Interviewing Imelda Staunton is a disconcerting experience. Her wiry little
dog, Molly, fixes me with the same penetrating gaze as her mistress. Is
Molly fully grown, I inquire. “Yes, and so am I!” comes the brisk reply.
This is classic Staunton: sharp, witty and down to earth, especially when it
comes to her appearance. “Fortunately my career has never been about how I
look, it's about how I can be,” she says. And indeed, she scrubs up a treat
on the Oscar carpet, but on screen she can look a fright. As the gossipy
Miss Pole in BBC One's highly acclaimed Cranford she is all raw cheeks and
bonnet, while as the homely abortionist Vera Drake she ages about 100 years
overnight. At the other extreme, she steals the show in the last Harry
Potter movie as the fastidiously overdressed baddie Dolores Umbrage.
We meet at Staunton's home in West Hampstead, northwest London, to discuss her
fronting of the British Heart Foundation's campaign to raise £1.5million
this month for research. She lives with her husband Jim Carter, the craggy
character actor, and daughter Bessie, 14, who both had parts in Cranford too
(he played Captain Brown; she played Francesca Annis's servant).
One can immediately see why Mike Leigh, who directed Staunton in Vera Drake,
described her as “a tough cookie”: she is compact, fiercely focused and
self-contained. Perched on the coffee table in a crisp linen shirt, jeans
and eccentric stumpy shoes you would be hard-pressed to guess that she is 51
- and happily confronting the menopause without HRT. She craves balance in
her life and finds it through acupuncture, yoga and gardening, while a
“slight belief” in karma has replaced the Roman Catholicism of her
upbringing.
Her mother died suddenly during surgery
“Bubbly” Imelda Staunton is only the half of it, she says. She always has had
a melancholy side, suffered postnatal depression after Bessie's birth and
has thought hard about the advantages and disadvantages of being an only
child. She is still recovering from the shock of her mother's sudden death
at 70 during heart bypass surgery three years ago.
Staunton has good reason to front the Help a Heart campaign. Both her parents,
who moved to London from Ireland before she was born, suffered from heart
disease. Staunton's father, a building worker, had bypass surgery 15 years
ago, and she had no reason to think that her mother, whose hardening of the
arteries and late-onset diabetes was diagnosed in her mid-sixties, would not
survive surgery. “Mum was getting very slow and, when she was going for her
bypass, I thought ‘marvellous, that'll do it',” she recalls. “They operated
for what seemed like a day and a half and discovered that all the tissue
around her heart was much more diseased than they had imagined. She never
came out of the operation, which was a great shock. But I'm grateful that I
didn't have to watch her being very ill because she was feisty and would
have hated it.
“Her death has had a huge effect on me. It felt like a big hole appeared on my
left side - apparently your left side is your mother - which I thought could
never be filled. Now I think what you have to do is fill it with yourself
because your mother is part of you. I'm easing into that space, using it and
being comforted by it.”
Her parents' heart disease has prompted her to keep a close eye on her own
health. She has regular blood sugar and cholesterol checks and listens
carefully to her body: coffee and wine have started to make her feel a bit
down so she avoids them. She loves meat, but became a vegetarian for more
than 20 years after watching The Animals Film, the seminal documentary
narrated by Julie Christie, in 1982. She has recently started eating meat
again now that it is easier to discover its provenance.
Staunton has practised yoga on and off for about 15 years and walks for a good
hour every day since Molly arrived as a puppy 18 months ago. She senses an
uncanny link between the little terrier and her late mother. “The rescue
home where we got Molly told us she had come from Ireland, which was weird,
because my mum was Irish, and it was near the anniversary of her death. I
thought, right, she's coming home! Part of me thinks Molly is keeping me
well, and is that my mum keeping me well? I do think about things like that.”
She rejected Catholicism when she was 14
This seems a strange admission from someone who seems so grounded, and who has
had “a problem with religion per se” since rejecting Catholicism at about
14. “I don't feel the need for religion,” she says, “But I went on a yoga
retreat last year and I do believe slightly in the karma thing and just
being good and true unto yourself. And I slightly believe that you can
attract good and bad to you. Chaotic people often have chaotic lives, and I
think they create that. But if you try and have an inner peace and a
positive attitude, I think you attract that.”
Staunton believes her ability as an actress may be to do with being an only
child, reliant on her imagination for entertainment while both her parents
worked. The family lived above her mother's hairdressing salon in Archway,
North London, and Staunton went to a local convent school, where an
inspirational drama teacher encouraged her to apply to the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art.
She originally thought she would have more than one child herself, but found
being an older parent pretty exhausting. Plus there was the postnatal
depression. “When Bessie was about 2 I remember thinking, we've got one
bloody lovely daughter, so let's not worry about it or think what it will do
to her.
“Bessie's only childhood is much more sociable than mine: there are sleepovers
every weekend and her mates are up the road. I remember Sundays as a child
being terribly depressing. I used to go to my grandmother's in Highbury
every weekend and, oh, that feeling after lunch...everything seemed dull and
grey.”
But her childhood was not all gloom: her mother, Bridie, played the fiddle and
accordion, and passed her ear for a tune on to her daughter and
granddaughter. One of Staunton's first big breaks was as Miss Adelaide in
the National Theatre's legendary production of the musical Guys and Dolls in
1982, where she met Jim. They celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in
October. Neither is much good at doing nothing, but they get huge pleasure
out of gardening; he is chief gardener, while she is his “barking
assistant”. Both front and back gardens are wonderfully wild, yet ordered.
When the couple married they made a decision not to spend long periods apart,
which was set in concrete after Bessie's birth. This inevitably has meant
turning down parts, but Staunton insists that it wasn't difficult because it
was her choice.
“Having a child makes you strong and gives you chutzpah. It relaxed my
attitude to the job; my centre of focus shifted, which I think is very
helpful, because even if you're not a very indulgent actor you spend a lot
of time thinking about yourself. I don't think that is particularly
healthy.” She says she rarely gets stressed: “I very quietly keep all my
worry to myself. That's probably to do with being an only child.”
Despite three Olivier awards, a Bafta, an Oscar nomination, an OBE and a
“quiet inner confidence”, Staunton is sometimes prone to insecurity. She
describes her reaction to the last script she was sent. “I thought, they'll
never want me for this. And even when they gave me the part, I thought I
shouldn't be playing this, they should get someone else. Then I think, ‘come
on, you know you can do it'. And that's good for me. It's good for an actor
to be frightened; to not take things for granted.”
“Sadness enriches you. I use it in my work”
She thinks that her melancholy side - brief interludes of sadness rather than
depression - also may be to do with being an only child, or perhaps her
Irish ancestry. She has never considered therapy because she accepts it as
part of life. “I haven't fully understood it; it might just be a different
side of me, and as you get older you get sad about leaving things. A lot of
me is very up, and you have to have light and shade. They are both important
and you have to be able to balance them. You have to admit that sadness is
part of you and that it enriches you. I use it in my work.”
Staunton relies on regular acupuncture to achieve the equilibrium she craves,
both in balancing the different aspects of her personality and in dealing
with the sudden shifts of gear that are a successful actor's lot. It seems
likely that acupuncture has also helped her to navigate the menopause
without hot sweats or any other symptoms apart from tiredness. She takes
herbal supplements to support her liver and adrenals (good for energy),
magnesium, iron and vitamin C. And if she is exhausted, she goes to bed for
an hour. “People now are obsessed with keeping going, everything's got to be
go, go, go,” she says. “I think this is the stage my body is going through
and I'm going to help it as much as I can.”
Staunton hopes that she will never have to retire and suggests that actors
tend to be healthy because they're so used to dealing with the unexpected.
She recently finished filming A Bunch of Amateurs, a comedy with Burt Reynolds
and Derek Jacobi, due out next year. “What's great is that actors often go
on until their eighties,” she says. “Phyllida Law, my neighbour, is
seventysomething. I saw her running up the road the other day and I thought,
that's what I want; to stay active. I want a healthy old age.”
Imelda Staunton is supporting the British Heart Foundation's Help a Heart
campaign this month. Log on to bhf.org.uk/helpaheart or phone 0845 2410976
