‘Children now want fame...I just wanted to act well’
Joanna’s tips to youngsters
DAME Joanna Lumley says youngsters often ask her how to be famous rather than a great actor.
But Joanna, 77, said she did not seek to be well-known as she sees acting as a passion. She said: “Anybody who has worked in our world knows you work ceaselessly to learn a play, to get things right or to go out on tour, you work and work and work all the time.
“I don’t see it as work, because if what you’re doing you adore, you might be exhausted, you might get two hours sleep somewhere with rats but you do it because you love [it]. “Some people only want to be movie stars. Children come up to me and say, ‘How can I be famous?’ Because that’s all they want to do. I never wanted to be famous. I wanted to act well.”
She added that leaving drama schools such as LAMDA gives people the “gold cup but it doesn’t give you a job”. Joanna added: “This is the whole thing in life, people who go to university and come out with a degree, it doesn’t get you a job.
“The only thing that gives you a job is working. You must start out, I believe, in the most humble way, accept everything you can and get to know your business.”
Joanna also spoke about acting for television compared to theatre, saying people no longer “project” their voices or emotions.
Frightening
She said: “In the theatre, we used to have old rules that you have to be able to be heard at the back of let’s say a 1,000-seater.” She said that has been taken away by microphones, adding: “Remain breathing and you’ve got a performance.”
Speaking on the Joanna And The Maestro podcast, she said despite her success, she looks in the mirror and wants to be someone else. “In my dreams and in my head, I’m somebody [different]. Which is why I always wear lots of make-up, and I love changing my hair.”
She said as people age, they look “frightening” when not “thickly painted” so she gets up “extra early to put on lashings of stuff”.