Joanna Lumley has been clasping my hand in both of hers for at least 10 seconds. “Bless you, darling, bless you,” she says, in the kind of RP that could cut diamonds. “Nice to see you, honey.”
These are the first of many “honeys” and “dahhhlings” – also a favourite word of Lumley’s most famous creation, the vile, vapid Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous – that the 79-year-old will deploy during our conversation. Though unlike Patsy, she says it with warmth not contempt, and also unlike Patsy, she is surprisingly self-deprecating. “You can’t get big-headed in this business,” she tells me. “Not if you start as humbly as I did.”
I don’t think she means her childhood, which can hardly be described as humble. Lumley was born in India during the final gasp of British colonial rule there, and her father was a member of the British Indian Army; the partition came when she was one, and the family returned to England by boat, before swiftly travelling to Hong Kong, and then Malaysia, where Lumley spent much of her early childhood.
At eight, she was sent to boarding school in England, then another boarding school, an Anglo-Catholic convent in the hills behind Hastings, where she was as “happy as a clam” and remained until she was 16. It was then that the humbling began; Lumley was desperate to be an actor, but after being rejected from RADA, she moved to London and became a model instead.
“I wasn’t a raging beauty, but I was good enough looking to be a model,” she recalls, rummaging her fingers through her blonde hair, which she does often. “We were treated pretty much like servants. Nowadays, models can walk into film parts, but in those days a model was pathetic, the worst of the worst. Because it meant you were fairly pretty but you couldn’t think, you couldn’t speak, and you couldn’t learn a line because you’re too stupid. So it was an odd place to land, because I only really wanted to do Shakespeare – which incidentally I’ve never been cast in – and Shakespeare doesn’t want pretty girls. So you’re sort of stuck in this nightmare of being judged before you’ve even started, and that haunts you for a bit.”
Things were made even more difficult when Lumley gave birth, at the age of 21, to her son James. Juggling work and childcare was not easy – nor was the stigma of being a single mother in the 60s (she had already separated from James’s father, the photographer Michael Claydon, when he was born). “But then you just stop being cross about everything,” she says, “and do the best you can.”
So she did. Her first two film roles came in 1969, when she was 23, and were both beautiful killers: a murderous female robot in the now largely forgotten comedy spy film Some Girls Do, and one of Blofeld’s Angels of Death in the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Neither role demanded much of her – “in the 60s and 70s, the girls were always additions, and if you were a pretty girl you were an additional addition” – and she barely had any lines, but she took the opportunity and ran with it. Somehow, the director Gavin Millar noticed her. “He said, ‘I saw this girl who came on and gave the part far more than it deserved in this crap film,’” she says. “And that was me. So he sought me out and talked to me and helped develop my career, and gave me chances to work as a young actor.”
Her first big break came in the shape of Purdey, a sharp-tongued, high-kicking secret agent in the British spy TV series The New Avengers (1976-1977). But it was Patsy Stone, the rotting black heart of Absolutely Fabulous, who made her a household name in her late forties.
Airing from 1992 to 2004 (plus an anniversary special and an underwhelming 2016 film), Ab Fab was an absurd, game-changing comedy in which women were allowed to be genuinely repellant. Patsy was a chain-smoking, binge-drinking horror with a ludicrous blonde beehive and a foul mouth. Lumley played her perfectly – plummy, camp, melodramatic, with a wonderfully contortable face, whether she was howling in horror at being labelled “47” in the newspaper, sneering at Edina’s long-suffering daughter Saffy, or calling someone a “little piece of dribble piss”. “Without a shadow of a doubt, my favourite part I’ve ever played in my entire career, was Patsy,” says Lumley. “We laughed almost ‘till we had to be taken to the hospital.”
She had some brilliant one-liners – “The last mosquito that bit me had to book into the Betty Ford clinic” – and some truly shocking lines, too. Like when she yells at Saffy: “When I heard that Eds was pregnant, I told her to abort. Abort, abort, abort. I said, ‘Chuck it down the pan. Bring me A KNITTING NEEDLE.’”
Lumley said recently that she didn’t think the show would get past the commissioning editors nowadays. “Because of their behaviour,” she nods, “and their language.” But doesn’t she think it paved the way for women to continue being grotesque? “I think there’s a nuance coming into the presentation of women in entertainment,” she says. “We really did fall into categories. A smart secretary, a dutiful mother, a vamp, a cosy granny, a horrid granny. Men could be wonderfully nuanced. For women, there was no colour at all. I think it’s changing now. There’s still a way to go, because for all we say that women are equal to men, we’re still not quite equal. Or not treated quite equal.”
Is that something she experiences, being treated not as an equal? “Not now,” she says, “because I’m old and because I’ve been Patsy and because I’ve been made a dame.”
Lumley has done some great stuff since Ab Fab – like Amandaland, the BBC Motherland spin-off in which she played Amanda’s scathing mother, and a string of hugely popular travel shows. And yet, she once said that most of the work she’s done has been “pretty average drivel”. Does she really think that?
“Look,” she says, “when we go home every day, we don’t eat Michelin-star food, but we have good suppers. And that’s fine, that’s sustenance, and most of life is just fine. It’s not exactly drivel – although some of it really is. But then you’ve got to earn a living and you pick up a part, you do the best you can with it, and the world goes on. Is it Oscar-winning? No. Practically nothing is Oscar-winning. I’ve never believed in prizes anyway. I don’t know how you judge a dog against a cat.” She pauses, then puts on an exaggerated drawl. “But we all love a prize. So darling, if you’re giving me a prize, look at me, suddenly a very different face. Suddenly I’m looking THRILLED.”
Her latest role, in the glossy Netflix juggernaut Wednesday, is neither Michelin star nor home-cooked supper. “It’s sheer entertainment,” says Lumley. The mystery comedy series is an Addams Family spin-off that centres the supernatural family’s most sullen member (played by Jenna Ortega) as she joins a new school for “outcasts and monsters”. It’s a teen high-school drama through the cartoon-gothic lens of executive producer Tim Burton, and is one of the most popular shows Netflix has ever produced.
Lumley joins season two – the first four episodes of which are out now while the last four arrive on Wednesday – as Hester Frump, Wednesday’s cold, glamorous “grandmamma”, who has a long-running feud with her daughter, Catherine Zeta-Jones’ Morticia.
I have a sneaking suspicion Lumley didn’t do a huge amount of research into Addams Family lore before taking on this role. “This is the weird thing I’ve discovered today, about half an hour ago: there was another Hester,” she tells me. Lumley knew that Wednesday’s grandmother existed in other adaptations, but she thought “Hester Frump” was created purely for her. In fact, she appears in the 1960s TV series too. “I’ve told everybody, ‘Oh she’s completely new. She’s been invented for this.’ But there was another one – a little old witch or something. I’ve never seen it. Nobody ever told me. Why didn’t they tell me?”
So, how does being in such a big-budget show compare to more modest British TV fare? “It’s like being run over by a lorry,” says Lumley. “It’s on a different scale, I do promise you. It is huge. And it’s American. It’s big. It expects big. They spend big money, they want big returns. And that’s pretty thrilling – to be caught up in the cross-draft of all that.”
Tim Burton wanted Lumley for the role from the start. She doesn’t know why. “Tim is not hugely communicative,” she shrugs. “I’d worked with him on Corpse Bride, so I’d done a voice for him before. Directors work with everybody and you can get a sniff of what you want. When you’re looking for an ingredient when you’re cooking… ‘Is it coriander? No that’s not it. What does it need?’ And then you go, ‘I know what it needs.’ And so he probably thought, ‘Ah, she’d be perfect.’”
Lumley’s answers are often like this: always entertaining, sometimes hard to follow. When I ask if she passed on any wisdom to the young stars of Wednesday, she begins: “I’d never pass on wisdom or advice, but they seem to be far more confident… Mind you, most of the young in this are Americans. Americans were the ones who bought into sport. They said, ‘I played really well today.’ We never used to say that here and now we do. We say, ‘I was playing well.’ Do you know what I mean?” About acting? “No, no, no, tennis!” Oh. “We always do the apologetic thing, whereas Americans come and go: ‘I’m great.’ And whether it’s a bluff of not, that’s what they say. And so the young seem to have much more self-confidence than I would’ve at that age.”
At what age, then, did Lumley feel she had proved herself? “I don’t think you ever feel you’ve proved yourself,” she says. “I mean, I would never even be considered for the role of Philomena, for instance,” she adds, referring to the 2013 film about an elderly woman searching for her long-lost son, which earned Judi Dench an Oscar nomination, “because I’m the wrong height, the wrong look… so the whole thing is just away from you. And usually those are the interesting ones.”
Does she feel that she’s put in a box? “No. Well, sort of. They’re not going to put me in as a Scottish Highland woman. Even if I could get the accent right, you wouldn’t go to me first. And also, in today’s climate, they would go to somebody who is a Scot. So more and more, they’re stripping away the acting from it, because they’re saying, ‘If you’re going to play a lesbian, you’ve got to be a lesbian.’”
That’s a tricky one, I begin, but she cuts me off. “In my heart, I completely understand it. And so, [if it were being made today] Daniel Day-Lewis could never have done My Left Foot.” (He plays an Irish man with severe cerebral palsy in the 1989 film.) “He wouldn’t have been allowed to do it. Maybe the film wouldn’t have been allowed to be made. And so you suddenly think, ‘Hang on, where is the line?’ It takes acting away from the whole thing. Go back to storytelling around the campfire, please. We’re storytellers, we’re entertainers, grasshoppers.
“If you can’t do that, then the world becomes boring beyond belief. If we can’t act things, what’s the point of actors? And so, gradually we begin to strip away all the things that we felt we could do, like accents or different nationalities… All that’s going away from us. They’re going, ‘If it’s Italian, she’s got to be Italian.’”
To be fair, she is playing an American in Wednesday. “I know I am,” she says. There’s a pause. “And I said to Jenna, ‘You’re to shout cut as soon as you hear my accent going grotesquely off the wire.’”
Did she do it? “She never did it.” Lumley flashes a smile. “I’d have absolutely punished her if she had.”
Episodes one to four of ‘Wednesday’ series two are streaming on Netflix. Episodes five to eight are released on Wednesday
