RIDING THE WAVE
Celia Imrie enjoys fresh success
Celia Imrie was 22 when she made her first trip abroad, to Australia, as an assistant stage manager (‘‘otherwise known as a gofer, teagirl and general dogsbody’’) on a Royal Shakespeare Company global tour in 1975.
Her gut instinct told her she should be seeking an acting role but the production’s famous cast – Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden, Patrick Stewart and Constance Chapman – was too hard to refuse. Plus, she would get to leave England for the first time.
Taken by the sand and sun, Imrie fell asleep while visiting Manly Beach and awoke to find an energetic Great Dane thundering towards her, and she was left with a badly bruised and swollen face.
When she delivered tea to the actors’ dressing rooms that evening she invented a Danish boyfriend to take the blame for her injuries, while others in the cast and crew were left believing she had been attacked by a shark.
It is just one of a library of anecdotes that Imrie has collected during a lifetime dedicated to performance and adventure.
Depending on your age, location and taste, you might best know Imrie as Miss Babs in the sketch Acorn Antiques on the series Victoria Wood As Seen On TV (1985-1987), the over-zealous HR-manager Philippa Moorcroft in Dinnerladies (1998-2000), the gravystirring Una Alconbury in Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), the major’s wife who needs ‘‘considerably bigger buns’’ to hide her breasts behind jam tarts in Calendar Girls (2003), the unpleasant Mrs Selma Quickly in Nanny McPhee (2005) or the flirty Madge Hardcastle in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015).
‘‘I am forever delighted and excited by new places and there are many places in the world that I would love to go to,’’ Imrie, 65, says, in plummy tones, on the phone from London (she divides her time between living in Notting Hill and Nice in France). ‘‘I remember my mother saying that to be well read and well travelled makes you interesting. It gives you something to talk about.’’
It is sage advice, but it also seems unlikely Imrie would have trouble finding something to talk about. Her latest film Finding Your Feet – she plays the pot-smoking, dancing, bohemian Bif – has recently hit cinema screens.
And somehow between the string of hit shows and movies, Imrie has found the time to be a best-selling author, with her third novel Sail Away in bookstores this month.
Suzy Marshall, one of the heroines in Sail Away, is a former star of a popular British TV series who has struggled to find auditions since she turned 60. But this is not a case of art imitating life – a drought of roles is not something Imrie has lately had to face.
‘‘Isn’t it lucky? I think it is luck that suddenly with trailblazing films like Calendar Girls and Exotic Marigold writers are thinking that there are parts for women in their 60s. I am truly lucky to have hit on this phase because I would say fairly confidently that 25 years ago that was not the case,’’ Imrie says.
Imrie would probably not have experienced such career longevity if her childhood obsession with becoming a professional ballerina had been realised.
Celia Diana Savile Imrie was the fourth of five siblings (who all share the name of Shakespearian characters) in Guildford, Surrey, in 1952.
In her memoir The Happy Hoofer, Imrie describes her mother, Diana, as a ‘‘true-blue Burke’s Peerage-listed aristocrat’’ who was descended directly from royalty, with the Queen Mother, William the Conqueror and, probably even, Helen of Troy on her family tree. Her father, David, a doctor born in Glasgow, was from a ‘‘poor, hardworking Scottish family’’.
The pair met when David was working as a chauffeur, and they married despite a 20-year age gap and stern disapproval from Diana’s family. Imrie and her siblings saw little of their parents, and were raised by a nanny who kept them on a strict schedule.
From a young age, Imrie developed a passion for dance and she never doubted her future as a ballerina. When she was 11 she auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, and subsequently discovered a rejection letter buried in her mother’s drawer that read: ‘‘Celia is very good and advanced for her age, but sadly she is going to be too big ever to become a dancer.’’
In a bid to make herself smaller Imrie stopped eating and, at 14, her helpless parents sent her to a hospital where she was placed under the care of the notorious and now discredited psychiatrist William Sargant. Sargant used electro-convulsive shock therapy and insulin-induced comas to treat his patients, and in her memoir Imrie describes how he still frequents her nightmares.
Two things, Imrie writes, helped her find a path to recovery: a nurse describing her as stealing the bed of a ‘‘truly sick’’ child, and her dance teacher saying she had come to say goodbye because she had been told that Imrie did not have long to live.
Imrie left school at 16 and studied to become a dance teacher, before deciding to enter the professional theatre world.
It was playing a ‘‘Citizen of Transylvania’’ in a pantomime Sleeping Beauty in 1975 that Imrie met Victoria Wood, who was in the
"I never thought I would get to this age. It felt so miles away. No, I could never think of not working."
Celia Imrie
audience with a mutual friend.
Wood would become a lifechanging and lifelong friend for Imrie, casting her as Miss Babs in the sketch Acorn Antiques. The sketch was a parody of a lowproduction soap opera, and Imrie jokes that she was probably cast because Wood genuinely believed she was a bad actress.
Miss Babs attracted a cult following and the pair went on to work on several projects together, including Dinnerladies and Pat and Margaret.
Imrie says she had no idea that Wood was battling cancer, and was in America working when she learned of her death, aged 62, in 2016.
‘‘We had a wonderful time when we worked together and I was extremely proud to be in her gang. Really the work she has made goes on and a whole generation has adored her as we we all did who worked for her. I am extremely grateful to her for the chances she gave me. I always will be,’’ Imrie says.
In 2017, Imrie lost another close friend – the father of her son, the British actor Benjamin Whitrow (best known for playing Mr Bennet in the BBC’s 1995 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), who died aged 80.
At a young age Imrie says she was determined never to marry, but she always wanted a child. Imrie approached Whitrow asking him to father a child with her. In her memoir, she describes how she ‘‘laid out [her] terms’’ as they walked along the beach: she would not ask him for anything and she would be responsible for all choices about the child’s life. Imrie gave birth to their son Angus, now 23 and a successful actor, in 1994 when she was 42.
‘‘It is very sad when somebody you love is just not in the world any more and I’m like a child. I find it terribly difficult and it was for Angus particularly because he was working on his film,’’ she says.
‘‘But like when my mother died, strangely work does slightly help because you have a routine and you try to concentrate your mind on something else but it is hard, very hard.’’
Routine might help soothe the soul, but Imrie isn’t one for settling into a groove. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel brought her fans and fame well beyond her traditional heartland in Britain.
With the film as her calling card, Imrie decided to head to Hollywood a few years ago. It was, she says, ‘‘like starting again’’, with rounds of interviews and agent and manager meetings. There were disappointments, she says, before she landed a role in the television series Better Things.
‘‘The thing about Hollywood is that I love it for its glamour but the truth of it is you kind of have to be working because the whole heartbeat of the city is all about film and television and working and so if you are working you’re kind of in the gang, but if you’re not it’s a rather tricky place because it is sort of lonely,’’ she says.
‘‘Anyway, luckily I managed to land this job. It did take a huge gamble to go to America without a definite job.’’
Imrie has also managed to migrate her considerable film audience to her fiction, having now written three novels that share an interest in the lives of older women. Her characters, she says, are all roles she would like to play and discussions are under way to make film adaptations.
The biggest audience for her books must be people of my generation – the over-50s – as they are the principal characters in her novels and she writes so well about that time of life.
‘‘But really the age range is much broader as they are for anyone with a sense of humour and also of course there’s Celia’s legion of admirers who are people of all ages,’’ Bloomsbury Publishing’s editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle says.
‘‘Because of the huge popularity of Celia as an actress we weren’t really surprised when her first novel went straight into the bestseller list.
‘‘We also knew that everyone who enjoyed such films as Calendar Girls and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel would adore these novels. We were pretty sure that considerable audience would come to her fiction. And they did!’’
Her first two novels were set in the French Riviera, but after the Bastille Day attacks in Nice in 2016, Imrie decided to no longer use it as a setting.
Imrie was walking along the Promenade des Anglais when a lorry ploughed into the crowd, killing 86 people. She told The Guardian, ‘‘It was a miracle for me that I survived’’.
Her latest novel is set on the Queen Mary 2 as it crosses the Atlantic. It is a trip that takes about six nights from Southampton to New York, and one that Imrie has made several times.
‘‘I hate to fly so whenever I go to America if I can I go on the Queen Mary 2... you feel like a film star and, for me, it is the only way to travel. It is just luxury and invigorating. I absolutely love the sea.’’
But a life of cruising is not one Imrie is ready to sign up to just yet. She doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as having ‘‘made it’’ or ‘‘got there’’ – which is good news for those who want to see her keep rocking the boat.
‘‘I never thought I would get to this age. It felt so many miles away. No, I could never think of not working and I have always, I suppose, been looking forward and up but I also truly love not knowing what is going to happen next.’’
- Sydney Morning Herald