Representation For Actresses campaign. “Misogyny was rife when I started out. You’d moan about it with your friends, but you just got on with it.
“Still now, if you tot up the number of roles for women and the number of roles for men, the discrepancy is ridiculous.
“Things are changing, but not fast enough. You only have to look at British television. We are worse than the States.
“When I was in my 20s I was told by an older actress, ‘You won’t get decent jobs past the age of 40’. When I got to my 40s that wasn’t true. But from 50 onwards isn’t so great. People think you become sexless, especially as a woman.
“You have to be strong as a woman in this industry. You just keep on in there, take the knocks and get back up again.”
But it is not just gender inequality she has fought – in the wake of the #Metoo