The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Life and times
The actor and author recalls onstage gaffes and a strange encounter on a train
The actor and author Celia Imrie
IT IS EARLY FOR A SPRING CLEAN but I’ve been sorting out some clothes to give to Royal Trinity Hospice, my local charity shop, and inevitably it reminds me of the cardigan. Early in my career, I worked for a small touring company. We played all the glam venues: Grimsby, Corby, Skegness. I was the grief-stricken Olivia in Twelfth Night and wore a fabulous Elizabethan costume rented from the Royal Shakespeare Company. She’s in mourning, so the dress, with voluminous skirt, was of black lace.
One November week we were performing in Mablethorpe and it was icy. Onstage we were all right, thanks to the lights. The audience, nicely heated, was delightfully unaware of the frigid conditions backstage.
With two scenes off, I swished to the arctic dressing room and grabbed my cardigan, a fluorescent-pink M&S thing, covered with woollen bobbles. I put it on top of my costume and relaxed for a while, going off into a bit of a daydream, then suddenly I had to dash to the wings, very nearly missing my re-entrance. My cue came: ‘Here comes the Countess: Now heaven walks on earth.’
I entered, passing through Olivia’s shady bower, an arch-like construction made of dried twigs, and said my first line – ‘What would my lord, but that he may not have, Wherein Olivia may seem serviceable?’– and was surprised to get a huge laugh, not only from the audience but also from the cast on stage.
I walked round the stage, oozing dignity and grace (I thought), not realising that, not only had I forgotten to remove the fluorescent-pink bobbly cardigan, but it had caught on the twigs of the shady bower, and wherever I went the bower came too.
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS I finished filming Finding Your Feet, a comedy with Joanna Lumley and I will be heading to LA to film the series, Better Things. I prefer to take the train and the glorious Queen Mary 2 to get there, and on board I am employed to give talks to people who might not, in ordinary life, cross the street to see me.
‘Hello! I’m not going to gush,’ said one man after one of my talks. ‘I enjoyed that. Anyhow, I’m not going to say you’re the best actress in the world. Obviously that’s Pamela Anderson. But I really enjoy your work.’ Another man waited to tell me I am exactly like Kathleen Harrison. ‘Don’t you remember her?’ he asked. ‘Mrs Thursday?’
You also meet people who did not come to your talks. A German woman approached: ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ I explained that I’d been in a film or two. She replied, ‘Yes, yes. I saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but you worked in that hospital in Coventry.’ ‘No.’
‘Yes, you did!’
AMTRAK PROVIDES even more splendid encounters. On the train at breakfast I got talking with a woman who had at first seemed rather disapproving. I noticed her elbowing her husband in the ribs when I ordered French toast without the bacon and syrup.
I discovered that she works at Disneyland and that her job is ‘realising people’s dreams’. She arranges fairy-tale weddings, complete with a crystal coach and footmen clad in white and gold (she plays one herself ). ‘It’s a lot of work,’ she said, ‘cos every white horse has to be spotlessly clean, brushed and have its tail and mane coiffed every morning.’ Then she said to me, smiling gently, ‘You can’t beat the fairy tale.’
I kept her card – just in case.
Sail Away, by Celia Imrie, is out on Thursday (Bloomsbury, £12.99). Her new film, Finding Your Feet, will be in cinemas on Friday
‘I’m not going to say you’re the best actress in the world. Obviously that’s Pamela Anderson’