“People say ‘Oh my goodness! Are you Jewish? We had no idea!’ ”
FELICITY KENDAL has a rare insight into attitudes towards Jews. It is all thanks to that careerdefining role in The Good Life, the 1970s sitcom in which she played Barbara opposite Richard Briers’s Tom, the couple who opt out of the rat race by opting in to a life farming their suburban back garden.
Kendal’s Barbara was a giggly, clever and quintessentially English sex symbol who became the nation’s darling. A prolific stage career followed, the latest role in which is upper class American socialite Evangeline Harcourt, ambitious mother to debutante Hope in Cole Porter’s classic ocean liner musical Anything Goes, now at the Barbican.
In Kathleen Marshall’s triumphant New York production starring Sutton Foster and with Robert Lindsay and Gary Wilmot too, Kendal’s job is comedy, leaving the singing and dancing to the rest of the 30-strong cast. But despite other TV series such as Rosemary & Thyme in which Kendal and Pam Ferris played a couple of sleuths, over the past four decades it is Barbara with whom Kendal has always been associated whether she likes it or not. Reports suggest it has been more a case of not.
Even Kendal’s two divorces which hinted at a private life that was less blissful than her on screen marriage in the cosy sitcom, did not dent the image. The first separation was from actor Drewe Henley in 1979 with whom she had her first son. The second divorce was from her Jewish husband, the director Michael Rudman (father of her second son) in 1990, after which there was a seven year relationship with Tom Stoppard. She never speaks of her time with Stoppard out of loyalty to the playwright, even though interviewers continue to ask her about it, including this one. She has been back with Rudman since the late 1990s, though they never remarried.
So how is all this connected to Jews? Well, for a start Kendal is Jewish. She converted because of a yearning to keep fam
I’m anything but typically English. I’m much more Eastern in my up-bringing and Judaism is an Eastern religion.
I’m fiercely against prejudice because I can see it in a more blanketed way. It isn’t obvious. But it’s there.
ily at the centre of life, a formative experience she had while being raised in India. Her parents toured the country performing Shakespeare productions which is how she became an actor. Yet although her Jewishness is well documented the view that she is “typically English” (whatever that means to most people) persists.
“I’m anything but typically English,” says Kendal who is talking to me on the phone from her Chelsea home on her day off from the tough, six-day-a-week schedule of Anything Goes. “I’m much more Eastern in my upbringing and beliefs, originally because that’s where I grew up,” she says. “And Judaism is an eastern history and religion more than it is European,” she adds. Yet the disconnect between who she is and the way she is perceived continues.
“I’ve been around the block a few times,” she says, referring to the many memorable stage productions she has starred in: Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests (1974); Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979) and Stoppard’s The Real Thing in 1982 among them, though what she says next refers to more recent shows.
“I was in rehearsal and sometimes I wear a Star of David and people say ‘Oh, my goodness! Are you Jewish?’ We had no idea!’” She doesn’t consider this to be a massive problem particularly because there is no sense of having “to explain herself”, it’s just “who I am.” And yet because that “typically English” persona goes before her much like a reputation, Kendal has, as she puts it “been able to see very definitely that antisemitism is not something of the past.” It is the incredulity that gets her.
“You think, ‘Why are you surprised?’” she says, clearly still unravelling the responses to the Magen David that apparently suggest there exists deep-seated ideas about what a Jew is and what a Jew is not.
“I’m not like my good friend Maureen [Lipman, with whom Kendal performed in Shaffer’s play Lettice and Lovage] who is obviously saying ‘this my opinion and belief’. But the result is that I’m fiercely against prejudice because I can see it in a more blanketed way. It isn’t obvious. But it’s there.”
I wonder if Judaism has delivered all she hoped it would when she converted in the late 80s around the time her second son Jacob was born.
“More than I could imagine,” she says. “It is as important now as it was years and years ago. It has grown and supported me more than ever, and certainly over the past couple of years,” she says of the period in which the pandemic significantly affected Kendal’s family. She caught Covid, “which was two weeks of real struggle” but her partner Michael, 82 “was in hospital and seriously ill.” He is thankfully out now but for two weeks Rudman was at the Royal Free’s intensive care unit on a ventilator. He is, it occurs to me, one of the two most significant Jewish men in Kendal’s life, not counting children. The second, Stoppard, didn’t even know he was Jewish when she was with him. Or at least he was only beginning to be aware how deep his Jewish roots were at the time he and Kendal were still a couple in the 90s. I wonder whether this was a subject of conversation, or whether in retrospect she thinks of how her life was even more Jewish than she realised.
Her answer is a riff on what drew her to the religion; that converting “actually had nothing to do with anybody else” (that is neither Rudman nor Stoppard); that Judaism has allowed her to avoid what she sees as the English trait of keeping children at arm’s length and eating separately from the family, or at least the way it was in the 1960s, and that what matters most is how you live now and not what happens in the “Neverland” by which she presumably means the notion of heaven. She continues in this vein for quite some time before confessing that “this is by way of not answering your question.”
“I know it is,” I say, as hope of getting her to talk even a tiny bit about her time with Stoppard disappears.
“I was wondering how long I’d have to go on for,” she chuckles.
“It is an interesting question, and there is probably an interesting answer,” she adds. “But I don’t have it,” she says.
I ask if she has seen Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt at least, calculating vaguely that in the timeline of things she was probably with him when he discovered that much of his Czech family was murdered during the Holocaust. But of course, appearing in a show six days a week doesn’t leave much time for going to the theatre.
“I’m sure I will,” she says “I hope. I don’t know how long it’s running for.”
As for the future she is “back to work and loving it” and there are one or two possible projects — one in TV and the other in theatre — but she can’t say more than that. There is also a big family reunion planned.
“As long as the world doesn’t seize up again it’s all looking better than it did this time last year,” she says with as much determination as belief.
And I suppose that being an essential part of a show as joyous as Anything Goes Kendal is doing more than most to make it true.