‘I’d like more serious roles... I’ll never retire’
DORIEN GREEN was a magnificent comic monster – under-dressed, over-sexed and on our screens for nearly two decades. Somehow, Lesley Joseph turned the self-centred, morally incontinent Birds Of A Feather man-eater into a national treasure. Now, to demonstrate her versatility, the muchloved actress is becoming a nun. On stage, at least.
Out go the leopard print jacket, short skirts and bed-hopping habits – and in comes a plain black one.
“I play a rapping nun,” Lesley, one of the stars of riotous new stage musical Sister Act, tells me.
“I’m rapping and I’m nun-dancing as Sister
Mary Lazarus in Manchester and London. And then on the road I take over as Mother Superior.”
It sounds exhausting, but at 76 Lesley remains a ball of thespian energy.
No stranger to musical performances, she famously sang Like A Virgin as Dorien.
“The karaoke episode, one my favourites,” says Lesley, her brown eyes twinkling.
“I had to pull David Grant out of the audience and run my hand down his right thigh.”
Good training for her 2016 Strictly Come Dancing routines…
“Sharon and Tracey” – played by her co-stars Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson – “were covering their eyes,” she laughs. “I was on my back, I was opening my legs… it became one of the most requested clips.”
The long-running sitcom, created and written by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, was fuelled by cheerful vulgarity.
Beginning on BBC One in 1989, it ran for nine years.
It was successfully revived in 2014 by ITV, but it was axed last year amid strong rumours of an irreparable bust-up between the stars – which Lesley won’t talk about. “It was time to move on,” she says diplomatically.
Some fans could never separate the brassy character from the actress. “I’ve had some very near-the-knuckle letters,” Lesley tells me. “But then Dorien was near-the-knuckle.”
Proposals and propositions? “All of that, but the details aren’t fit for publication.”
She pauses and adds: “I have also had people writing to say they love my legs, and I think to myself, ‘If only they knew!’
“Dorien felt real for a lot of people.”
Worryingly so. Lesley recalls an incident when she was playing surly housekeeper Frau Blucher in stage musical Young Frankenstein.
“A man walked up and came on to the stage because he wanted to meet me.
“Someone pulled me off-stage and I could hear Ross Noble telling him, ‘Yes I can take you to her, you can sit and have a cup of tea with her’, and I was thinking, ‘What? No he can’t!’ ” Geordie stand-up Ross, who played hunchbacked servant Igor, was simply keeping the intruder calm so he could be steered off-stage and out the door.
“Ross is so brilliant, so funny. I can’t recall where that happened but they closed the tabs [curtains] and he went front of cloth and entertained the audience,” Lesley recalls.
“We had a haycart on the stage and once, in Newcastle with Mel Brooks in the audience, the cart got stuck so we had to close the tabs to fix it.
“Ross immediately grabbed Hadley Fraser, who played Frankenstein, and went out and kept them laughing for half an hour. Mel loved it so much he wanted to write the show-stop into the show.”
She goes on: “I love moments like that, it reminds the audience that it’s theatre and that it’s live. That doesn’t happen on television.”
Young Frankenstein came hot on the heels of the 2017 Strictly tour. Mel Brooks personally asked her to audition, and when the show ended he sent her a video message saying, “I love you Lesley, I don’t want to marry you, but love you.”
She was nominated for an Olivier for her performance – “for the first time ever,” she says with a smile. “It was one of the greatest moments of my life, along with spending half an hour with the Pope on Pilgrimage.”
That’s BBC Two’s Pilgrimage – The Road To Rome in 2019, which saw the star walking more than 620 miles from the Swiss Alps to the Vatican, with the likes of Les Dennis and “wonderfully funny” comic
Stephen K Amos.
Lesley’s back story is harder to unravel than the Papal mysteries however. She guards her privacy fiercely. “I’ll never do an autobiography,” she says. “I don’t like them, I never read them.”
The Jewish star, whose great-grandfather was a Russian-born rabbi, was raised in Northampton. She made her stage debut aged seven as Gretel in Hansel & Gretel and realised, “I never wanted to do anything else”.
AFTER taking elocution lessons, she performed in school plays and amateur productions before studying drama at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Her earliest screen role was as Catherine of Braganza in the 1969 TV movie The Bastard King. Small parts followed in shows including
The Knowledge, Minder and ITV’S Roots.
Lesley was 44 when Dorien made her a household name. Laurence Marks had seen her in a 1988 play called Exclusive Yarns at Comedy Theatre. “His instant reaction was ‘Oh my God, that’s what I want for Birds!’,” she recalls.
He had based Dorien on “a real woman who wore a white mink and nothing underneath and
would go to petrol stations and get men to fill up her tank”. The sitcom ran for 180 episodes with an audience high of 23 million. Spin-offs included Dorien’s Diary (a saucy 1993 hardback) and a sell-out theatre tour.
“We’d spend six months every year filming Birds,” says Lesley. “So, I managed to do serious acting and quiz shows too.”
Her theatre roles range from Sir Peter Hall’s production of Home, to Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, via Dooniasha in Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard.
She toured with Edward Hardwicke in Alan Bennett’s Office Suite and produced and starred in Singular Women, a one-woman show written by Stewart Permutt, at The Kings Head. After Young Frankenstein, Lesley toured in Annie The Musical, reprising her role as Miss Hannigan, and then Calendar Girls the Musical in 2019.
“I was inundated with letters after that,” she says. “One was from a recently widowed woman who’d been terribly depressed but said, ‘You’ve made me feel alive again’.”
Lesley starred in the ITV soap Night And Day, but made a bigger impact on Strictly with dance partner Anton Du Beke, becoming at 70, the show’s oldest female contestant.
SHE IS STILL super-fit, like her mother Rebecca, who passed away in 2016 aged 103. “She was playing tennis into her 90s and line danced until 96. She did yoga all the time.” The divorced star never discusses her daughter, son or probable grandchildren. Lesley did yoga classes through lockdown via Zoom, and will walk rather than taking the Tube in London. Last year she parasailed with Linda Robson on Celebrity Coach Trip (and also managed to get her swimming costume on inside out during a synchronised swimming event).
“I walk every day,” she says. “I’m as fit as a flea. It keeps you young – exercise and eating carefully.”
She adds: “I’d love to do more serious roles. I’ve done musical theatre a lot and pantomimes. I will never retire.” When she isn’t working, Lesley enjoys eating out, seeing live theatre and reading historical fiction – to relax backstage, she knits.
We spoke on Monday, hours before the first live performance of Sister Act in Manchester.
“We’ve got to rehearse the finale when I get off the phone,” says Lesley. “This close to first night gets a little scary.”
The London cast includes Beverley Knight as Deloris – the singer who sees a gangster shoot someone and hides out in a convent. Jennifer Saunders will play Mother Superior with
Broadway star Keala Settle as Sister Mary Patrick.
“It’s a wonderful uplifting show,” says Lesley. “After two years of what we’ve been through it feels like life is finally coming back.”
● Sister Act runs at the London Eventim Apollo from July 19 to August 28, and then embarks on a national tour. www.sisteractthemusical.co.uk