This Much Is True, by Miriam Margolyes
TANYA GOLD This Much Is True
John Murray, £20
Miriam Margolyes is more gifted and more serious than her multifarious roles suggest.
Her performance as Mrs Manson Mingott in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, although she’s playing opposite Daniel Day-lewis, is the best thing in it. Manson Mingott is kindly and cynical, buried under a mountain of her own flesh.
Scorsese was wise to cast Margolyes. I think this is what she is like when she is still and not scheming for attention. But she has filled her career with blockbuster, pratfall and voice-over work.
Her cleverness is undeniable, as is her eating disorder, though she rarely alludes to it, saying only that her mother Ruth’s ‘weight ruined all our lives – just as mine does now’. She mostly behaves like an itinerant minstrel wondering where the next gig is.
Now, at 80 – it is incredible to realise she is 80 because she is so childlike – she has written a memoir which pulses, as memoirs do, with both admission and denial.
She had a fairly normal Jewish childhood – which, to anyone who is not Jewish, will sound insane. She grew up in Oxford – her parents fled there during the Blitz because they had heard Hitler would not bomb Oxford – and, like many Jewish only children, she was worshipped but not seen.
Her father, Joseph, a doctor, was gentle. Ruth was not. She was clever and thwarted – she had sought to be an actress – and wanted Margolyes to be with the ‘best people’.
When Margolyes applied to university, Ruth persuaded Isaiah Berlin, then the most famous intellectual in Britain and Joseph’s patient, to support the application. She did this by inviting him to dinner and feeding him the Jewish food of his youth, and he complied.
But Ruth did not trust people, which is understandable when, across the sea, Europe’s Jewish community was being slaughtered. Margolyes was raised in a ‘fortress family’ and, like Ruth and many Jewish outsiders, she is a combination of self-hatred and self-love.
It’s not unusual in a clever Jewish woman to think the world beyond the door is dangerous, and that she is not beautiful enough for it.
The best example of her confusion is probably this: she won’t ‘f**k anyone without a PHD’. That is Jewish snobbery, which is intellectual snobbery, and she has been with a kind and appropriate female academic called Heather – the anti-ruth – for 53 years. But as a young woman she would perform fellatio on men she met in the street, as if she were shaking hands.
‘It didn’t matter to me whose penis was in my mouth – it was all grist to the mill,’ she writes. ‘I knew I was giving pleasure, which was what delighted me.’
She studied English at Cambridge University and was bullied in the Footlights: ‘These chaps wanted to sleep with women, not compete with them. I was neither decorative nor bedworthy, and they found me unbearable.’
She learnt she was a lesbian and told her parents. Ruth, thwarted again, promptly had a stroke in revenge. But nothing could dent Margolyes’s love for her mother, even if Ruth had confided that, fearing childbirth, she had wanted to abort Miriam. When she buried Ruth, she realised she was screaming.
I think Margolyes’s vulgarity – the fart jokes, the profanities, the flashing of her breasts, the mooning – are her defence against Ruth and the world.
She will not be a good Jewish girl and she will pre-empt all criticism – all rejection – with laughter. She had therapy, where she progressed from four years old to 12 and learnt to be objective about Ruth: ‘To make any criticism of Mummy feels like treachery, but I must acknowledge she had terrible moments.’
Only once does Margolyes admit – when she forgets to perform – that her real nature is ‘melancholy’. (Scorsese saw it, too.)
Sometimes she is very acute. She says of Dickens, on whom she’s an expert, ‘He pushes reality to extremes. I don’t think there are many other actresses who are as temperamentally suited to interpreting his work as I am. I’m an over-actress; I’m at home in extremes: that’s my weakness and my strength.’
Or there’s this, on growing up in Oxford: ‘A place of harsh judgements and little compassion.’
She is right. These observations make me long for the serious Margolyes in prose, as I long for her on screen.
Sometimes you find it, but not where you expected, and at the edges, because that is where she finds herself.