LESLEY NICOL
Screwing up her face and pushing her mouth into an outrageous trout pout, Lesley Nicol gives her verdict on the craze for cosmetic work: “Lips! Awful. It’s all over Beverly Hills.
“You sit with your mouth open, you see horror stories,” says the 65-yearold actress.
“Plastic surgery is such a bad idea, it gets addictive – they go on and on.”
I feel like I’m having a gossip with Lesley’s equally straight-talking alter ego Mrs Patmore in the Downton Abbey kitchen.
Lesley, 65, will reprise the role in the movie version of the TV hit this autumn but, before that, she stars as posh Henrietta Beecham, in new ITV period drama, Beecham House.
Set in Delhi, India, on the cusp of the 19th century, it is another upstairs, downstairs story, but this time Lesley’s character is “upstairs”.
Thanks to the success of Downton, Lesley now lives in LA, but vows never to join the rush to plastic surgery. She says: “I have never been a beauty. I’m all right, but that’s not been a thing, so it doesn’t make a difference really.”
She tells me about a “horrible experience” she had at the age of 23.
She says: “I went to an audition and it was a director I had known when I was 16. He said, ‘I have to say something, here – you’re going to do really well when you get to your 40s’.
“He meant, ‘You’re not the young lead sort, there are other people younger, prettier, slimmer.’ He meant I was a character bag and, ‘You’ll do really well when you get older.’
“It was a very crushing thing to say. What the hell am I going to do for the next 20 years?
“I was a bit demoralised, but of course it’s bulls*** – it did come later, but it didn’t mean I didn’t have anything to do for the next 20 years. I did lots of work.”
She had roles in Casualty, Blackadder II, The Bill, A Touch Of Frost, and the film East Is East before Downton Abbey finally came knocking.
Lesley, a doctor’s daughter from Irlam, Lancs, who went to the Guildhall Drama School, was 56 in 2010 when Downton began its six-series run. But, she says, all the best things have happened to her later in life.
Lesley says: “That’s probably the best way around because you don’t want it all at the beginning and then go, ‘Blagh’.”
She was gone 50 when she married a Reiki practitioner and martial arts instructor. He was born David Heald but adopted the spiritual name Da’abath Te’He’ling. She giggles as she tells me she thought it sounded like Darth Vader when they first met.
She had at times despaired of ever meeting “the one”. She says: “I didn’t panic, I just knew I would be happier with someone – the right one – than without. And I am.”
A friend introduced her to Da’abath, who is, she tells me conspiratorially, “a ninja”. Leaning in, she says: “He is 73, but if there was danger, he could do this...”
She then lunges for