Miriam’s outrageous memories How I heard a shocking claim about Jacqueline
There’s never been a British star quite like Miriam Margolyes. And there’s NEVER been a memoir so packed with eye-popping, hilarious and shockingly candid stories about the A-list she’s mingled with. So brace yourself for...
WHEN I was born in Oxford in 1941, at the darkest moment of the war, my parents were convinced that Britain was about to lose. Since then, I’ve skipped from moment to moment. I’ve travelled through every continent bar Antarctica. I’ve slept with a curious variety of humans.
I entered a precarious profession where a short, fat, Jewish girl with no neck dared to think she could stand on a stage and be successful. I’ve completed more than 500 jobs and relished every minute of them.
However, having been a working actress for over 50 years, it is a decidedly odd feeling to know that, whatever else I do, however acclaimed or successful I am, I will go to my grave best known for playing Professor Pomona Sprout in two of the Harry Potter movies.
It made a great difference to my career, making me more famous than I ever thought possible. Fans follow me in the street; people ask to have their photographs taken — selfies, as they call them — standing next to Professor Sprout.
Even now, I have to get photographs printed to sign and send out to my Harry Potter devotees but, if I’m honest, which I must be, I fell asleep during the premieres of both films.
And whenever I glimpse scenes on television, I’m never absolutely sure what’s happening — even in the ones I’m actually in! For that reason, I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a single Harry Potter film and I’ve still never read the books.
When I was first interviewed for the part, I confessed I didn’t know much about the series but if they wanted someone who could act as a teacher, there was no question that I could play the part.
‘I give good teacher,’ I told them. They gave me a page of script to read; I didn’t think that it was terribly distinguished writing. In some ways it was rather banal, actually, but I read it and that was that.
It was filmed mostly in the cavernous Warner Brothers Leavesden Studios, a converted aircraft factory just outside Watford. We also shot scenes in the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, and, of course, at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, which is used for Hogwarts. It was fun being on location. For the Alnwick scenes they put me, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, and Kenneth Branagh all in the same lovely hotel. At the end of a long, often freezing cold, day’s filming, Richard Harris liked to be welcomed by a roaring fire in an open grate, so the hotel staff had to keep it blazing all day because no one knew what time we might finish.
Maggie Smith got the room with the four-poster bed, but she thoroughly deserved it.
On the first day I came down for breakfast, Richard Harris was having his toast and marmalade at another table with Maggie Smith. I said to him, brightly: ‘Good morning,’ and he growled ‘F*** off’.
I didn’t know that he had leukaemia, so I was quite offended at the time. I kept myself to myself after that, at least where Dumbledore was concerned.
It was always a little scary to be working with Maggie Smith. I am very fond of her, but her reputation is justified; she is a great actress with a distinguished career, she loves to laugh and she’s deliciously witty and jokey. But there is that other side to her, which is biting.
Luckily, Maggie and I got on. Sometimes she would say: ‘Oh, come and sit with me, Miriam, I’m bored.’ I would go and sit with her and we would talk and laugh. She also had a nicer trailer than I did.
I can’t say if she and the other main actors felt similarly underwhelmed by Harry Potter, but even if they didn’t consider the books the greatest works of literature in the world, they took the work seriously. They’re rattling good stories and they were unbelievably popular, something we actors respect because the law of the box office is the first law of the movie industry.
My FIRST brush with Hollywood was in 1980 when I was called to audition for a small part as Secretary of the Communist Party in Warren Beatty’s Reds, much of which was filmed in England.
Mr Beatty, who according to his biographer has had sex with 12,775 women (a number he disputes), insisted that he could only meet me in his trailer at lunchtime. I knocked at the door, he called ‘come in’, then looked at me, up, down, up, quite slowly and said: ‘Do you f***?’ ‘yes, but not you,’ I replied. ‘Why is that?’ asked Warren. ‘Because I am a lesbian,’ I said. He grinned and said: ‘Can I watch?’
I said: ‘Pull yourself together and get on with the interview.’ I got the job. I mooned at him once and the expression of shocked surprise frozen on his face still tickles me even now, but he completely deserved it. Mooning is a powerful tool; a bottom is not threatening; it’s rude, amusing but unmistakeable.
I can’t remember why I did it, but probably because he made Diane Keaton do 50 takes of a shot she did perfectly well first time.
Diane had refused his marriage proposal and he took it out on her. She was completely delightful, totally without grandeur. One of my top ‘faves’.
I HAD never thought of trying to make it in America. It was the glittering centre of the entertainment industry, way out of my reach.
But in 1988 I received a Los Angeles Critics Circle award for playing Flora Finching in Christine Edzard’s film, Little Dorrit.
I was then in my late 40s and thought to myself, ‘They’re prepared to give me, a completely unknown English woman, an award and they’ve never heard of me? This is the prod I needed. I’m off!’
I was probably the fattest person
THE most sobering and memorable thing I’ve ever heard was related to me by Margaret Branch, a therapist I saw during the Eighties. We subsequently became friends and one day she said: ‘I want to tell you something, and I don’t want you to speak about it until after I’m dead.’
She told me that another of her customers had been Jacqueline Du Pré, the renowned British cellist.
She asked if I had heard of her, which, of course, I had. Jacqueline was one of the greatest cellists of all time; her great gift was like a meteor flashing across the music world until, at 28, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; a horrible, slow, debilitating decline.
‘We were friends for many, many years,’ Margaret said.
‘One day Jacqueline said to me: “Margaret, if I wanted to kill myself, would you help me?” And I said: “Of course I would.” Because I would.’
One day Jacqueline had telephoned her.
‘Margaret, remember what I said? What I asked you, and you said you would...? I want to do it today. I’ve given my staff the day off. I want you to come over.’
Jacqueline’s husband, the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, had a new relationship in Paris and I think he just couldn’t bear to see what had happened to Jacqueline; how the disease had transformed this beautiful, gifted young woman.
‘I had a key,’ Margaret told me. ‘I took along a syringe and the liquid. I let myself into the house. I went up to her room where she was in bed and we talked for a bit.
‘Then I said: “Are you absolutely sure that you want me to do this?” Jacqueline said: “Yes. I am. And I can only trust you to do it for me.”
‘I was a trained nurse during the war,’ Margaret said. ‘I knew what to do . . . If you want to help someone to die, or to murder someone, without a trace, you inject them above their hairline.’ I always remember her saying that.
She continued: ‘So, of course,
I kissed her, and I injected her. Then I looked around, checked that there was no trace of my presence, and I let myself out of the house.
‘Just hours later, of course, Jacqueline’s close friends sat with her as she died, and nobody ever knew it was me.’
I felt honoured that Margaret should tell me, but I found it shocking; the most sobering thing I’d ever heard.
I suppose she felt that she didn’t want that knowledge to go with her to her grave without anybody knowing what Jacqueline had asked of her, and yet, although she was obviously deeply affected by it, she related it to me entirely matter-of-factly.
She believed that it was the highest mark of love for Jacqueline that she could show, to release her from the horrors of her illness.
Perhaps telling me was the ultimate proof of our friendship, because, obviously, if she had been found out, she would have been sentenced for murder. I hope by telling this now, I have kept my promise to Margaret.