‘Don’t punish old men for once patting a bottom...’
ONE OF Britain’s best-loved actresses says she’d like the #Metoo campaign to end.
Gwentaylor, who starred as Peggy Armstrong in Heartbeat and Anne Foster in Coronation Street, reckons the movement against sexual harassment and assault by allegedly predatory men has gone far enough.
Gwen said she does not want to see men punished for patting women’s bottoms decades ago as “it was a different world” then.
Now 80, Gwen says of the many victims – some of them famous actresses – who’ve made historical allegations: “I’m proud of them but I want it to stop. I just think it’s going on, and going back so many years now. I’m very proud of the people who came out and spoke about it – that is wonderful – but I don’t want old men to be punished any more. It was a different world.
“I had my bottom patted and things like that, which you just took in your stride.
“I wouldn’t want somebody who had their bottom patted in 1960 to come out and get that old man.” Derby-born Gwen, a late-starter to acting after working in a bank, says she never had any #Metoo-type experiences. “I think that’s only because I’m not attractive enough probably,” she laughs. “I do remember once somebody saying, ‘Well, you know why I’ve given you this job, don’t you? Cos I fancy you’. I said something like, ‘Oh rubbish!’ and walked away.” But Gwen, who stars in the UK tour of new play The Croft next year, acknowledges pressure on actresses to strip for love scenes.
“I did take my clothes off once, for a wonderful play by Peter Nichols. I got the script and it said, ‘She gets out of bed...’ I decided I would go ahead with it. I was much younger and really rather attractive, so it wasn’t a terrible thing.
“To this day I remember them saying to me, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a closed set...nobody’s allowed to come in once you’ve taken your things off and got into bed’.
“So I was protected then. I’m not sure that would happen now – you’d have half the press there probably! And you certainly would if it was me with my clothes off because, believe me, I ain’t pretty any more!”
Living in London with playwright second husband Graham Reid, Gwen jokes about what it would have been like to be a sex symbol. “I would quite like to have tried it, yes. I just don’t have the equipment. I weigh the same as most of them, but it’s all distributed differently!”
The Croft is touring from January 22