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Ruby Wax on taming her anger, why she traces it to her childhood and how her husband acts as the perfect antidote to her fiery temper
ADDING carrots to a cake has been fashionable for years as they help keep it moist but beetroot works deliciously well with a chocolate-based cake too.
You can serve this as a dessert with some creme fraiche or as an afternoon tea treat with a lovely cup of Earl Grey. Heavenly. far-off footsteps of despair, I batten down the hatches, quickly unplugging from contact with the rest of the world, both onscreen and in person.”
Today though, Ruby, 64, stops short of saying that she’s mellowed.
She said: “I don’t really like that word. It shows an overall losing your edge. I think my edge is better – but then I pull it back more.
“I still get angry about stuff but it subsides quicker.
“If a traffic cop stops me, the full reptilian rage will hit, but it will go down quicker.
“Rage is addictive and it tastes good. You can repeat the story to regain the anger, but now I put the brakes on and don’t repeat the story, unless it’s funny. If you can turn it into comedy, your body’s in great shape.”
Following her one-woman Frazzled tour, based on her previous book, she’ll be working on a new pilot show with material based on How to Be Human, which she wrote with a monk and a neuroscientist.
The show will delve into evolution, why we think what we think and feel what we feel, exploring emotions, addictions and relationships.
The monk and the neuroscientist will feature in the second half in conversation with Ruby, who has a master’s degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy from Oxford University. It may all sound a bit dry, but she is terrifically funny at recounting her own flaws to get her points across.
Talking about her husband, TV producer and director Ed Bye, she said: “I chose Ed because he had Grade-A sanity genes and I felt that would break the chain of thousands of years of Wax madness in one fell swoop.”
They’ve been married for 28 years, after meeting when he directed her in the ITV comedy Girls on Top, with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, and the couple have three grown-up children.
In an age when more than one in three marriages ends in divorce, and celebrity partnerships are ever more tenuous, how has it worked for them? “We have totally
An epiphany is a good deal. I understood my roots. That’s worth 50 years of therapy