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NOW WE’RE A DOWNTON DOUBLE ACT
As she stars in a harrowing new true-life TV murder drama, Imelda Staunton tells of joining husband Jim Carter in the Downton film – and how she’ll be taking on Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess
You might imagine Imelda Staunton – who inhabits so convincingly the dark, tortured characters she often plays – would be melancholic. Actually, what strikes me forcibly is her sheer capacity for joy. Her default mode is cheerful, her delight in life child-like. ‘Look at me! They’ve turned me into some kind of model,’ she laughs as she teeters around in the floaty dress and high heels chosen by our stylist 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 like Dick Emery in her stilettos.
Imelda, who is so tiny and fineboned she’s almost doll- like, is thrilled too by the house and garden where we’re shooting. She marvels at the hand-painted walls. She trips out to look at the plants. Then she summons her husband (actor Jim Carter, celebrated as the loveable, lugubrious butler Carson of Downton Abbey) to drive over from their house nearby in north-west London to see it.
Imelda and Jim have been married for 36 years. ‘We’re very fortunate because we sti ll 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 affects a bored voice.
In the hall, Jim’s familiar rumbling baritone announces his arrival. Both he and Imelda, 63, will be appearing in the much-anticipated Downton Abbey film next month in which 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. When I mention 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 never appeared 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,’ says Imelda, whose character arrives in the Queen’s entourage.
‘ How you wer e 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.’ He laughs.
‘He doesn’t pour me a single glass of claret!’ confirms Imelda. I ask if they shared a luxury Winnebago off set, but Imelda laughs. ‘No, 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.’
I wonder if Jim waits on her, butlerlike, at home. ‘No!’ she says, pretending outrage. ‘I can’t get any service out of him. 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 mar riage, 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. 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 she has nothing to prove, having been garlanded with awards (she’s won four Oliviers – three for Best Actress In A Musical for Into The Woods, Sweeney Todd and Gypsy – as well as a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination for her title role in the 2004
film Vera Drake, about a woman who performed illegal abortions). A generation of children know her too 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, an only child. ‘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.’
Later this month she will co-star with Sherlock’s Martin Freeman in a six-part drama for ITV, A Confession.
‘Jim doesn’t wait on me – at home I’m below stairs’
The true-life drama entwines the two stories of neighbouring families in Swindon, who – although they don’t know each other – become enmeshed in a shared tragedy when police start searching for their daughters.
Imelda plays Karen Edwards, the mother of Becky Godden, 20, a drug addict and street prostitute who disappeared in 2003. Karen, a loving mum, tried repeatedly to get Becky into rehab, but had lost touch with her when another young woman – 22-year-old office administrator Sian O’Callaghan – vanished eight years later in 2011 after a night out. When Sian failed to Imelda as Lady Bagshaw with Geraldine James as Queen Mary in the Downton film return to the home she shared with her boyfriend, a 15-minute walk away, he raised the alarm. It was when the police – led by senior investigating officer Steve Fulcher ( played by Mar t in) – began searching for Sian that Karen became gripped by the awful certainty that her daughter’s disappearance was connected. In the drama, Fulcher edges closer to their chief suspect, taxi driver Christopher Halliwell, played by Doc Martin’s Joe Absolom. Fulcher elicits a confession from Halliwell about Sian – and another about the whereabouts of Becky’s body. But his methods are unconventional: he does not caution his suspect and the confession is inadmissible. Fulcher is then investigated for breaching procedural rules. ‘ Karen campaigned for him not to be struck off,’ says Imelda. ‘She channelled her pain at Becky’s death into supporting him.’ Imelda visited Karen as she prepared for the role, and admits she was reticent about the meeting, fearing she was intruding on private grief. ‘I didn’t want to pry. But Karen was an open book and she poured forth the story. A part of her died with her daughter. I looked at her and thought, “I don’t know how you live with it.” She will never get over it. I was worried about stirring that grief up again. I felt quite a heavy weight of responsibility.’ Imelda is a parent too, and she talks with restrained pride about her only child Bessie, 25, also an actor. ‘She’s our biggest joy,’ she says. ‘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 when she was born] 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 Violet Woodhouse – a young woman in search of a husband – in Beecham House, the ITV period drama dubbed The Delhi Downton. Set in 18th century India, it also featured 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.’ I wonder if she and Jim discouraged 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 sort of personality you want on a set. She has great, positive energy. She knows it’s important to always be good to everyone involved.’
I ask if they instilled 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 º, 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 laughs. ‘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.”’
I ask if she minds her ‘down-toearth’ label and she replies crisply, ‘There’s no point. 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 the constant use of mobile phones. ‘Sometimes phones appear between every take,’ she says. ‘And, 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. We have tea breaks and lunch for texting, but everyone seems to have to be connected to their phones.’
Her impatience with the over-use of mobiles extends to other aspects of today’s technological world. ‘I don’t always do selfies,’ she admits. ‘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 playing unglamorous roles – think of 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 compliment about her skin, 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 has, of course, no intention of
‘What on earth do people do with selfies?’
retiring. ‘Will I work forever? I bloody well hope so! Hopefully good actors get better and better.’ She’s 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 exclaims. ‘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 12year-old rescue Cairn terrier cross, Molly.
We reflect on parents. 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. She’s from Harrogate,’ she says, as if that explains everything. ‘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, playfully.
‘Actors are grown-ups who dress up for a living,’ she agrees. ‘We’re playful. Hurrah!’
A Confession comes to ITV later this month. The Downton Abbey film will be out on 13 September.
‘I grafted for 40 years, so I only do roles I want to now’