The best bit about the USA? They sent me to jail!
As her American road trip gets under way on TV, Miriam Margolyes admits...
IN HER new BBC1 series Miriam’s Big American Adventure, the actress – who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films – embarks on an epic road trip through the heartlands of middle America. This latest journey follows her appearance on The Real Marigold Hotel and, more recently, The Real Marigold Hotel On Tour which took her to China, Cuba, Florida and Japan.
ILIVED in Santa Monica in California for 16 years but I knew that it didn’t really represent the ‘real’ America. With the election of President Trump, it is a very peculiar time in the States and I thought it would be interesting to see what it, and the people, were like now – and to find out why President Trump was elected.
My new three-part TV series is a road trip from Chicago to New Orleans, but it’s not really a travel programme, it’s more sociological.
I see a lot of places that I’d never been to before, but the programme is really about the people I meet. It’s the opposite of ‘Marigold’ which was really a travel programme. This time my favourite place was the inside of a jail!
I realise that this series, coming hard on the heels of ‘ Marigold’, means that I’m on the TV quite a lot at the moment – people are going to get very sick of me.
I’m technically an actor, but I’ve done documentaries. One of my favourites was the programme I made 12 years ago about going around America in the footsteps of Charles Dickens.
I also loved doing ‘ Marigold’ because I liked the people I was travelling with and, you know, you can’t believe that you’re being paid to go on holiday.
I really enjoyed our time in India – partly because we stayed there longer than the other places we visited. If I looked as if I wasn’t enjoying China, it was because we didn’t stay there long enough to visit the really interesting bits and get to know people, so that was probably the least successful visit, but I still enjoyed it very much.
Actually I just love travelling: it’s wonderful to meet people and learn
new things. I now realise you u need to get out and travel while e you still can. As you get older, it’s less easy – I don’t walk as well as I used to, and I can’t climb stairs very well, so the things I can do are somewhat limited now.
We didn’t travel much when I was a child, just to Glasgow and Broadstairs. My father was Scottish so we went there to see the family, and my mother had always gone to the Kent coast for her holidays and so we went there as well.
What I liked about doing my Big American Adventure was that I was travelling with a pur- pose, and when you do this you always have an interesting trip.
There were three highlights for me. One was going to a women’s prison in Ohio and meeting the inmates and talking to them and working with them, actually cleaning toilets with them, and understanding something of the horror of drug addiction, which I’ve never been familiar with before. America’s drug problem is an absolute epidemic.
Meeting Zena Stevens, a black woman sheriff in Texas, was also a highlight: she was an electrifying personality. I really hope she will stand for President one day. She was extraordinary.
I also met an incredible female biker gang called the Caramel Curves in New Orleans.
A lot of the places I visited are probably not the sort of places that people would think of visiting on a holiday to America. Yet, funnily enough, Dickens always went to the jails, workhouses and the mental homes.
MY NEXT t ri p is to Australia where I’m going for two months: I am an Australian citizen and I have a home there in Robertson, a little town in New South Wales where they made the movie Babe about the little pig. In the film I was the voice of Fly, the mother dog.
I wanted to do that role because when I read the book, the very first line of Babe is: ‘This is the tale of an unprejudiced heart.’ As soon as you hear those words, you know that something different and good is about to be unfolded before you.
The place I’d still love to visit is Africa. I don’t really know anything about the vast continent but I’ve adopted three elephants in Kenya and I’d love to go to see them.
The only thing that will slow me down is if I don’t get offered work. But, at t he moment, that’s not the case, and you just keep going.
Miriam’s Big American Adventure is on Wednesday evenings at 9pm on BBC1.