Miriam Margolyes

Best for:
People interested in a very comprehensive life history of a well-known character actress.

In a nutshell:
Author Margolyes shares stories of her 80 years, starting before the beginning up through the pandemic to today.

Worth quoting:
While this was an audio book, this one caught me so I had to write it down:

“When people say to me ‘oh I never talk about money, religion or politics’ I say ‘what the fuck do you talk about then? Those are the things that matte!”

Why I chose it:
It kept popping up in my audio book app. I’m familiar with Margolyes’s work in Harry Potter as well as Call the Midwife, so thought I’d have a listen.

What it left me feeling:
Surprised.

Review:
What a ride.

I can’t help but compare it to my most recent memoir read, Pageboy. Both are written by out queer actors, and both share much more about their sex lives than I’d like to know. The obvious difference is that Margolyes is more than twice as old as Page and so had many more years of stories to draw upon. Margolyes is also settled into a very long relationship with her now-wife, though that too is a bit unconventional, which is always refreshing to see.

Margolyes has a very matter-of-fact attitude, and I can’t say that she is someone who I’d enjoy being friends with as she certainly has a ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ approach to many things, but I did enjoy much of her memoir. I think she owns her own contradictions, which is refreshing to see - for example, she identifies as quite left and socialist, but also accepted the OBE from the British royal family and shares that she quite likes Prince (now King) Charles, and states clearly she knows these two things don’t align. At the same time, I’m also not entirely clear that she understands how problematic some of her past roles were - she performed in black face, and in yellow face - as while she will throw in a ‘not politically correct these days’ comment when referring to them, the reality is those roles weren’t appropriate when she performed them, either.

Margolyes starts her memoir discussing the births and childhoods of her parents, and follows a linear time line from there. As someone who is not super familiar with her work, I greatly appreciated that. She jumps around a little bit, and references stories she will cover in future chapters, but overall she starts and the beginning and brings us up to present day.

There are so many stories in here that name-check actors, and I cannot imagine what the legal review looked like. So much of it feels like the British actor version of TMZ, but perhaps it’s the accent and the fact that she’s had such a long career that I kind of didn’t mind? Like when she shared that she worked with many of the Monte Python men when she was younger and that they were basically all assholes to her.

I like quite a lot of this book, but I did need to address a couple of things that I found frustrating. She is clear about how she feels about her fat body, and for most of the book she’s very matter of fact about it, but she does have a chapter that specifically focuses on her weight and I found it fairly anti-fat. Obviously she’s allowed to feel about her body however she wants to feel, but her comments also apply to other fat people, and they are so negative that I just find it disappointing. She also very graphically discusses her willingess to engage men in oral sex. I think she has a quite healthy perspective on sex, but as I’ve said before, I’m just not interested in the graphic details. Frankly, if I never hear the phrase ‘suck him off’ again, it’ll be too soon.

Throughout the book one common thread is her deep pride in being a Jewish woman. She is clear that she does not believe in the religious aspects of Judaism, but belongs to a synagogue and partakes in the cultural aspects of the religion. She is active in the fight against antisemitism, and is also a vocal supporter of Palestine. The latter has caused some issues for her within her community, and she has a very thoughtful chapter in her book about this. Interestingly, she repeatedly talks throughout the book about how she wants to fight injustice and will speak out whenever she sees it, but in her Harry Potter chapter she didn’t mention the anti-trans activism promoted by the author of those books, and some further googling on my own has shown that she has made some disappointing comments on the topic.

If you do choose to read this one, I recommend the audio book as she does accents for everyone when quoting them, and they are delightful and unexpected.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Donate it… (altro)

Sometime around 2012 we were lucky enough to catch Miriam Margolyes performing Dickens' Women at Her Majesty's Theatre in Ballarat. A one person show, with pianist, written by Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, she commanded the stage, effortlessly shifting through 23 different characters, based on or inspired by 21 women and 2 men in Dickens' novels. An admirer of Dickens work, at no stage did the performance shirk from the less savoury aspects of his life, his obsession with youthful beauty, his "odd" relationships with sister-in-law, and, in Margolyes' own words from an interview in The Lumiere Reader in 2007 (accessible via the waybackmachine: https://web.archive.org/web/20080423234540/http://www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/item...:

"The characters are based on real women in Dickens’ life and where they parallel with his fictional characters. I love the contrast between the goodness of the prose and the badness of the man. His daughter once said ‘he was a very wicked man’ and no-one seems to know that but they will after they see my show."

That ability to see contrast, and a willingness to forgive some transgressions and refuse to accept others, is very much the Margolyes way. As is, one suspects, a somewhat cheeky attitude towards shocking others, and an unrelenting desire to tell the unvarnished, uncensored truth. About everything.

I had the great, unmitigated joy of listening to Margolyes read the story of her life, and blessed, as she is, with the elocution and vowels of much work (instigated by her mother), her voice is captivating, as is her ability to switch between accents at the drop of page. Her background as a voice actress and in voiceover work (including a stint in soft-porn), to say nothing of the more well-known (and very different from that) roles in Harry Potter or Fly in the movie Babe, provides her with all the tools required to do an admirable, and very engaging audio version of her own autobiography. Her life provides her with much fodder for the story itself.

It might be fairest to potential readers of this autobiography to point out a few things - if you come to this as a fan of Fly, or Professor Pomona Sprout, knowing little else about Margolyes, and you are likely to be offended by explicit sexual content (of the relieving of men kind somewhat surprisingly for an avowed lesbian like the author), then might be best to avoid. If you're also not a fan of somebody who calls a spade an f***ing shovel, you may be best to skip by. Margolyes is not one to toy with people's "sensibilities". She's not a fan of prudes, and she's not a fan of beating about the bush. One finds it very hard to imagine that back in the days of the Cambridge Footlights, that a particular set of very badly behaved men could not have known of their transgressions, Margolyes is not one to muck about if you've pissed her off.

I think that's what I loved most about this entire audio book. Here is a woman who can be bad-tempered, makes mistakes, swears fluently and enthusiastically (a woman after my own heart) and is totally and utterly unapologetic about it. She's also not in denial about who or what or how she's lived her life, and there is much in this book that goes to the heart of mistakes made, people transgressed against, and those who have transgressed against her. She doesn't pull any punches about just about everything.

And it is because of all of the above that I loved every sweary, pointed, ridiculous, contradictory, unapologetic minute of it - including the soldier up a tree. I mean if you can't live your life as you bloody well want to when you're Miriam Margolyes, what hope is there for the rest of us. All power to her, her walking frame, her beautiful eyes, her beloved Heather and her career going forward.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/much-true-miriam-margolyes… (altro)