No actor is convinced that they’re fabulous...

Joanna Lumley may be deemed acting royalty – but she still doubts her own work. She tells GEMMA DUNN that apart from becoming a ‘proper granny’, she longs for a performance she is happy with

ARECENT visit from her granddaughter has got Joanna Lumley thinking. The famed actress – best known for her unforgettable portrayal of Patsy Stone in BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous – is considering a change. A transition from glam to gran, if you will.

“My eldest granddaughter – she’s 15 – came down to stay at the weekend with three friends. And it was absolute heaven!” she begins.

“So I just thought, ‘I’m going to be a little bit more of a granny’, which involves eating a lot of cake and becoming quite big.

“I want to have one of those housecoat overalls,” she declares, with a laugh. “A nice big one so I get a bit Demis Roussos about it.”

While that sounds like a sight to behold, for now Joanna – whose two beloved granddaughters hail from her only son, Jamie – remains impossibly stylish.

Cooing over the London skyline when we meet, the 72-year-old runs rings around those decades younger than her: impeccably dressed, hair well-coiffed and, as always, as down-to-earth as they come.

“I rush about a bit!” she says, excusing her age-defying looks. “And I live in a tall, thin house, so I don’t go to the gym because it’s five stories high. Stairs, stairs, stairs, stairs, stairs!”

But the cake-scoffing granny era will have to wait, for Joanna has plenty in the pipeline – including another epic travelogue for ITV.

Joanna Lumley’s Silk Road Adventure will see the British India-born star (whose grandfather was a diplomat and travelled along much of the same path) trail 7,000 miles across continents, deserts, mountains and steppe.

She’s even dubbed the ancient trading route her “most adventurous and exotic journey yet”.

“It was more than on the bucket list – it was stitched into the hem of my trousers!” Joanna says of the voyage.

“It was eight countries; I’d been to two of them, to Venice and Turkey, but Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan, Azerbaijan, whoa?!

“How do you ever get there?” she questions. “Places like Uzbekistan, I just thought, ‘What can it really be like?’

“It sounds as though it’d be a few old stones on a street and a dusty camel,” she proclaims. “But it’s the most sophisticated place, with boulevards, tree-lined streets, opera houses, architecture. My preconceptions (were) dashed.”

In fact, the four-part series covers a part of the world many of us – including her – are ignorant of, she notes.

“We’re not sure where they border, we’re not quite sure where the Black Sea is and where the Caspian Sea is, we’re not sure about all of it,” she reasons. “But when you’re travelling, then it all begins to click like a Rubik’s Cube.”

Do humbling experiences such as meeting local families, who happily exist with very little, leave her re-evaluating her life in London?

“It does,” she answers honestly. “Particularly when you’re up in the mountains, you feel so well and the air is so clean, you go, ‘God, we live a mad life’.

She follows: “But rather than leave it behind, I think (it’s good) to escape from time to time.

“I’ve found a lot of people – and I am included in this – get so used to such speed that you miss it,” she claims. “So after three months, you go, ‘OK I’m feeling pretty good now, I’m looking forward to something’. It’s just we tire out.”

That said, Joanna – who is married to music conductor Stephen Barlow – intends to halt her plans in favour of lying on a beach soon enough.

“I want to become completely mahogany,” she announces.

“I would like to be a scrawny old crow who’s dark brown before I die,” she says with a smile. “Because the places we go to and what we do, we don’t have time for sunbathing. Plus we’re usually in modest countries.”

First, though, she has a 31-date, live tour to complete.

Kicking off in October, It’s All About Me will see the legendary performer travel the UK and Ireland with an abundance of hilarious stories from her lengthy career – some of which have never been heard before. Between this, acting, travelogues and her avid charity work, is there anything else Joanna is keen to tick off?

“Pretty much everything!” she fires back. “It’s like the more you know, the more you have to know.

“But what I would really like to do is to just do one part – act one part – where I come back and go, ‘Pretty good’ instead of, ‘Oh my God, will we get away with that?’

“We all think like that,” she insists. “No actor is convinced that they’re fabulous.”

What she will say, however, is she’s become “less fearful” with age.

“A lot of it is to do with your own life,” she says, addressing past concerns. “‘Will I be wrongly dressed?’ ‘Will I say the wrong thing?’ ‘Can I make ends meet?’ All of those sorts of things. But you say, ‘Yes you can’.

“But there are some things you can’t ever get rid of and I call them