Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF LOSS
Joanna Lumley’s the mother from hell and Keeley Hawes her bereaved daughter in new comedy-drama Finding Alice – a deliciously quirky look at the lighter side of loss
Joanna Lumley tells why she had a ball playing an overbearing mother to a bereaved daughter in ITV’S quirky new comedy-drama Finding Alice
Joanna the television, best-loved Lumley faces may but when be on one British she of skips into the room (she moves in a way that’s both livelier and more exaggerated than your average mortal) she shakes everyone’s hand and announces, ‘Hello! I’m Joanna!’ as if we didn’t know.
She’s a larger-than-life personality – genuinely absolutely fabulous – which only makes her co-star and fellow TV legend Nigel Havers seem positively grey in comparison as he sits down beside her.
We’re meeting, pre-covid, on the west London set of Joanna’s first TV drama for years, Finding Alice, in which she and Nigel play husband and wife. And the first thing she reveals is that she learned why charming manners are important from another screen legend, Ava Gardner, and has tried to be the nicest and the most generous person on set ever since.
‘I was in a film with Ava Gardner – she was a massive star and I was playing a tiny part,’ Joanna recalls. ‘We were all in awe of her work but also she was a complete and total sweetheart. She made us all feel loved and even invited us round to her place. I’ve discovered that the people who have tended to be brattish in my long, long, very long career are the people who haven’t quite made it, or think they ought to have done better. They’re disappointed and they take it out on wardrobe or make-up by being terribly grand. But there aren’t many of them.’
Sadly, a few weeks after our meeting in February the entire production was halted because of the virus, but filming resumed in the summer and the deliciously quirky new show will air later this month. Co-produced by Keeley Hawes, who also stars as the Alice of the title, it sees Joanna steal every scene she’s in as Alice’s rather brutal mother Sarah.
In terms of category it’s a hard show to pin down, and that’s what makes it so completely refreshing. Ostensibly it’s a drama about death and grief, but it boasts an extraordinarily light touch, with laughout-loud moments amid the intriguing mystery at its heart. Strangely for a show about death, it’s actually very life-affirming.
On the night Alice, her husband Harry (Jason Merrells) and their daughter Charlotte (Isabella Pappas) move into their dream home which Harry, a property developer, has been building for years, he falls down the staircase and dies. The six-part series then focuses on how Alice slowly picks herself up and finds her inner strength, especially as the police are investigating exactly how her husband came to fall down the stairs.
And then there are Harry’s parents, Gerry (Kenneth Cranham) and Minnie (Gemma Jones), to contend with… As the days go on, Alice begins to discover more and more secrets about the man she loved, her partner of 20 years.
The first time we see Joanna’s character Sarah is when she and her husband Roger arrive to comfort Alice. ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ is Sarah’s greeting to her grieving daughter.
‘I’ve moved into that era of my life where I only play unsympathetic characters, total bitches,’ sighs Joanna, 74. ‘I think it might be partly because of Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous because she was hardhearted beyond belief. And also, I know I sound like I must be a snob so I get a lot of these sorts of snobby parts. But I love roles like this that you can immediately start fleshing out.
‘Sarah is hardhearted and tactless and she can’t even bring herself to kiss her daughter, so there’s something interesting there. Because the writers are so clever there’s a whole back story. This is a disappointed woman. She started off as a young and gorgeous model, marrying an up-and-coming young lawyer who was going to become a QC. She might have become a lady and had masses of money.
‘But that didn’t happen. Her husband Roger is a retired local lawyer, and so her bitterness is because of the circumstances she finds herself in. She’s perpetually irritated, especially by Alice, who she thinks made the wrong choice in the man she married. Harry was a builder and, really, she’d hoped for a bit better than a builder. It’s a brilliant bit of writing.
‘As for Roger, Sarah thinks he’s really just a bit dull. He hugs people for too long and he cries and cries and, well, hugs people. He’s quite emotional. He never made enough money for her. He’s just as wet as a hen, quite frankly.’
Poor Nigel, 69, isn’t getting much of a word in edgeways as we talk. ‘He just wasn’t successful enough for Sarah,’ he sighs.
Joanna and Nigel were always Keeley’s first choices to play Alice’s parents in the show, which she has co-produced with The Durrells creators Simon Nye and Roger Goldby. ‘A few people have said Joanna and I are kind of similar, which is incredibly flattering,’ confides Keeley. ‘She is a brilliant actress and nobody does comedy like her. It’s a dream come true to be working with her.’
The idea for a contemporary light drama about loss was first discussed when the three were working on The Durrells. In that hit period drama, Keeley’s character Louisa had been recently widowed, and in this new series co-writers Simon and Roger wanted to explore a world in which everything had changed and yet the mundanity of life continued.
‘Death is something that touches everyone’s life,’ says Keeley, 44. ‘We wanted to look at what happens when someone dies, especially when they’re young; what happens
to all of those people they leave behind. It can be like a grenade being thrown into a family, especially because of who Alice is.
‘She’s someone – and I think we all know people like this – who is
almost completely reliant on the other person in their relationship. Harry is the breadwinner and she’s been at home looking after their daughter and just existed within their family. At one point she says,
“I haven’t got any friends because I only needed Harry.” First she has to learn how to cope without him, and then she discovers all this other stuff about him.’
A lot of the humour comes in the form of the uber-smart house Harry has built. Because they’ve just moved in Alice can’t find the fridge or open the curtains, and even discovers rooms she never knew were there. The whole thing is meant to work using voiceactivated commands but, as we all know, these things have a way of frustrating us rather than making life easier.
The exteriors of the house were filmed at a modern property in Farnham in Surrey, while the interiors were created at the West London Film Studios.
One of the inanimate characters in the story is the staircase Harry built, which has no banister. Health and safety notices were put on scripts to ensure everyone was extra careful when going up and down the stairs that had been built in the studio. ‘A lot of funny moments happen in the house,’ says Keeley. ‘It’s Harry’s dream – he’s within the fabric of it. But it starts to change Alice’s perception of him. She’s left with a lot of questions about who she was married to.
‘As the series continues you see that all the characters have their secrets. They’re all very human. I think a lot of Harry’s secrets were created to protect Alice because he adored her – but now they cause her real problems.’
Keeley found the role particularly challenging because she’s in every scene. With three BAFTA nominations under her belt, this was an excuse to completely push herself in situations that constantly switch from grief to humour.
‘It’s a luxury to be in every scene because they’re all so brilliantly written,’ she says. ‘Yes, this is about a woman grieving, and that can be difficult. But there’s also so much humour in it – whether it’s from not knowing her PIN number to the way her mother keeps berating her for what she’s wearing. As humans, we try to bring humour into difficult situations, and it’s good not to shy away from the mess that life can be.’ ■
‘I’m in that era of life where I only play bitches’
JOANNA LUMLEY