I’d never heard of Miranda, but the audience laughed so hard they drowned us out!
As she returns to serious theatre, the unlikely sitcom star reveals her MeToo moments, talks of rebuilding her life after bereavement and ponders the mixed blessing of versatility
VERSATILITY is Patricia Hodge’s watchword. Read through her CV and you’re struck by its huge variety: Look Back In Anger and A Little Night Music. Rumpole of the Bailey and an Olivier-winning turn in Money. Jemima Shore and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. And then there’s her scene-stealing turn in Miranda.
She laughs when I suggest she’s clearly a good picker of parts.
“I’ve always encouraged my agent to help me turn corners all the time,” she says.
“I try to fight against typecasting. Having said that, it sometimes means you’re shooting yourself in the foot. The trouble with versatility is that it can confuse casting directors.”
It’s impossible now to imagine anyone else in the role but who, for instance, would have thought of Patricia as Penny, Miranda’s gloriously over-the-top matchmaking monster of a mother?
And yet, her repeated cry: “Such fun!” as her cowed daughter cringed in the background became a national catchphrase. How did she land the role?
“Someone recommended me,” says Patricia, “but I must admit I hadn’t come across Miranda Hart at that stage so I rang comedian Jack Whitehall who knew her and he said she was good news.”
APPARENTLY Miranda, the writer as well as the star, was herself very doubtful it would work. “She always said it would be watched by 15 of her best friends and her dog. But it took off almost straight away.
“The studio audience were really laughing,” she adds.
“In fact, one woman laughed so loudly, she had to be asked not to come to the next recording because she was dominating the soundtrack.”
Another cherished project was playing Jeremy Thorpe’s mother in the much-lauded A Very English Scandal.
“Hugh Grant was magnificent. It irritated me was when people said he had finally proved he could act. He’d been pigeonholed as a slightly hopeless, floppy-fringed fop – extremely hard to do, incidentally – but just watch him as Thorpe. Every hesitation, every physical tic was dreamed up by him.”
Patricia hasn’t quite had the year she expected. After a quiet summer, she can be seen next in a revival of the recently deceased Peter Nichols’s seminal play, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which looks at the impact of raising a severely disabled child on a married couple.
Claire Skinner and Toby Stephens play the troubled parents and Patricia is his mother.
“She’s a bit provincial but socially aspirant,” she says. “I liked the idea of stretching my muscles in that direction.”
A couple of films have been postponed until 2020. “And that meant I’ve done rather more
travelling than I’d planned,” she says. “It’s been lovely. I visited friends in Spain and Ibiza. I went to Sardinia and then up to Edinburgh for the festival which is always wonderful.”
The latter was part-fun and part-family loyalty. She was there to support The Pin, a comedy duo made up of Patricia’s elder son Alex Owen, 30, and his stage partner Ben Ashenden.
“It’s a particular sort of torture to watch your child standing up and trying to make an audience laugh,” she admits.
“My heart is always in my mouth. I’m too close to it to have an objective opinion.” Alex got married in March to a theatre director called Emily. Might she and her mother-in-law ever work together?
“I’d love to,” says Patricia, without hesitation.
Younger son, Edward, 27, is about to do voluntary work over
‘People react in different ways when they lose a partner and we’d been together for 40 years’
seas but read music at university and it remains his first love. “He’d like to be Bob Dylan but that vacancy has been filled,” Patricia smiles.
She’ll be 73 at the end of September although, truly, she doesn’t look it.
“I’m a natural redhead and we’re lucky with our skin,” she says.
Patricia is a celebrated beauty, which must have resulted in a few MeToo moments over the years.
“I’ve never known a Harvey Weinstein-type situation,” she says. Then she adds, alarmingly: “But I was jumped on a couple of times. I dealt with it immediately by simply pushing them away and telling them not to be so stupid. “Thank God, people have now got the courage to stand up and say something. “Where it goes wrong is when the pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction.
“Am I not allowed to stand up and give you a kiss when you walk in the room? In the end, it comes down to common sense.”
In almost any other profession, of course, she’d have qualified for her gold carriage clock by now. Patricia winces. “I think to keep working is a real blessing. The truth is that performers don’t ever want to stop performing.”
That said, she’s become good, she says, at keeping herself occupied during fallow periods.
“In another life, I’d like to have been an architect. I’m also keen on interiors.”
It’s an interest that was something of a comfort during a difficult time in her life.
In 2016, Patricia’s husband, music publisher Peter Owen, died after years in the grip of dementia.
Before then, she had taken “the extremely difficult decision” to put him in a home when he no longer recognised the people he loved.
“Different people react in different ways when they lose a partner and we’d been together for 40 years,” she says.
“I made up my mind to sell the family home in Barnes and move into something completely dissimilar. I didn’t want a mini-version of what we’d had. I wanted this to be the next chapter in my life.”
THERE followed a prolonged period of sleeping in friends’ spare bedrooms before she bought a converted loft apartment. “In the end, I moved out for what should have been six months but which expanded into well over twice that time as the
builders went to work.” It’s where she lives now, “happily alone”.
In 2017, Patricia was awarded an OBE for services to drama. “It was the time of Mrs May calling a snap election,” she recalls. “A flimsy envelope came through the door saying the contents were important. I thought it was a political pamphlet. Then I opened it to discover my name had been put forward for an OBE.
“I was so stunned, I immediately put it in a drawer and didn’t tell anybody until the night before the announcement.”
The investiture took place at Buckingham Palace where she was accompanied by her sons and her “very excited” sister, Valerie.
“I remember Edward saying how great it would be if I got the Queen, which I told him was highly unlikely. But I did!
“She’d been very well briefed and the whole ceremony was stagemanaged so beautifully.
“It was thrilling but I was so nervous, my heart was hammering in my chest. I couldn’t help thinking of Peter at that moment, though. I know he’d have been so proud.”
● A Day in the Death of Joe Egg opens on September 19, atgtickets.com/trafalgarstudios/ 0844 871 7632