From Downton Abbey to... Ann Summers
Penelope Wilton, star of Downton Abbey, tells Vicky Power about her latest racy role
The sight of Downton Abbey’s Isobel Crawley poured into a slinky pink negligee and displaying ample décolletage on screen would be enough to see some fans of Julian Fellowes’s period piece come down with a touch of the vapours.
Add the fact that Penelope Wilton, the esteemed actress who brought the Crawley matriarch to life (and has just been ennobled in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List) also appears to be handling a sex toy, and I’d wager several would choke on their tea, too.
But while she may now be a Dame, Wilton’s no prude. Such racy goingson are the result of her surprise choice to star in Brief Encounters, an ITV ensemble drama set in 1982, which focuses on a group of Yorkshire women who find liberation and friendship by throwing Ann Summers parties.
“I really loved it,” she says. “It couldn’t be a more dramatic change from Downton. I didn’t choose it because it was different from
Downton, but now I’m very pleased that it is a complete contrast. It’s nice to move into another era.”
Wilton, who recently celebrated her 70th birthday, plays a lonely, childless wife who is all but invisible to her husband (Peter Wight) until the spark in their marriage is reignited by her new job selling sex toys and underwear.
What could easily have been a simple tale of tawdry titillation – loosely based on Good Vibrations, the memoirs of Jacqueline Gold, the CEO of Ann Summers – is elevated by a pin-sharp script delivered by the brilliant team behind Green Wing, and warm, witty performances from Wilton and her co-stars, who include Lewis star Angela Griffin and Peaky
Blinders’ Sophie Rundle. Indeed, Wilton insists that the plot’s saucier aspects are almost incidental to the story at the drama’s heart. “You can’t make a series just about sex toys and sexy underwear,” she laughs. “The first two episodes can do that and then you have to see where that independence takes these women, because they make money out of the parties. It completely changes the dynamic in their homes and gives them more confidence in themselves.”
We are talking in a chic London hotel, just days before her DBE is announced. If Wilton knew about it when we spoke, she wasn’t letting on. “It’s an absolute honour to be given and so very special that it should happen on the Queen’s 90th birthday,” Wilton said, in a statement released by her publicist afterwards.
On the day of the Brief Encounters launch, Wilton had dominated the press conference, displaying impeccable comic flair as she told an anecdote about a book she once discovered as a 14-year-old on her mother’s shelf: “It was called Sex and
the Older Woman and I said, ‘Mum, look at that book!’,” recalled Wilton. “She replied, ‘It’s no use at all – the older woman is 38!’.”
Over tea, today, however, she is in no mood for raucous anecdotes. While she’s charming and unfailingly polite, she deflects personal questions in a firm tone that brings to mind Isobel Crawley reprimanding the Dowager Duchess over plans for that blasted cottage hospital.
Of course, this natural reserve has been parlayed into her acting to great effect – she has excelled at portraying quintessential Englishwomen in Downton, Ever Decreasing Circles, Calendar Girls, Pride and Prejudice and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Although Wilton has been adored by the theatre cognoscenti for decades, she never enjoyed the Stateside success that contemporaries such as Helen Mirren have had. Born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, this daughter of a tap dancer and businessman says she was never even tempted to try her luck.
“I know young people do now go to America, but when I was their age you didn’t do that,” she says. “There wasn’t the availability of the roles and I never felt any wish to go there.”
Ironically, it was Downton which finally reeled in her first big American movie, Steven Spielberg’s live action version of Roald Dahl’s beloved book,
The BFG, due out later this month. She plays the Queen. Of course she does. “I don’t think I would have got The
BFG if it hadn’t been for Downton,” she says. “Steven Spielberg’s wife [Kate Capshaw] told him to watch it and he did and he loved it.”
Wilton was thrilled with her first taste of Hollywood-style film-making, albeit in Vancouver. “Spielberg was the most delightful man – I would work for him doing anything.”
This latest in a run of career highlights came after she added an Olivier Awards Best Actress gong to her mantelpiece for her role in Taken
at Midnight last year. But while she will happily discuss her work, any discussion about her private life leads to the conversational drawbridge being drawn up.
In 1975 she wed the acclaimed actor Daniel Massey and before their daughter, Alice, was born in 1977, they endured the pain of having a still-born child. Wilton and Massey divorced in 1984 and, in what appears an odd twist of events, he married her younger sister Linda two years later. Wilton then married Ian Holm, an established star of the Royal Shakespeare Company with whom she co-starred in
The Borrowers. However, they divorced in 2001. Today, she won’t even tell me if she has a partner.
She does, however, volunteer the information that days before our interview, her daughter Alice, now a theatre producer, gave birth to her second child, Ella Rose, a sister for four-year-old Daniel, with her husband, Elliott. Poignantly, Wilton adds: “I’d have loved to have had more than one [child], but I got to an age where I couldn’t have any more. So now I’ve got the full set – the husband and the wife and the boy and the girl. Who could ask for anything more?”
She’s taken the summer off work for grandmotherly duties, helping out with the new baby. Where, I wonder, does that leave the rumoured Downton movie? “Your guess is as good as mine. I’m told some people know about it. Perhaps they don’t want me,” she laughs nervously.
Of course she’d be willing to reprise her role as Isobel. “You couldn’t say no, could you? That would be churlish and shooting myself in the foot.”
Unsurprisingly, Wilton shies away from all social media. In her downtime she listens to the radio, frequently shouting at The Archers’ Helen and Rob storyline. “The poor woman’s having a ghastly time!” she says. Her other guilty pleasures include
Grace and Frankie, the US television comedy-drama (available on Netflix) about a pair of seventy-something women – played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin – whose husbands have left them for each other. “It’s escapist. Nobody seems to get too upset about anything, and yet some of the things that happen to these women would put me to bed for a week out of humiliation or sadness.”
And yet the racy props for this latest role didn’t faze Wilton. “Brief
Encounters held lots of firsts for me, and probably lasts, too,” she chuckles.
It won’t be the last time Dame Penelope Wilton brings her truthful English sensibility to bear on our screens.
Whether she’ll be wearing a buttoned up corset or a pink negligée next time remains to be seen.
‘You can’t make a series just about sex toys and sexy underwear’