Put the word “chutzpah” into Google, and Ruby Wax’s lip-sticked grin will
probably pop up somewhere.
Conforming to the British stereotype of a loud-mouthed, brass-necked American,
the last, and only, show she put on at the Edinburgh festival turned out to
be her career-maker. She arrived in town a complete unknown and left three
weeks later with a television show.
For her Fringe comeback this year, she is bringing a comedy show based on
mental health. “What funnier topic, right?” muses the woman famous for
bulldozing through taboos in her celebrity interviews.
But the Ruby Wax speaking today seems worried about offending anyone.
Cautious, clipped, not quite shy but certainly awkward, this is not the Wax
British viewers know and love to hate. The shock tactics and smut have
disappeared, replaced with an honesty and vulnerability that makes her a lot
easier to like.
“I’m not making fun of mental illness,” she says slowly, as if there’s a
danger she won’t be heard properly without the volume turned up on her
Illinois accent. The show she is bringing to Edinburgh is part of the BBC
Headroom campaign to encourage people to take care of their mental
wellbeing. As someone who suffers from depression, Wax became a voice for
the cause when she began a series of weekly webcasts for her BBC online show
Ruby’s Room.
In the show she interviews schizophrenics, bulimics, self-harmers and
over-eaters, trying to give sufferers of mental illness a safe space to air
their feelings. Her two-night performance in Edinburgh will tie in with
topics that crop up in the show, but Wax has promised she will deliver
something funny at the same time. “I’m talking from personal experience. If
I was making fun of mental illness and I didn’t have it, it would be really
tasteless. It’s the same rule that says you can make fun of being a Jew if
you’re a Jew.”
She is particularly conscious of the stigma attached to mental illness and was
too ashamed to speak out about her own depression until fairly recently. The
child of Jewish parents who fled Austria in 1939, her 2003 autobiography,
How Do You Want Me? revealed an abusive upbringing that she never fully
recovered from.
First diagnosed with depression aged 10, Wax says she suffers from the illness
in an eight-year-cycle. After her youngest child Marina, 14, was born, Wax
was hit with a bout of severe post-natal depression and checked herself into
a Priory clinic in London. “It’s a sickness. It’s like having cancer of the
brain,” she says, describing her husband, the television producer Ed Bye, as
“her translator” during these times when “a tsunami” washes over their
family life. “When it’s over, it’s over and you don’t remember anything.”
Less than a year after her most recent bout, Wax is keen to do what she does
best — and trample down the taboos surrounding mental illness. “You used to
come out of the closet and be gay,” she says with a soft smirk. “Now people
come out the closet and they’re mentally disturbed. The theme of the show is
getting people to talk about it.”
The show will feature a line-up of guests, with Wax topping the bill with a
half-hour comedy performance. “I’ll be talking about my journey into the
darkness. I think that’s kinda humorous,” she deadpans.
Her first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe was in 1987, when her friend Alan
Rickman directed her in a show with John Sessions. But it was a drunken
interview with Michael Grade, head of Channel 4 at the time, that secured
her a television deal. It was 2am and they were in a tent.
She can’t remember what she asked him, but she knows she had knocked back a
lot of neat vodka beforehand. “All I know is, the next day I had a chat
show.”
She agrees the interviewing technique that was to become her trademark was
larger than life and cheeky, but she gets defensive about the word
obnoxious. “No,” she says, in a more familiar, forthright voice. “I never
did obnoxious, there’s no such thing as nice obnoxious.”
As a wannabe actress she studied acting at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music
and Drama, in Glasgow, before writing comedy with her friends Jennifer
Saunders and Dawn French, but Wax was always determined to launch her own
career. “I needed to get well known. Everybody picks a persona. You can’t
just be yourself. I had to be larger than the personalities I interviewed.”
Several television programmes followed, usually with her name somewhere in the
title — East Meets Wax, The Full Wax, Ruby Wax Meets — and Wax was able to
develop her shamelessly loud schtick further. Over almost 20 years at the
BBC, she helped Jim Carrey trash a hotel room, rummaged through Sarah
Ferguson’s underwear drawer while 15m viewers watched, and got a near
confession out of a post-trial OJ Simpson. “He pretty much admitted that,
you know, he’d made a little mistake there,” she recalls. “Then he tries to
stab me with a banana at the end of the film. He and Imelda Marcos were my
favourites. They were monsters, and the monsters are fun to interview.”
Wax remembers Marcos as “a pathological liar”, who claimed her husband found
£17 billion of gold in the walls while painting the house. “It was
hilarious. I asked her to sing for me, so she put on her bridal gown and
sang. Then she showed me all her tax accounts. You just don’t get people
like that anymore.”
Although she paved the way for celebrity-baiting interviews, including Louis
Theroux’s innocent-snoop routine, Wax says those days are over for her. “I’m
not loud in person. It’s an act. I mean, I’m still funny, but I don’t really
do that anymore.”
It was an urge to explore “the intellectual side” of her brain that led her
back to university to finish the psychology degree she began years earlier
in Berkeley. After four years of study, she got her degree and is now
working on her MA.
“Going back to school was kinda normal,” she says. “The minute you pick up
your books and go to the cafeteria, your body knows what to do. I was 18
again. I just ignored the fact that everyone else was.”
Now a qualified psychotherapist, she doesn’t intend to practise, but is proud
of what she achieved. “I was doing it for me. The pleasure was inside my
head.”
She is keen to make more programmes discussing mental health issues. “I don’t
know why they don’t put more about people’s mental journeys on TV,” she
says. “I don’t think the public identify so much with gardening or cooking
shows.”
So having ditched her old persona as a feisty, fun-loving troublemaker for
something altogether more caring and sharing, is Wax happy? She pauses for a
nanosecond. “I was happy with myself back then too. But I was being a bigger
version of myself. Now I’m more like I am.”
BBC Headroom, with Ruby Wax & Friends, is at the Assembly Rooms in George
Street, on August 21 and 22.
