This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Dame Joanna Lumley is talking make-up. We’re discussing her birthday in early May, when she will be turning 80 (I know, look at her, ridiculous!), and the words just pop out from me: “Well, if you’ve had work done, it’s bloody good!” The radiant apparition peers into the camera and says: “No, look closely... I’ve got a sort of regular face, if you know what I mean, and my make-up is like drawing on a face.
“I put it on to see you,” she adds, “because if I didn’t you’d think, a) I hadn’t tried, and b), ‘Gosh, she looks a bit washed out!’”
It was as a model in the 1960s that La Lumley learnt how to create different looks. “It was less frantically expensive then,” she explains, “and less in your face, less always saying, ‘You’ll die if you don’t have these peptides’ and how, in 20 seconds, your whole face could look like a child!”
In that era, she says, models had to carry all their own make-up – and even wigs – so that in a flash they could change from “pert office girl to hostess entertainer at home to a young mother… it was a very imaginative, almost theatrical way of looking at things. But I’m really not obsessed with appearance. I think what you should do is try and look nice and then forget about it.”
Our interview is wide-ranging, swooping from surface matters to the meaning of life, from what grosses her out (sex scenes, vomiting) to the importance of reading, tolerance and kindness, smoking (she still does), immigration, dying and the law around it.
The strongest feeling is one of a person who is thoroughly engaged in the now, loving her work, her husband of four decades, Stephen Barlow – conductor, composer, and her co-host on their 2024 Joanna Lumley and the Maestro podcasts – the joys of friendship, travelling (for documentaries and pleasure entwined), art.
There is something luminous about her through and through, but also down to earth and, yes, as so many friends have asked, funny. You can definitely see why the role of outrageous reprobate Patsy, created for her in Absolutely Fabulous, so appealed to her.
One of the first sentimental ideas to be dispatched, spit spot, is the absurdity of any kind of celebration on turning 80. On the day itself, she will be filming in Ireland as Grandmama (a wondrously gothic Glam Gran, with a complex towering concoction of a wig), mother of Morticia Addams and grandmother to Wednesday, in Tim Burton’s Netflix drama of the same name.
“People say the big 5-0, the big 6-0, the big 4-0 and they see it as, well, it’s an awful thing to say, but…” Lumley thinks better of speaking out. “I think birthdays are completely lovely, but they always fell at school in term time when I was a boarder. I got birthday cards but it was never sort of my day. So I’ve never thought, ‘Oh, I must have a birthday party where people think of ME.’”
What’s much more thrilling to her is that “it’s completely normal for people like me to be 80 and still working, apparently fit and not having lost too many of my marbles. When I was very young, people over 60 were pretty much past it and 70 was – woaaahoooo.” She makes a hand gesture to imply totally off the planet.
She has cornered the market in tricky mothers and grandmothers: see Amandaland, which is also back this week; and she’s off to Argentina shortly for another one of her travel documentaries. But we are here to talk about one of her other on-going projects, the long-running Radio 4 two-hander, Conversations from a Long Marriage by Jan Etherington (series seven begins this week).
Inspired by Etherington’s own long marriage to fellow writer, Gavin Petrie, who died last November [see right], Conversations was first broadcast in 2018 and written with Lumley in mind. When Etherington asked her who she’d like to play her husband, the actor had no hesitation in plumping for Roger Allam: “Every person I meet wants to marry Roger but they can’t, because he’s already married [to fellow actor, Rebecca Saire].”
It’s a clever conceit, charting the ups and downs of a couple who love each other very much but have some serious challenges (heart attack, knee op being the least of it) and even long periods of separation. In series five, ‘Joanna’ discovered that ‘Roger’, unbeknownst to him, had fathered a son (in Chicago, at a time when he thought their marriage was over), now in his 40s, with children, and wanting to connect with his father.
This was a particularly painful bombshell since, as regular listeners will know, ‘Joanna’ had a miscarriage during their first separation as a young couple, in the Summer of Love, and was unable to conceive thereafter.
What is artful about the writing is that you feel you know all the different friends in their group – the old friend who has dementia, the pal who puts up with her husband’s affair and love-child, the Pilates chum for her, the cycling buddy for him – without ever hearing their voices. It is relatable for those of us who still like dancing and rock’n’roll and refuse to countenance the idea of having one foot in the… But, surely, what is exaggerated is, well, how can one put it, the sheer amount of S-E-X the 70-somethings engage in?
“Oh yes,” Lumley says, with a big grin. “She’s ready to jump his bones in the morning, in the evening, when he comes back from washing the car, whenever…” It tends to be her instigating the action, doesn’t it? He quite often demurs saying he’s reading a good book!
“I think she’s much keener on sex than he is. He’s a quite willing partner, to be fair, but it isn’t usually his idea. She seems to have a much higher libido… but how do you measure it? Certainly, she’s always up for it!”
I wouldn’t be so indelicate to ask you if it reflects your appetite… “As my parents would say, it’s not really the sort of thing you talk about! But, really, it doesn’t reflect anybody! I think that’s just the most gorgeous caprice of Jan’s, that somehow, several times a day, almost every day, you jump the bones of your husband. I don’t think that happens even when you’re young and hot and crazily, madly in love.”
None of them are friends socially, although she and Allam exchange the odd text and she went to see him in one of his plays, along with Etherington and the show’s producer: “We adore him so much that we went along as his fan-girl groupies.” She talks of his beautiful voice and how he sung in Les Misérables [he played Javert in the London premiere at the Barbican]. I had no idea he was a singer, I say. “Bloody hell, he can sing the pants off you!”
Lumley is talking in her study, lined with paintings and many books. On the far wall, it looks like ballerinas in tutus à la Degas. “I love you, Ginny, but I haven’t got a Degas – it’s called Precious Cow, by a naive artist, with two lovely people – not really ballerinas. But cows, ballerinas, all the same to me.”
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She was a journalist, herself, for a short while, with a column in The Times, and also wrote opinion pieces, book reviews and travel pieces. At the Daily Express and Today (the short-lived Eddy Shah enterprise) she did big interviews and remembers one with the late Martin Amis: “He was a funny boy.”
Remembering his books and those of his father Kingsley sets her off. “I’ll tell you what I hate now, Ginny, the way people are treating reading as a sort of niche activity. I can’t bear the way we’ve managed to pull books out of our lives.
I could not live without books. We’ve got them in every room [PG Wodehouse in the loo], on every chair, so that wherever you are, there’s a book.”
For those who have turned their back on books, Lumley says, “You are missing at LIFE!”
For our interview, she is dressed in elegant shades of cream, while her long blonde hair has a black base at the tips, a necessary part of her elaborate wig process for Wednesday. She always makes an effort to dress up, when required, but “when I go to Sainsbury’s, I get out of bed, comb my hair and don’t put any make-up on.”
At home she wears the same old thing every day. Not a track suit, Joanna, surely? “No, but clothes that you couldn’t even give away to a charity shop they’re so sad. Old trousers, shirts and jerseys – not necessarily with holes in them, although some of them do. And I’m happy going out in the garden, where it doesn’t really matter.”
She has various medical conditions; one is prosopagnosia – not being able to recognise people’s faces – “so I quite often greet complete strangers as if they’re my dearest friends,” she explains. She also suffers from emetophobia, which is unfortunate because of what she sees as a growth in scenes on television showing people being violently sick: “I think they should give people sick warnings!”
As for sex scenes, “I just think, ‘Poor old actors, there they go again, having to hammer away at each other, and look good while doing it’ and it’s pathetic. But lots of people adore it. I just don’t like it. I love the heart, the falling in love, the brush of the hand, the glance across the room, those are the things that you remember.”
Lumley has been outspoken in her views on how immigrants are talked about and treated. “A lot of people say they don’t think actors should be given the platform to say what they think. But if you feel strongly about something and you feel that it’s setting up a bad feeling among people, hurting them, dispossessing people who you ought to love and greet, then it’s good for you to stand up and say what you think.
“We’re all just creatures. We don’t own anything, we don’t own the land, we’re just people on the earth. And most of the people who are coming here are getting away from something that’s completely horrible at home. Nobody wants to leave their homeland. But if they can’t bear to live there, can’t get work, are persecuted, if there’s a drought, a famine, if there’s a war, then we have got to understand that. So, I think we should be kinder, just be kinder.”
Her attitude to our final bow sounds remarkably considered. “I think about dying every day because I think about living every day and I can’t see them as separate. It seems to me completely normal to be born, to live and to die. It doesn’t seem like an insult or a loss or tragedy, it’s just what happens. I don’t think we should see it as this colossal enemy.
“I’ve thought it would be nice to see it as a friend who’s waiting around and you never know when the friend is going to come through the door, so you mustn’t be cross or sad about it. You hope it won’t be now, because you have lots to do and things you still want to see, but maybe you get to the time when you feel bloody awful and alone and hurting all the time and then you might think, ‘I’d like to go now.’”
She hasn’t spoken out about the assisted dying bill, “but you can tell by the way that I’m speaking that I think it would be a nice thing for all the people whose opinions I respect, like Esther Rantzen, who’s a friend. And I’d love to have it in the arsenal, should the time come that I just go, ‘This is too bloody awful’. It would be so nice not to have my family sent to prison for helping me go.”
Lumley is cheerful about growing older. “I’ve always wanted to be older. I can’t really work out why, but I have always longed for it. And now I shall be 80 – incidentally I thought I was 80 last year, so I’d forgotten it – but I shall clearly make 90, and I can’t wait!”
And so say all of us.
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