Call the nude wife
NAKED TRUTH ABOUT STAR’S ROLES TV actress plays a nun but reveals some risque habits
Cal l The Midwife Christmas Special star Miriam Margolyes today reveals a hidden past that would make her fellow screen nuns blush.
She once worked as a silkyvoiced soft porn actress called Sexy Sonia and posed nude for a famous painter.
The Harry Potter actress will play formidable Sister Mildred in the Nonnatus House festive special. But in her youth, some of the habits she got into were quite risque.
“Before I became an established actress, I was known for my work as a voice artist,” says the star who was a hit this year in BBC special Mir iam’s Big Amer ican Adventure.“
“And I recorded a soft-porn audio cal led Sexy Sonia: Leaves from my Schoolgirl Notebook.
“It was one of my first ever shows.
“It was for sale in sex shops and one day I went into Ann Summers and told the man behind the counter I was Sexy Sonia.
“He was very distressed and told me to keep my voice down because he didn’t want people to know she was this short, fat and rather unattractive person.”
Stage and screen veteran Miriam, 77, – who bounced back into the public eye in BBC reality show The Real Marigold Hotel – also became such a big fan of Welsh painter Augustus John that she wrote to him offering to pose nude. “I thought it was worth taking my clothes off for a genius,” says the actress – 17 at the time, while he was 80. Miriam – who also posed naked in publicity shots for 1975 TV drama The Girls Of Slender Means – said: “I ended up modelling for him in the nude. He did tell me to climb a ladder though, and that made me feel ver y peculiar.” Millions across the country will witness Mir iam’s guest appearance in Call The Midwife, in which she plays chape rone to four refugee Chinese orphans.