📚 This Much Is True (Miriam Margolyes)

BAFTA-winning actor, voice of everything from Monkey to the Cadbury’s Caramel Rabbit, creator of a myriad of unforgettable characters from Lady Whiteadder to Professor Sprout, MIRIAM MARGOLYES, OBE, is the nation’s favourite (and naughtiest) treasure. Now, at the age of 80, she has finally decided to tell her extraordinary life story – and it’s well worth the wait.

Find out how being conceived in an air-raid gave her curly hair; what pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had; how she ended up posing nude for Augustus John as a teenager; why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she’s ever had; and what happened next after Warren Beatty asked ‘Do you fuck?’

From declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave to being told to be quiet by the Queen, this book is packed with brilliant, hilarious stories. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much Is True is as warm and honest, as full of life and surprises, as its inimitable author.

Source: This Much is True: ‘There’s never been a memoir so packed with eye-popping, hilarious and candid stories’ DAILY MAIL by Miriam Margolyes – Books

This Much Is True shares Miriam Margolyes’ life on and off the stage. I wrote a longer response here.

Marginalia

One of the book’s real merits is Margolyes’s refusal to mould her story to the usual celebrity narratives: being honest about herself only hurt her parents and, by extension, her; she sees no positives in her lifelong struggle with her weight; getting old sucks. But also, she refuses to be miserable about any of it. Despite all the talk about penises and celebrity prats, The main impression readers are left with is of her kindness. The friends she sweeps up along the way are friends for life, and as a result she has 11,833 names in her phone, and I dearly wish mine was among them.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes review – a wickedly honest memoir by Hadley Freeman

This Much Is True is an entertaining, sometimes shocking, periodically uncomfortable, but altogether delightful read. And Margolyes keeps her promise, “Well, I can’t please everyone all the time . . . but I promise you the REAL Miriam Margolyes.”

Source: A book review: This Much Is True by Joan Burda

Introduction

I’m quite sure you picked this book up hoping I’d make you laugh. That’s what I seem to have become best known for. I lack the filter others possess and out of my potty mouth pop filthy sexual anecdotes, verbal and physical flatulence on a grand scale. I swear, I fart, I draw attention to things best left unremarked – and it seems it’s made me popular. Please don’t think I’m unaware of my duty to both entertain and shock you, but I won’t allow my book to be just dirty talk. Let me tell you the truth about myself, too.

Women Are Better than Men: Discuss

I realise I’m generalising but from my experience I find that the range of thought and conversation in most men is limited. They’re not interested in feelings. Many men react with horror and fear when a woman starts crying

Going on the Stage: A Masterclass of Sorts

How much of it is training, how much of it is innate? A mixture of both. I have no formal training: I didn’t go to drama school, mainly because I was already twenty-two when I left Cambridge and I didn’t want to remain a student for another three years. I read quite a bit about theatrical technique but mainly I have learnt on the job and through observing others.

When I read a text, I use the bricks of my own personality to fashion a character. It’s the text that gives you the mortar, the other elements of what you’re creating and what you have at the back of your mind’s eye. When I get a play script, I want to see if the character has changed at all during the course of the piece. Is there an arc to the character? Or, if not, does she move in any way from beginning to end? If there is no movement, I have to try to put it there, because it’s boring to know everything about a character from the minute they step onto the stage. The actor or actress must surprise the audience in order to engage them and to entertain them. That’s what I look for in the writing. But the surprise must be organic, from within. Imposing it won’t work.

I try rather to discover what it is that opens the door to a character for me, and it’s always different things – maybe a single line of my script, or something that another character in the play says. I see every rehearsal as an opportunity both to offer and to glean something new from my fellow actors – as long as you are receptive to that dialogue and you open yourself to the moment, the process of finding your way into a character becomes a continual foreplay. Every inch of your skin has got to be sensitive to the moment, and if you’re lucky, the moment comes – but it can go again just as quickly. It is a flash, and you can’t control it and you can’t compel it – you just have to be available. That’s the most important thing: you make yourself available for the moment.

I think that you see how you want to appear on the stage. And I don’t mean physically: what I mean, rather, is that somehow you ‘see’ what you want to do with your character, how you want her to be. What is her reality? You glimpse it, distantly, and as you rehearse, and with the help of your colleagues and your director, and the costume department and the make-up artist, and so on, gradually, it all feeds into your ‘being’. Then the creation, your character’s being, starts slowly and imperceptibly to take root, and to be there for you to step into on the first night, or whenever the first audience appears.
That’s why I hate it when people ask to watch a rehearsal. Sometimes directors say, ‘Oh, I’ve asked a few people to come in to see how we’re going.’ I can’t bear it, because a performance is a fragile butterfly of a thing – and it has to be coaxed and nourished and soothed. Exposure too early is scary and frightening, because an actor’s nature is to perform – that is what we do. And that’s how we think of ourselves – we are the performers and you are the audience. When we see an audience, we will perform, but if we’re not ready to deliver our performance, then something phony, invented and inorganic is risked being laid onto the fragile structure that is slowly coming into being. (I

To learn my lines, I often go off and lock myself away for a week or two and do nothing except learn and properly get to know the text, and I see no one and do nothing apart from that script. Then I hire someone for another week to run through it again and again with me until it is written deep into my brain. I then remember it until the end of the last night of the show – then it’s wiped clean.

Being Jewish

I fast on Yom Kippur (and always have), maintain the dietary restrictions during Passover (no leavened bread etc.), and have never eaten bacon, shellfish of any kind, ham or pork in any guise – not even at a restaurant. I may not believe in God, but I’m very proud of my roots: they nourish me. I’m fascinated by the pull of Judaism and its culture – the food, the jokes, the vitality, the suffering, the guilt and the history – it’s all part of who I am and what I’ve inherited. The fact of my being Jewish informs the whole of my life. It informs connections with people. More than anything else, being Jewish informs my actor’s aesthetic: emotion is always trembling on the brink for every Jewish woman. It comes with the territory, and it’s very useful as I don’t have to delve to find joy, despair, laughter and tears.

Getting Older

Most people like to pounce on an empty bench, but I long for human communion – that to me is Holy Communion. I love talking to people, and asking them questions. They’re giving me a present of their stories. Talking, listening, learning what it’s like to look through the eyes of another soul.