Joanna Lumley: “There’s something rather thrilling about being 70”
In a hilarious interview, Joanna Lumley talks to Chrissy Iley about hypnosis for her panic attacks, her struggles as a single mum, why today’s models are too thin and her trip Down Under.
IT’S JUST LIKE a scene from Absolutely Fabulous. As I enter the Soho Hotel room where I am to interview Joanna Lumley, I see her precariously hanging out – whole torso out – of the second-storey window, her hand wafting a cigarette into the crisp London air. “Darling you don’t mind, do you?” She’s smoking in a no-smoking zone, but she has to, she just has to.
Then it’s a warm cashmerey hug hello. She looks ravishingly good.
The expressive eyes, the trademark platinum-blonde hair, although it’s not in a Patsy beehive. The beehive for the upcoming Ab Fab movie was, in fact, a wig. “Darling, my hair wouldn’t have been able to take it.” She’s wearing a pale grey wrap, dark trousers, trainers.
The real-life Joanna Lumley is understated, but the lines between the actress and the character of Patsy do blur. Joanna likes to drink Bolly, just not quite as much as Patsy. The cigarette is never far away. “I know, it’s ghastly, isn’t it?” she says in that distinctive velvet purr. Are they the same person? She laughs her deep chortle. “Well, not quite, but I own her; she’s mine. I’m not her, but she’s mine,” she says with immense pride.
Just sitting with Joanna for a few minutes makes me feel I can’t wait for Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie. “Working on it was terrific,” she says. “People say to me, ‘Will it be the same? Will it have lost its Ab Fab flavour?’ I don’t think so. The five of us are all in the centre of it. Jennifer Saunders, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks, June Whitfield.” The five Js – that’s what she likes to call them.
“And the old favourites who pitched in over the years, like former Spice Girl Emma Bunton and Lulu, are in it again.” Lulu is usually mocked. “Very much so, absolutely. She’s one of Edina’s clients – and Edina does nothing for them – so Lulu and Emma Bunton are pretty resentful. It’s really quite good. Instead of getting a half- hour episode, you just get it much bigger.” Her eyes seem to pop with excitement, but not much else moves in her face.
I had been given a gift for Joanna from a beauty PR, liquid Botox that you don’t have to inject – I wondered if she would be a bit embarrassed to receive it. “Darling, bring it on! Where is it?” she says.
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie has been in the works for years and no one believed it would ever get made. “Dawn French made a deal that if she [Jennifer Saunders] hadn’t done it by Christmas, she’d have to pay her £10,000, so she wrote a treatment and the film was green lit in the spring of last year and we were filming it in October in London and the south of France.”
I’ve heard that Edina and Patsy disgrace themselves at a party, so flee to the South of France. So will Patsy actually eat? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that!
“She had a crisp once and jolly well nearly choked,” Joanna quips. “And one Christmas episode, she decided to have a bit of turkey and was taken off in an ambulance because she’s had most of her organs removed, so eating is not an option. She gets all her sustenance from the drugs and the drinks she consumes. She is a cartoon character. She would be long dead if she were alive.
“I can’t imagine Patsy cooking, but I can cook. I was never taught to bake and I have a savoury rather than a sweet palate, but I would like to learn how to make cheese straws. I could live off cheese straws along with the margaritas and the champagne,” she jokes. “I don’t follow recipes very closely, but I can cook. I’m rather a basic cook, not a chef.” Joanna may say she is basic at cooking, but her achievements are actually extraordinary.
Away from the big screen, Joanna is known as a woman who gets things done, whether it’s aid to her beloved Gurkhas, or building a garden bridge across the Thames. “I don’t think I always get things done,” she says. “I think I always fight to get things done; they don’t always end up happening.” Now she’s doing that very British thing of downplaying her achievements.
“To put a soberer spin on it, I am fighting for things like compassionate world farming, fighting for a better life for farm animals,” she says. “You don’t get it done easily, you do it inch by inch. You get their cages made a little bit bigger. It’s never accomplished, but you keep on fighting and the Gurkhas was something I was proud to be involved in, but it wasn’t really me, it was a team of us. My father was a Gurkha [she was born in Kashmir, when it was British India] and my whole young life was,” she searches for the word ... “gurkharised. They were a family and the idea of your family being so badly treated by a government, successive governments, was something I had to fight for. A wrong was righted.” She pushed for the British government to pay their “debt of honour” to Gurkhas who had fought for Britain. Those who had retired before 1997 were awarded the right of settlement in the UK.
I like the campaigning Joanna Lumley, yet she underplays it. There’s no fuss, no extravagance. And just when I am thinking how very unPatsy she is, Joanna says, “Darling, this present sounds extraordinary. You put this stuff on your lips and it makes them plump? What a kind person. It’s not a needle? It’s like squeezing an icing tube. Oh, my darling, it’s going to be my next Christmas present to everybody.”
Whatever she’s had done or will have done to her face, there is no way she will ever look 70. “How did it happen – 70?” she says. “Life just gets quicker and quicker. The other day, I wrote a cheque and I put 06. That was not a slip of the pen, but a slip of the brain. I skipped a whole decade. The word ‘seventy’ on paper looks so not what I feel am. Although there’s something rather thrilling. We don’t any of us know what 70 is anymore.” Is 70 the new 50? “I think everything now is the ‘new something’ compared to our grandmothers. At school, I thought teachers who were 42 had to be helped onto a bus. Patsy stopped ageing at 39, that’s what she admits to, but she’s clearly more like 93.
But I have always longed to be older than I am. I don’t know why.”
Joanna got her break, of course, with The New Avengers, the mid- to late-1970s TV series, in an era defined by a haircut called the Purdy, named after her character in the show. A generation of women tried to emulate this sculpted bob. “The two characters for which people kindly remember me have both had distinctive hairstyles which defined them.” Joanna is indeed remembered for the
Purdy and the Patsy.
The New Avengers, though, changed everything. Pre- New Avengers were panicky times. She was a model/actress and a single mum of son Jamie. The relationship with his father had ended. She married the writer Jeremy Lloyd in 1970; it lasted only a few months. “I was pretty strapped for cash,” Joanna says. “Counting the pennies before I would go to the supermarket. I knew that I was rich when I could afford to buy cheese and didn’t look at how much it would cost – I’d just take it and put it in the basket. I love cheese and when I could only buy a small piece of the most basic cheddar and suddenly I could buy any cheese I wanted, I felt rich.”
Did she ever starve herself to get jobs? “No, but you had to watch what you ate. I worked a lot as a model. I wasn’t a top model, but I was in the top 10, and in that time I only knew one anorexic girl, who recovered because a man said, ‘I love you, but I can’t marry you if you’re as thin as this; if you get a little fatter, I’ll marry you.’ Isn’t that divine?
“When you look back at pictures of those days, most of us were long and slender, but not very, very thin.
“Most of us were long and slender, but not very, very thin. There’s an effort to be much slimmer now.”
There’s an effort to be much thinner now and the girls are miles taller.”
She doesn’t complain about any of it but, in her 20s, she had a panic attack. She was acting in a play and couldn’t go on stage. “It was pre-Purdy and it was very hard times,” she says. “The stress of everything got to me. I was double, treble anxious about everything and that little thin wire which you always think you can keep going just snapped. It was awful.”
It never happened again? “No, but it made me realise we all have frailties in us. It helped me get to know when such things might happen again. That way, I could prevent them or evade them, rather than march into them.
“It’s what comes from being older now. When you’re young and you’re having a tough time, you’re struggling with, ‘Will I make it as an actress? Will I ever be able to feed my boy enough food?’ And all those anxieties about being a parent. These anxieties are quite often about logistics: if you’re kept late at rehearsal, who’ll pick him up from school? If you feel you are failing them, or that you are forever on edge about how you will accomplish what has to be done, it can gnaw away at you. But it all came good.”
Jamie Lumley is a photographer living in Scotland, married to a writer and they have two daughters. “He’s at the very top of Scotland and I adore going there,” Joanna says. “Even if you are walking across a moor, you never feel alone, and I love the Scottish people. I am three-quarters Scottish, one-eighth English and one-eighth Danish.”
People seem to respond to the Viking in her – her blonde charisma and the force in which she gets things done.
She also used hypnosis to get over the feeling that she couldn’t go on stage. “I wanted to feel like Judi
Dench when she stands in the wings every night and says she can’t wait to get on the stage, rather than, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve got two today.’ I thought, ‘I want to be able to love it,’ so I went to a hypnotist and asked,
‘Can you change my mind and make me long to do the show? Eight shows a week, week after week.’ He didn’t put me out, but he altered my mindset. I can’t remember him doing anything except talk to me and, now, I love it. You’ve still got to learn your lines and all that business, but now I think, ‘Oh, I’m going to have a really good crack at it’.
“I wonder why people don’t use hypnotherapy for everything, actually. ‘I’m afraid of the dark’, get hypnotised. ‘I’m afraid of flying,’ get hypnotised.
“Maybe you can be hypnotised for losing your temper. I try not to and I don’t quite often, but if I do lose my temper now, either my head would come off or I may kill something.”
You get the sense that, underneath the glorious manners and charm, Joanna is very contained, that it’s all on the inside. “In Japan, politeness is everything. I realised that I find it incredibly courteous and sweet. Manners maketh the man.”
Joanna is shortly off to Japan for a documentary. “It’ll be a three-parter all about Japan. I love making them. I love travelling and exploring. And it’s such a pleasure to bring it back to people, who then stop you on the Tube and say, ‘I loved that’.”
Does her conductor husband, Stephen Barlow, ever join her? “No. These things are done on small budgets. There are six of us, we all travel light with a particular job, and I never trail around after him when he’s rehearsing his operas. If we’ve got time, by which I mean more than a few hours together, we’ve got a cottage in Scotland and that’s our bolthole where we can race up to and we just walk about in the hills, talk to each other and laze around.”
It is a very happy 30-year marriage. “I met him when he was playing the organ at a friend’s wedding,” she says. Have all her husbands been charming? “I love the way you say ‘all’. There was one previous one, Jeremy Lloyd, writer of Are You Being Served? and ’Allo ’Allo!, but I was married to him for about 20 minutes. I loved him and he loved me, but we shouldn’t have got married. We remained close up until the time he died, which was over a year ago. I’m sad that he’s gone, but his charm was wonderful.”
Joanna and Patsy both inhabit a charmed world. Patsy, of course, has no charm whatsoever; her charmlessness helps to make her the hilarious cartoon she is and distances her from Joanna, who is quite possibly the most charming person ever.
In August, Joanna will jet into Australia for the movie’s premiere. “I’m so excited about going to Australia,” she says. “I’ve only been to Perth and that was years ago. I was thrilled to learn we’re doing a premiere in Sydney and will get to go to Melbourne as well. Darling, how lovely will that be!” And the thing is, she really means it.
“I’m so excited about going to Australia. Darling, how lovely will that be!”