‘I can’t read music and I can’t sing. But I am VERY good at taking naps!’
FELICITY KENDAL TELLS JOHN NATHAN ABOUT TAKING ON HER FIRST STARRING ROLE IN A MUSICAL – AFTER 70 YEARS IN SHOWBIZ
OVER the course of a career spanning more than 70 years, Felicity Kendal has only ever suffered from stage fright once. She got it so badly she literally had to be pushed onto the stage. But no, this didn’t happen when she opened in her first musical, Kathleen Marshall’s award-laden Broadway revival of the Cole Porter classic Anything Goes, at the Barbican.
In the hit show starring Sutton Foster, Felicity plays Evangeline Harcourt, an American high-society mother of a debutante, who is engaged to an English Lord but in love with an American broker.
But Felicity had no first-night nerves even though, as she puts it, ‘I can’t read music, and I can’t sing.’
Felicity’s job in the show is simple – to be funny. And it is something she achieves with serene ease. It’s a talent which Britain has loved her forever since she starred as Barbara in the cosy 1970s sitcom The Good Life, opposite Richard Briers.
No, the stage fright came when she was about to go on stage in Shakespeare’s blood-soaked tragedy, Macbeth. ‘I was nine and playing the little boy Fleance who gets murdered,’ recalls Felicity, speaking from her home in Chelsea.
The show was the first of many
childhood performances
with her parents’ theatre company, which performed Shakespeare all over India. ‘I remember being so terrified I actually ran out of the theatre and my father came after me and pushed me onto the stage,’ says Felicity, with that bubbly giggle which, in the minds of millions of fans, will always be Barbara’s laugh.
‘And that was it,’ she adds, summing up in just four words the award-winning career in television and theatre that followed.
We are talking on her day off from the demands of the musical. ‘It’s a six-day-a-week job, as theatre always is, with two shows Thursdays and Saturdays, she says. ‘So by Monday, we’re pretty knackered.’
On two-show days she would normally find somewhere to sleep in the very few hours between the matinee and the evening performance. ‘I’m very good at lying down and having naps,’ she says. ‘It’s a habit I learned as a very young single parent working in the West End or on tour.
‘And when I was at the Trafalgar Studios in The Last Cigarette [in 2009] I spent every summer afternoon between shows lying in the grass in Green Park. In fact I’m slightly pissed off that there is nowhere like that near the Barbican.’
For a whole generation raised in homes where Felicity was a regular presence as an uninvited but welcome guest in the nation’s living rooms, even the mildest swearing comes as a surprise from this sweetest of national treasures.
Felicity used to push back against the goody-twoshoes impression the public had formed of her – as anyone who happened to be watching the current reruns of Ruby Wax interviews and sketches from the 1980s will have seen. In one episode, Felicity swapped her goody-two shoes for a pair of leather boots in a sketch in which Felicity appeared as a dominatrix. ‘Oh, I loved that!’ she says when I remind her of the skit. ‘Well, I love Ruby with a passion. I think she’s a clever woman and a joy to work for.’
The whole point was to show Felicity in a way would shock her adoring fans. ‘That’s what comedy is,’ says Felicity, who fears we are at risk of losing our sense of humour amid what some people see as the intolerance of cancel culture.
‘If we become so politically correct that we can’t have someone taking the piss out of you or me I think we’re going down a really slippery slope of righteousness,’ she says. ‘We have made such advances in understanding and accepting the differences of people. But if we can’t laugh at the differences, how are you going to see half of Shakespeare? Because you’re going to be offended by some bloody thing.’
That image of living an irredeemably well-behaved life became more rounded with news of her two divorces, first from fellow actor Drew Henley in 1979, with whom she had her first son, and then from director Michael Rudman in 1990, with whom she had her second. She has been back with Michael for many years now, without remarrying.
At the age of 82 he had a bad brush with Covid. ‘He was seriously ill in hospital,’ says Felicity.
She also became ill, though not as seriously as her partner, but says there were ‘certainly two weeks of real struggle’.
They are both recovered now and one silver lining of the pandemic is that it led to her joining the cast of this mad-cap musical set on an ocean liner, where she stars alongside Robert Lindsay as gangster Moonface Martin and Gary Wilmot as a Mr Magoo-type tycoon called Elisha Whitney. ‘The pandemic was a major reason why I decided to try something I hadn’t done before,’ explains Felicity.
‘When the chance came, and the death toll was rising, I just thought, “This is the show to come back with.”’
‘The pandemic was a reason why I decided to try something I hadn’t done before’