It’s a gift of a story: “Purdey” confronts gunman, calms him down with that
famous poise and lilting voice, defusing a dangerous situation. But,
recalling that evening in March in Ruskins bar in Sheffield while she was
taking time off from rehearsing Jonathan Miller’s production of The
Cherry Orchard, Joanna Lumley briskly dismisses the plaudits for her
heroism.
“I think you’re brave when you’re frightened and do something, but I wasn’t
frightened,” she says in that hushed, rich voice. “Remember, I was in The
New Avengers. I’ve handled guns. I’ve taken them apart. I’ve fired them. I
would have been scared if he was waving a gun around. But he wasn’t, and
actors are interested in people.”
Lumley recalls that she saw “this man fumbling in his bag and then the gun
skidded out and slithered on the floor. He seemed to be sweating profusely.
I wasn’t cool or calm. I’m a nosy old woman. I thought that if I talked to
him he might find it that bit harder to behave in a disruptive manner than
if he felt isolated or that people were staring at him.” Lumley says all
this in a cut-glass, offhand way, as if it were the most normal situation.
She looks, as ever, glamorous: rock-chicky T-shirt, mussed hair, languid
charm.
Perhaps the 61-year-old actress’s fearlessness comes from having a Gurkha
officer father and the self-confidence born of growing up around the world.
She was a single mother in her twenties, didn’t get into drama school,
struggled to get a career off the ground after modelling. But after playing
the odd Bond girl and anonymous secretary, along came fame as Purdey, and
that pudding basin haircut . Playing the grotesque old soak Patsy in Absolutely
Fabulous brought her back into the limelight after a period away from the
screen and, as she says, made her rich enough to make her own choices.
This week, the second and final series of BBC Two’s wonderful drama Sensitive
Skin starts, in which Lumley plays Davina, widowed after her husband Al’s
sudden death. Hugo Blick’s astonishingly written and directed drama follows
Davina as she drifts about an evocative, raw London, barely connected to
those around her. It is melancholy, mordantly poised between comedy and
drama. Lumley says she is “nothing like the character, the complete
photographic negative”.
Davina would not, as Lumley did, say to the man with the gun: “I couldn’t help
seeing your gun fall out of your bag. I do hope you’re not going to use it.
Are you in any sort of trouble? Can I do anything to help?” Something made
Lumley think: “He wants us to see it there. He wasn’t threatening at all. He
didn’t realise who I was. We made small talk. Then Jonathan Miller joined us
with a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Surreal.”
The police were contacted and Lumley left the bar. Officers immediately
swooped and arrested the man. Earlier this month, Phillip Cottam, 52,
admitted possessing an offensive weapon and received a four-month suspended
jail sentence. Lumley is pleased that he wasn’t banged up. What “sickens”
her are the CCTV cameras that recorded their encounter. “They’re an
infringement on our liberties. I loathe them.”
Lumley is more than that caramel voice. Her thoughts dart around eclectic
passions. She has suffered the “black dog” of depression. Her hackles can
rise suddenly. She thinks out loud. Davina, she says, is “semi-suicidal in
an inert way, childlike, self-absorbed; things happen to her”. Where Davina
is “withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy I am jabber, jabber, jabber. She
can’t make the first move, and I’m like” – and Lumley snaps her fingers. “I
adore my son [Jamie]. She doesn’t show hers that she loves him. Davina is
utterly dismembered by Al’s death and regrets that she took their marriage
for granted. I haven’t lost a partner but I’ve noticed that people go on,
but looking like a human bomb-blast.”
Lumley claims to be without ambition: the idea of a regular job has “appalled”
her since she was young. “I wanted to travel with wise people, work from
dawn till dusk translating or painting rooms. Be a secretary in an office?
I’d rather stick knives in my eyes.”
She was born in Kashmir. The family moved to Malaya and Hong Kong. She was
educated at a convent in Hastings. “We were never poor but we never had any
money. There were no ponies or holidays. But I was completely happy. I
couldn’t have wished for kinder, more darling parents. Books were everything
to them, listening to lovely music, talking to people. My father was a great
historian and loved jazz – Eddie Calvert trumpet music – which my mother
abhorred. She loved classical music, was a great walker, taught me about the
natural world: which trees were which, how to handle snakes and stare at
lightning.” She pauses; hackles alert. “Do you know, Tim, I spoke to a young
man the other day who had been on holiday to Italy and didn’t know where.
‘It was a resort’, he said [this delivered in a dimwit tone]. I
can’t stand it.”
Her reclusive father died seven years ago, her mother two. “It was awful, but
all of us had talked about dying and we hugged and kissed up to the last
second. I do find myself thinking: ‘Oh, if only Mummy was here. She would
know what to do.’ Family knowledge vanishes with them like mist, but one
shouldn’t get too hacked off about death.”
Two Lumley stories recur again and again: that she was told once she was too
fat to be a model, and that rejection from RADA was pivotal for her. Neither
is true. She admits she has “polished” stories in the past and wants to tell
the truth now rather than the “received versions” of tales. “I’ve met a lot
of drama-school alumni whose acting is great and a lot who are terrible. I
don’t feel I missed out.”
Being a 21-year-old single mother wasn’t hard, she says. Trying to find work
at that time was “tricky” though. “I lay on my bed and cried my eyes out
some days. You’ve pressed every secret button to get in and you haven’t.
You’ve done film, television, plays. I had to pay the gas bill and I knew
the roles were s***. I couldn’t think how to crack the carapace. Then the
Chinese panel moves and you’re in a different world.”
Having choice means Lumley “can say no”, she laughs. “So much I get sent is
broad-brush, two-dimensional s*** [a lot of drunken broads, postPatsy]. I
say no to most of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love money. I’m so grateful that
I don’t have to look at the price of one cheese against another, but I still
shop like a poverty-stricken peasant. I’m in the lucky position of living
the last quarter of my life not wasting my time on drivel.”
Fame means nothing to her, she claims, nor the stuff written about her being a
national treasure. “Television makes national treasures. It makes you
incredibly familiar. I know that I am known. I have been in things – Avengers,
Sapphire and Steel, Coronation Street [in 1973, as a paramour of Ken Barlow]
– that people remember.” Videos and DVDs extend your shelf-life. “They’re
all these tags rustling on me, like a suitcase that’s been from Madrid to
Paris to Nairobi.” She is oddly unnostalgic. Playing Patsy Stone “was only
six weeks of my year”. Was 60 a mile-stone? “Completely not,” she snorts,
“40, 50, 60, 21, 30 – none of it meant anything.”
Lumley has been approached to do reality shows, and is proud of her
desert-island adventure, Girl Friday. But she refuses all such programmes
now. “They are cruel and manipulative. Commissioners should get back to
proper drama.” She reveals that she is about to take on her first
Shakespearean role, as Gertrude in a Miller production of Hamlet next year
in Bristol. “Fabulous,” she says, eyes glittering in anticipation.
Lumley claims not to dwell on ageing (“when I was 10, I thought 30 was as old
as you could get without dying”), and for all her beauty lacks vanity. But
she fears when “I can’t go up the stairs two at a time, or pick
up my granddaughters, or bend down and pull a saucepan out of the back of
the cupboard”. She would consider plastic surgery. “I would have my head slashed
to ribbons,” she roars, “but remember: if you are 61 and you are offered the
parts of grandmothers there’s no point looking like a doll!” Ageism
against older actresses is not new, she says. “The camera has always loved
beauty and youth. You want to fall in love when you watch anything.”
And love is truly important to Lumley. She is happily settled with her
husband, the composer Stephen Barlow, and dotes on Jamie and his children.
“I used to wear a bracelet engraved ‘ Amor Vincit Omnia’ – Love
Conquers All. To become piercingly honest for a moment, and rather boring,”
she says intently, “fear is my greatest enemy. They say perfect love casteth
out all fear. I am afraid of being afraid. Fear makes people behave
ruinously.”
Perhaps this explains her literally fearless actions in the Sheffield bar?
“Yes, maybe. Of course, he could have killed me.” Lumley goes very quiet.
Does she fear death? “No, I can’t see the point,” she says in waspy
staccato. “We don’t know what it is. We rehearse for death every night when
we go to sleep.” Does she fear living without love? “No, I would invent it.
It will always come to me. Remember that Sixties song? ‘If you can’t be with
the one you love, love the one you’re with’ [Stephen Stills]. I think that’s
very touching.” She’s “terribly pleased” to be with Barlow. “But if, God
forbid, he was snatched away tomorrow, I would get on with it because that’s
what we’re here for.”
So, stiff upper lip, ramrod back, a very British heroine is Joanna Lumley. But
she has one fear and one remaining ambition. “I am terrified of masks,” she
says, hands gripping her cheeks vice-like, “things closing up around my face
and stopping me from breathing. A friend said I should go scuba diving and
look at the fish, so maybe I shall, and fight it.”
On the strength of what happened in that Sheffield bar, any passing piranha
might give her a wide berth.
Sensitive Skin is on BBC Two, tomorrow, 10pm
