Imelda & Jim’s limitless love
IMELDA STAUNTON JOINS HER HUSBAND JIM CARTER IN THE DOWNTON FILM – AND TAKES ON DAME MAGGIE SMITH’S DOWAGER COUNTESS
You might imagine Imelda Staunton – who so convincingly inhabits the dark, tortured characters she often plays – would be melancholic.
Actually, what strikes people in reality is her sheer capacity for joy. Her default mode is cheerful, her delight in life childlike.
“Look at me! They’ve turned me into some kind of model,” she says with a laugh as she teeters around in the floaty dress and high heels chosen for her photoshoot today. “You’d think I was sophisticated, but then I start walking and I’m like a four-year-old in her mum’s shoes.” She mock-staggers in her stilettos.
Imelda, who is so tiny and fine-boned she’s almost doll-like, is thrilled too by the house and garden we’re shooting in. She marvels at the hand-painted walls. She trips out to look at the plants.
Then she summons her husband – actor Jim Carter, the lovable, lugubrious butler Carson of Downton Abbey – to drive over from their house nearby in north-west London to see it.
Imelda (63) and Jim (71) have
been married for 36 years.
“We’re very fortunate because we still enjoy each other’s company,” she says. “We get very excited about going away for a couple of days together. It’s never, ‘Yeah, if you wanna,’” she says in an affected bored voice.
In the hall, Jim’s familiar rumbling baritone announces his arrival. Both he and Imelda will be appearing in the muchanticipated Downton Abbey film, which opens in New Zealand on September 12.
In the movie, Carson, a stalwart of the TV series since 2010, returns from retirement, having miraculously overcome the palsy that forced him to retire, to oversee a visit from King
George V and Queen Mary.
At mention of the astonishing cure that’s brought the loyal butler back into the Crawley family fold, Jim chortles.
“Yes! The involuntary tremors have gone. Perhaps Carson just needed a rest.”
Imelda, who didn’t appear in the TV series, plays the formidable Lady Bagshaw, a cousin of Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville). “She’s a redoubtable woman and a match for Maggie Smith’s dowager countess,” reveals Imelda, whose character arrives in the queen’s entourage.
“How you were cast ‘upstairs’ is a mystery,” twinkles Jim. “We don’t do anything together in the film. We have one scene where we stare at each other across the social divide and I refuse to meet her eye in case she wants any wine pouring.”
Confirms Imelda: “He doesn’t pour me a single glass of claret!
“We had our own little caravans and dressing rooms, and it was nice when we could have lunch together. We weren’t there together much, though, so I got to be with Maggie and Penelope Wilton, who plays Isobel Crawley. I already knew them, so it was lovely.
“There are an awful lot of hours to while away between filming and we played the word game Bananagrams. I think Laura Carmichael [Lady Edith] was the best at it.”
If you’re wondering if Jim waits on his wife, butler-like, at home, she gives a firm “No!”
“I can’t get any service out of him,” she adds. “At home
I’m below stairs. I’m like Mrs Patmore. I do all the cooking.”
Shared humour is a keystone of their long, happy marriage, but they also made an early decision not to spend long stretches of time apart.
“If one of us has to go away to film, the other will join them,” says Imelda. “It’s difficult in this job when you’re travelling a lot, but it hasn’t been a sacrifice because marriage and family are important to us. I don’t want to live in hotels. I like to come home at the end of the day and do the gardening. It’s very restorative.
“I’m brave about the parts I take. I don’t think, ‘I’d better do this because it will lead to that.’ I don’t feel I need to chase anything.”
One reason for this is that she has nothing to prove,
having been garlanded with awards (she’s won four Olivier theatre awards as well as a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination for her title role in the 2004 film Vera Drake).
And a generation of children now know her as the evil Dolores Umbridge in the
Harry Potter films.
She is, she admits, drawn more to tragic than comic roles. Her late parents Bridie, a hairdresser, and Joe, a labourer, emigrated from County Mayo to north London, where she was raised.
“I must have a darkness in me because I get drawn to those characters,” she says. “The melancholy is from my
Irish background. We inhabit that well.”
Imelda is a parent too, and she talks with restrained pride about her daughter Bessie (25), who is also an actor. “She’s our biggest joy. She’s an only child, as I was, but I don’t worry about her not having siblings because I was fine. When she came along, we had this gorgeous, perfect little thing and we weren’t going to mess with that. We were older parents [Imelda was 38 and Jim 45] and we thought we’d be knackered if we had another one a few years after.
“We’d start each day with a little dance, the two of us, then Jim would cycle off to school with her on his tandem. It was glorious.”
Recently, Bessie was seen as a young woman in search of a husband in Beecham House, a UK period drama dubbed “The Delhi Downton”. Set in 18th century India, it features the upstairs/downstairs formula that made Downton such a roaring success.
“I feel so proud of Bessie,” Imelda says, “and so happy for her. I might work with her one day. And we know what she’s going through, all the ups and downs.”
Imelda and Jim didn’t discourage Bessie from joining their precarious profession. “There was a moment when we said, ‘If you go to university instead of drama school, you can do anything – acting, directing – but then she auditioned for drama school and got in.
“She’s got the personality you want on a set. She has great, positive energy. She knows it’s important to always be good to everyone involved.” Did her folks instil this in her? “No, she’s just seen how
Jim and I behave. Bessie was a dresser for six months before drama school and a stage manager at a fringe theatre. She’s seen the business from
360 degrees, it’s put her in good stead.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find an actor less grand than Imelda, who famously took sandwiches to the Oscars.
“Of course we did!” she cries. “We had them in the limousine. Bessie was with us – she was 11 and I didn’t want her to be hungry. So we were tucking in
– all very English – and as we arrived, I thought, ‘I hope I haven’t got ham in my teeth.’’’
Imelda doesn’t mind her “down-to-earth” label. “There’s no point,” she says crisply.
“It’s what I am. Jim and I stay true to our roots.”
She’s also impatient with bad manners – she believes eating and drinking should be banned in theatres (“all those rustling wrappers!”) and is appalled by constant mobile phone use.
“Sometimes phones appear between every take. Particularly if it’s an emotional scene, it’s disrespectful. It suggests you have more important things to do than the job you’re being paid to do.”
She also objects to selfies.
“If people ask, I try to say nicely, ‘Do you mind if I don’t?’ I get embarrassed and bewildered. And what on earth do people do with them?”
Although she’s celebrated for unglamorous roles – charwoman Vera Drake with her stomping gait and frumpy overcoat or Cranford’s ruddy-cheeked Miss Pole – in life she’s pretty. Her skin is clear and remarkably unlined, her blue eyes almost feline.
I ask if she’s ever had work done and she explodes with mirth. “Funnily enough, no,” she says. “I don’t get work because of how I look. So it’s not appropriate for me.
Goodness, does it really matter if I get a bit wrinkly? The best actresses in the UK – Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, etc – work with their own faces.”
She brushes off my compliments, exclaiming, “I’ve been sitting in make-up for one and a half hours! Otherwise I’d look like a farmer’s wife with my Irish red cheeks and red nose.”
She says she hopes to work forever, having reached a happy equilibrium, an age when she has nothing to prove and much to enjoy. “I made a decision a couple of years ago to only do work I really want to. But in the gaps I do get bored. I think, ‘I’m not clearing out the airing cupboard again.’
“I’m happiest when I have scripts coming in and characters to think about. Yes, I want to have my cake and eat it! But for 40-odd years I’ve grafted.
“The really hard work was in the early years, in repertory theatre when you rehearsed in the day and did a show every night. Whenever I work in the theatre, I’m so disciplined.
I have no life! My focus is on the show every day.
“So it’s very hard doing TV. I think, ‘I should be working a lot harder.’ That’s what years in theatre does to you.”
The pleasures she shares with Jim are gentle ones.
“I love a day out at Lord’s!” she says. “Jim will get up at 3am to watch a cricket match on telly, but I won’t. And my therapy is walking the dog.” (They have a 12-year-old rescue cairn terrier cross, Molly.)
Sadly, Imelda’s mum died just before Imelda was nominated for an Oscar. “It’s really annoying that your parents have to b****r off,” she says. “Jim’s mum is
100, though. She’s in a nursing home, but she lived alone until she was 97. She’s not free with her praise, but she’s kept every one of Jim’s newspaper cuttings.”
On cue, Jim pops back into the room to drive Imelda home. They have another quick tour of the garden, then Imelda skips back inside to say goodbye.
“Actors are grown-ups who dress up for a living,” she agrees. “We’re playful. Hurrah!”