Miriam Margolyes, 84, reveals health struggles: ‘I’ve let my body down’

As she launches her new memoir, an uproarious Miriam Margolyes reveals to Weekend Magazine why she’s so friendly with our royals , but has had it with England, and why at 84 she’s beginning to feel her age. 

Miriam Margolyes has had enough. ‘I’ve kind of had it with England,’ says the veteran actress and comedian, despite having become an unlikely national treasure lately. 

‘I live in a street in Clapham where everybody is wealthy, and the wealthier they are the worse they behave,’ she says, sitting in the garden of her home in south London.

The neighbours can hear, presumably, but it is just like the outspoken Miriam not to care. ‘When I bought into this street they were just ordinary people who lived here.

‘Now they’re all millionaires and billionaires, and they’re always either blowing leaves in their garden with very noisy equipment or constructing further stories on top of their houses, as if four wasn’t enough. Absurd.’

At 84, she’s beginning to feel her age. ‘I’ve let my body down. I haven’t taken care of it. I have to walk with a walker now. I wish I’d done exercise. It’s the most ghastly waste of time, except that it keeps you going. So, I’m foolish.’

Is she tempted by Ozempic, the weight-loss drug of the moment? ‘Absolutely not. That’s for diabetics. You shouldn’t take medicine meant for people who are really sick. What I do think is we should not have food advertising on television.’

There is nothing she will not discuss, including her plans to ask for assistance in dying if needs be. ‘I don’t want to go through a slowly diminishing period of pain and embarrassment. If a stroke meant I couldn’t speak, or I was doubly incontinent, or I lost my mind completely, I would ask to be put down. That’s because I want to be who I am. I don’t want to be less than I can be.’

This sparky, twinkly-eyed woman with a flurry of white hair has a lot going on in her life right now. There’s a one-woman Edinburgh show about Charles Dickens, a solo tour promising ‘cherished memories, razor-sharp observations… and a little bit of smut’, plus an entertaining new account of her life called The Little Book Of Miriam.

Here in alphabetical order are the anecdotes of a woman of 84 who has made a successful career on television, on stage and in Hollywood. 

‘What do a***holes, apostrophes and ageing have in common?’ she says. ‘They’re all entries in this informal and idiosyncratic dictionary of me.’

Yet the book does not reveal the huge change about to happen for Miriam, who has lived apart from her partner for nearly 60 years. 

She and the Australian professor Heather Sutherland have always maintained separate homes in London and Amsterdam and come together for holidays in Tuscany and New South Wales.

‘We really do love each other,’ says Miriam, who rarely talks about her partner in public. ‘She is a remarkable, brilliant woman and every conversation with her is uplifting and surprising and fun and sometimes full of anger, but she’s my person and I’m her person and we should live together when we’re old.’ 

Is that happening? ‘Oh, I hope so. I hope I will be able to live with Heather in the house that we bought together in Italy in 1973 until we die.’

When does she plan to leave England? ‘We’re starting to do it now. But, of course, I have to come home every so often because of the rule about 90 days.’ 

Post-Brexit changes have made it more difficult for Brits with homes abroad to live there, says Miriam. ‘So I’m thinking I might have to become Dutch. Heather has residency in Europe because she’s lived in Amsterdam for over 50 years, but we want to be together.’

The couple met in 1968. ‘She thought I couldn’t possibly be a lesbian because I was so noisy. In her world, gay women were silent and self-debasing. I wanted to be looked at. I wanted to make remarks and do things with my body and my hands and my eyes and get a response. That was why I became an actress.’

This daughter of a Scottish GP took elocution lessons to achieve the cut-glass voice that has made her fortune, but she also has a great gift for accents. 

She won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, and joined the Footlights comedy club to the delight of her mother, who was a frustrated performer; but Miriam’s book reveals that she had a terrible time in the otherwise all-male revue. 

‘These chaps wanted to sleep with women, not compete with them.’ She was ignored and treated as invisible. ‘I’d never met studied cruelty like that before and it made me very unhappy.’

The cast and writers included future Goodies Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie but the biggest culprits were John Cleese and Graham Chapman. ‘They were nasty little p***** and I’ve never forgiven them. I really should have forgotten about this, it’s a very long time ago, but I was so angry and so hurt and shocked. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening.’

She adds, ‘They meant to do it. They meant to be hurtful,’ she says. ‘They were puny minor public schoolboys. When they did Monty Python later on I thought it was funny and they were gifted, but they used women in a nasty way.’ The only females in Python were ‘dolly birds’ or played by the men, she points out.

Chapman died of cancer in 1989 but the animosity between Margolyes and Cleese continues. ‘When I would meet John again in professional situations later he would always try to put me down,’ she says. ‘He’s not funny now, he’s just tired and bitter.’

Miriam went on to appear in repertory theatre, where a few years later a female stage manager in Leicester helped her understand she was a lesbian.

‘My parents were very conventional. They wanted a pretty daughter to be married to a Jewish doctor or a lawyer. I was fat but I was pretty. I had a good personality, so it all looked as if it was going well. I got into Cambridge. Oh, the joy. Then this terrible thing.’

She still regrets coming out to them in 1966. ‘It was selfish of me, but all my life I had told Mummy everything. I didn’t realise it would shatter something for her, but it did.’

How does she mean? ‘I feared it might have caused her stroke. I’ve been told that is very unlikely, but her last stroke crippled her, took her mind away and she was semi- paralysed. It was terrible.’ 

Why would Miriam coming out have such an impact for her parents? ‘I used to explain to my gay friends, it was like being told your child is a Nazi. It was unthinkable within their context.’

Miriam went on to become a distinguished English character actress before making it in Hollywood. Her film appearances include Little Shop Of Horrors, Romeo + Juliet, Magnolia, Mulan, Happy Feet and the Harry Potter series, in which she played Professor Sprout.

She won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress in Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film The Age Of Innocence after flashing her considerable breasts at the great director during the audition.

‘I did it on the spur of the moment,’ she says. ‘I could see they were fed up and exhausted after a day of looking at different people. Scorsese is very conscientious. I just thought, “Oh, I know. Wooh!” So I just lifted up my top. And it made them laugh. That’s the wonderful thing about t***. They make you laugh.’

Miriam is proudly Jewish by birth and culture and attends a synagogue, although she does not believe in God. The Little Book Of Miriam is very funny but also includes these very strong words about Palestine: ‘We Jews have become the abusers. My heart is heavy – it means Hitler has won.’ 

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has called for her OBE to be withdrawn. ‘Oh, that did make me laugh. I can’t take seriously that somebody thinks I should give back an honour, which I deeply prize, because I want to stop the killing of women and children in Gaza.’

One man for whom she has nothing but praise is the King, despite calling herself a woman of the Left. They’ve known each other a long time, but Miriam still shies away from calling Charles and Camilla friends. 

‘I feel that would be impertinent, because I don’t know them well enough.’ And yet she describes the Queen as ‘totally delicious’ in her book. ‘Oh, she is, because she’s totally herself.’

They’ve seen each other in swimming costumes. ‘I was invited to one of their Sandringham dos and we went for a swim. She’s a bloody good swimmer, actually. I just wish my parents had been alive to know about it,’ says Miriam. ‘The fact I can write to the King and he writes back and that I can meet them is astonishing. You don’t expect to be mixing in royal circles.’

Her pleasure is obvious, but is hanging out with the royals proper behaviour for a socialist? She laughs and answers in a style that is typical of this magnificently defiant, hugely entertaining woman. ‘Well, it probably isn’t. But, you know, who the f*** cares?’

Mick Jagger had better swerve The Little Book Of Miriam, as she uses the strongest profanity possible to describe his behaviour while dating her friend Sophie Dahl, who was then 24. The model, writer and granddaughter of Roald appeared with Miriam in The Vagina Monologues in the West End in 2001.

‘Sophie was buxom at that time and truly beautiful, with creamy skin, long blonde hair and huge blue eyes,’ she writes. 

‘Every evening Mick Jagger would pick her up at the stage door, looking like a debauched 58-year-old angel in tight jeans, his face perpetually grumpy. Clearly far from his only entanglement, Sophie was a former friend of his daughters Elizabeth and Jade, who were furious about the relationship.’

Miriam uses a very ugly swear word. ‘He was always so smug and a smug c*** is such a turn-off.’ 

She remains unrepentant, telling me, ‘That’s what I thought. We all did. We were worried about Sophie, who’s the sweetest girl. He just strutted in and was very full of himself. She really did love him…

‘I don’t know whether he loved her or not, I never spoke to him, but I thought it was nasty, because she was young and vulnerable and we all felt protective.’

The pair’s (left) relationship came to an end after five months.

The Little Book Of Miriam will be published on 11 September by John Murray, priced £16.99.