Miriam Margolyes hoots with laughter when I suggest she is an icon. “An acorn, maybe” she suggests. “I am glad and grateful that when I come onstage I get a cheer. I am warmed by the affection of my audiences. I am alive, and employed !” she says. “I have loved my life. I have had a lot of happiness”
The world at large and online, is more problematic. “I am not liking the world now” she says, with tangible sadness. “We are living in unforgiving, brutal times.” She is constantly misrepresented on social media. “They call me a self hating Jew” she says, shaking her head, “and ‘vile’. I just do not recognise myself in that. I think I am kind. I try to do things morally, carefully and kindly.”
In case anyone has been alarmed by the many online reports of her immanent demise, I have it from the allegedly afflicted one herself that, while she may not be exactly in the athletic pink, she is most certainly not about to make her exit from the stage of life. She does give mention of a certain lady journalist from a prominent Scottish paper who reported that the Graham Norton Show could be about to lose its most entertaining guest to the afterlife – “some people are not interested in the truth” – and is hoping they might meet in August. “I shall have something to say”, says Miriam.
She did, she says, have a recent fall at home. Which was worrying. “It is the one thing you must never do when you are older” she says. “Fall”. But she did. She has done many things that a well brought up and educated Jewish girl shouldn’t do. Especially one who has captured the public heart and mind in the way she has. It is fascinating, I find, that the absolute honesty and openness that we find so attractive in the woman, is also that which gets her into trouble. She admitted she wished Boris Johnson would die, after Covid. She gave controversial (and yet genuinely practical) dating advice from This Morning’s sofa, and, last year brought the Beeb’s editing shears out in a fearful flurry when Kirsty Wark asked her which Dickens character had interested her most in her earlier years.
“Oh, Fagin.” she replied, “without question. Jewish and vile. I didn’t know Jews like that then sadly, I do now.”
It is that fearless, honest intelligence that qualifies Miriam a true icon. She is, quite simply sui generis. One of a kind.
There is part of her that regrets not being taken more seriously
“I’m not happy with what I’ve given to the world,” she told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs in 2008. “I think I’m underused, undervalued and slightly despised. I wanted to do Shakespeare, be at the National, admired as an actress. But at the moment I’m just smiled at as an actress. I want to hurt and astonish as an actress.”
There is so much about her that is serious : she is a recognised authority on Dickens, she is a documentarian, and she is a powerful activist on many fronts.
The creaming her knickers and advice for the uncircumcised genuinely just crop up along the way because they are relevant to whatever anecdote has been teased from her at the time.
“I’m trying to change people’s minds, to make them see that the sort of thing going on in parliament and Israel and America is not acceptable. I’m angry and I think other people should be angry. Actually I’m an incredibly moral and well-behaved person in public with other people. I don’t want to embarrass and upset people. That’s absolutely not my agenda.” she emphasises. There is, frankly, so much on her agenda that there is little space for random rudery.
Having said which, even icons have to be allowed a joke. Or not, as in the case of her latest book “a lavatory book” she says. With chapters organised in alphabetical order. It is entitled “The Little Book of Miriam”. Which is sweet, but, in my humble opinion, not a patch on Miriam’s own, original idea : “From Arseholes to Zoom”.
She is 84 now with a hairline crack in her spine and gets around with a wheelchair, walker and ‘sticks’. Rather excitingly, she discovered that being registered disabled means she could apply for and receive a key that opens all the disabled toilets in England.
August in Edinburgh delights her. And this year is ‘a show of two halves’. “The first half is Dickens and the second half is Miriam” she says. “And you can ask me anything you like. Anything.”
And, of anyone appearing in Edinburgh this August, when Miriam says “anything”, she means anything.
How many times do you get to ask a true icon … “anything” ?
Margolyes and Dickens: 18.00, Pleasance at EICC, until August 24
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/margolyes-and-dickens-more-best-bits
