WHY JOANNA
During a career spanning more than 50 years, Joanna Lumley has been a top model, a Bond girl, a New Avenger and, of course, the drug-addicted, harddrinking, man-eating fashion editor Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous.
She is TV royalty and has also become friends with the real thing, meeting the Queen many times and getting to know several members of the Royal F amily.
But when those two worlds collide, specifically in the shape of hit show The Crown, Joanna was less than impressed.
The 75-year-old admits she watched some older episodes about the Queen’s early life as she did not know anything about it but then things changed.
She says: “Suddenly it began to get closer and closer and they had people acting as Prince Charles, as Camilla Parker Bowles, as Princess Anne.
“But I know them all and I know that’s not how they speak or what they said or did. People say, ‘Oh, well everybody knows that it’s made up’. People don’t, people think it’s the truth.
“So I decided not to watch it anymore because I have some loyalty, as one would to anybody they know and like and are lucky enough to be friendly with.
“It’s rather ghastly. I mean think of somebody imagining what you say and then it becoming something spread around the world and people believing it’s the gospel truth. It must be agonising.
“So I thought I should step away from it. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it because it’s made up.”
Joanna, who has just written a book, A Queen for All Seasons: A Celebration of Queen Elizabeth II on her Platinum Jubilee, adds: “If you do meet any member of the Royal Family, they are so kind and so friendly and so polite and not grand.
“You’ll find kindly, goodhearted people.”
The multitalented star has written books but had not considered one about the Queen until publishers approached her.
Lumley, a selfdescribed “Army brat”, was a schoolgirl in Malaysia at the time of the 1953 Coronation, which she watched on television.
Since then she has followed the monarch’s
AVENGERS
With her co-star Gareth Hunt
life, admiring her devotion to duty. Lumley received an OBE from her in 1995. Speaking via Zoom from her London home, she says: “I think we are very honoured and very lucky to have the Queen. “What I wanted to do is to show how an ordinary woman, because we are all ordinary people really, has made herself extraordinary through shared dutiful determination to do what’s right. “She’s never faulted and never failed. My