‘What’s wrong with “actress”? ’

From ‘the odd grab’ to ‘nightmare’ co-stars – how Patricia Hodge survived the 1970s to become an accidental sex symbol

Patricia Hodge greets me at the door of her beautiful openplan apartment in a former furniture depository beside the Thames. The large windows overlook the river at a spot where Oxford and Cambridge crews battle for yearly dominance, and on a clear day one might even see Strictly Come Dancing winner Bill Bailey paddleboarding along from Hammersmith on the opposite bank.

Not bad for the girl from Grimsby, who grew up looking out at the grey mouth of the Humber from the windows of the town’s Royal Hotel, which her parents ran. Hodge could hear the dock workers pass by each morning – it was the busiest fishing port in the world, she pointedly reminds me, before Britain joined the EU and gave Europe’s fishing fleets free reign in British waters.

The soft-pastel quality in her voice mellows even her tarter opinions, smoothing over those traces of a Lincolnshire accent that survived her childhood elocution lessons. At 74, lightly made-up, in jeans and white top, she seems ageless: unmistakeably the woman who was the obsessively desired Emma in the 1983 film of Pinter’s Betrayal and the husband-tempting novelist Mary Fisher in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.

There was a period in the 1980s when Hodge seemed to get all the posh, sexy roles. Was she a sex symbol? “It’s a funny thing, I had a laugh to myself a few years ago, because I looked back and I thought I was being chosen to do jobs because of my ability. But you don’t think about the fact that maybe you were being chosen for the visuals.” This is a very Patricia Hodge way of putting it. “That was probably quite naive of me, really. When people say to me now, ‘you’re absolutely my husband’s favourite,’ I just laugh and think, ‘Oh god! How nice.’”

Now, she’s about to take over from another famous sex symbol – Diana Rigg, who died last September – as aristocratic Mrs Pumfrey in the second series of Channel 5’s enormously popular remake of All Creatures Great and Small. Hodge is delighted. She’s a Herriot fan and has thoughts on why the books’ retelling has struck such a chord.

“I do think that life is moving on almost too fast for any of us to quite take in,” she says. “And there’s a big reaching for nostalgia. You know: ‘Let me just remind myself of the way life used to be, when there was a more pastoral, slower way of life, when small things mattered, small pleasures, such as human interaction with animals and nature.’” People

yearn for such things, she believes, especially “when there’s an awful lot that’s more unstable”.

Covid has only increased that sense of instability. Still, Hodge is relaxed about face masks and thinks we all need to find a way of getting on with our lives. Her husband, the music publisher Peter Owen, died in 2016, and she has made it through the pandemic alone by swimming every day, or walking at least three miles, and by meeting friends outdoors; she even found herself watching daytime television for the first time in her life.

But she’s back in the swing of the “very stimulating” life of a working actor, even if, she tells me: “I’ve never dropped the word ‘actress’. I mean, I sometimes say actor and sometimes actress, and really, I’m not going to get excited about it. I don’t understand why we felt the need to have to change it. If some people want to be called an actor because they feel demeaned by feminising, that’s fine, I respect it. [But] I don’t have a problem.”

This is not the first time Hodge has stepped into a role associated with another performer, but, she says, “it’s something I do with a degree of reluctance, because I always feel that the person that’s gone before probably casts a long shadow, and it’s difficult. But it’s not impossible. I did Miss Jean Brodie on the stage, and you could say that was identified forever with Maggie [Smith], who played her on screen.” Hodge never worked with Rigg, but met her on several occasions, most recently when Hodge was in a play in the West End and heard a knock at her dressing room door. “It was the last time I ever had a conversation with her. And she was so generous. It meant a lot.”

When Hodge is recognised in the street these days, it’s often as Miranda’s “Such fun!” mother, Penny – incidentally, she doesn’t think Hart will write any more of the sitcom – whereas years ago it used to be as barrister Phyllida Trant from Rumpole of the Bailey. But there have been many, many memorable roles along the way. She was brittlely brilliant as Jeremy Thorpe’s disapproving mother in A Very English Scandal in 2018, and she famously played Margaret Thatcher in The Falklands Play in 2002. I wonder if she saw Gillian Anderson’s “Iron Lady” in The Crown. She hasn’t watched the series, she says. “I sort of feel I’ve lived through it. One of my really sharp earliest memories is of the coronation, watching it on a little black and white screen. We all had the day off school, and my mother dressed me in my white bridesmaid’s dress and put red and blue ribbons around my waist.

“I think [The Crown’s writer] Peter Morgan admires the Queen very much… but I would rather watch her than a fictional version, and part of me thinks, why do you have to do it when somebody is alive? Particularly when she’s in her 90s, for goodness sake. Just wait a few years.”

Hodge recalls being attracted by the “shine” of showbusiness visitors who came to stay at her parents’ hotel, but she went first to teacher training college before applying to drama school. She soon found herself in demand on stage in the early 1970s, a period on which she looks back fondly, “when Hair came into the West End, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and there was a whole gang of wonderful, beautiful West End gipsies – West End Wendys as they were called – very talented young people who jumped from one show to another. And there was a fair amount of dope smoking and things, but I was always on the fringes. I was always quite naive.”

Did she need her wits about her to deal with the unwanted advances that other actresses complain of from that time? “There has been the odd, very mild intimation and the odd grab,” she says. “But one would just say, ‘That’s not appropriate’. And I don’t think that I ever felt that if I didn’t comply, I wouldn’t get a job. You just kind of took it as the cut and thrust of a profession that is very open with itself, very much freer, if you like, than most of the rest of society. That’s what appealed to me about it; I just felt from the moment I went to drama school, I’d landed in the right place. I loved people not obeying the rules. So you kind of took that as part of the language of being in a bohemian type of environment.” Although, she adds, “of course, it was a nuisance”.

Hodge married Peter Owen in 1976, and they had two sons: Alex, who is now one half of the comedy duo The Pin, and Harry, a teacher. Losing her husband to dementia was a traumatic time. “Dementia, for one single word, is such a broad spectrum,” she says. “Everybody’s experience is going to be different. My husband was a very strong character and, I think, a very brave man in many ways, because he didn’t have a very good upbringing, and he was such a fighter. So he fought it and fought it and fought it. And that’s what I feel so sorry about, I wanted to hold up my hand and say, ‘It’s all right’. But he fought because of his dignity. And you don’t ever want to see somebody lose that.”

As time passes, does she find herself able to remember him as the person he was before illness struck? “I don’t think you can miss that part out. But one makes the distinction. If I’m talking to the boys, I’ll say, ‘Well, of course, Dad, when he was well, would have done this.’ It’s something one can never come to terms with. You just have to learn to live with it.”

Hodge is returning to the stage soon, with Nigel Havers in Christopher Luscombe’s production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, rescheduled from last year. “It was written for two people in their 30s,” she notes, “and we’re doing it as two people in our 70s.” She said no at first, “and the director said, just read it, and tell me if you think it’s agespecific. And it isn’t, except for about four lines.”

In All Creatures Great and Small,

‘Why make The Crown when the Queen's in her 90s, for goodness sake? Wait a few years’

she forms a different kind of acting partnership. It is Mrs Pumfrey’s overindulgence of her dog, Tricki Woo, that lands the corpulent Pekingese in the Farnon veterinary surgery. It’s not the first time Hodge has risked being upstaged by a dog. She was Bafta-nominated for the 1986 adaptation of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, in which her snooty, glamorous hotel guest is rarely seen without her small dog, Kiki. “Kiki was very good,” she recalls, “playing what someone called ‘a furry brooch’.” But she has also had canine co-stars who have been “a bit of a nightmare”.

Not so Derek, who plays Tricki Woo. “He’s the most placid dog I have ever come across in my life. He is a completely contented dog that just loves human company, so he just snuggles up to you, adores being stroked and, I mean, he almost to the letter takes direction.” The only issue, she discovered, was “he’s not the easiest dog to hold in one hand. There’s a lot of fur.”

All Creatures Great and Small returns to Channel 5 on Sept 16