Joanna Lumley: 'I'll be here when I'm 90,' as she prepares for ANOTHER hit show role
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Her acting career spans five decades – from a Bond girl in 1969 to the high-kicking spy Purdey in the New Avengers in the 1970s to the drunken Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous in the 1990s.
She also kissed Leonard di Caprio in Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, and most recently appeared as Lucy Punch’s caustic mother in the hit BBC sitcom Amandaland.
But as she looks forward to celebrating her 79th birthday this week (1 May) the national treasure that is Dame Joanna Lumley is set to star in the hotly anticipated second series of the Netflix blockbuster, Wednesday.
Looking as absolutely fabulous as ever as she shared anecdotes from her distinguished career, she told the audience at the SANDS International Film Festival of St Andrews today that she has no intention of exiting stage left.
‘I’ll be here when I’m 90 - as long as I can speak,’ she said in the distinctly plummy, husky tones that once voiced the Cadbury Caramel Rabbit.
‘When I was 16 and told the careers officer at my convent school that I wanted to go into acting, he told me that the only jobs open to me in film would be as a continuity or make-up girl.
‘In the past women like me would have been sidelined at 38 but now there are lead parts for people in their 50s and big parts for those in their 70s,’ added Lumley, who is unfazed by ageing.
Now she is looking forward to wearing ‘many, many huge wigs, one on top of the other’ for her role as Hester Frump, Morticia Addam’s mother and Wednesday’s closest ally in season two of the Tim Burton drama.
She also can’t wait for people to watch her play a rotting ghoul in the latest Mark Gattiss’ Christmas ghost story, The Room in the Tower.
‘I was four hours getting prosthetic make-up to get a frightening face. You can watch while you’re wrapping your presents from Santa,’ added Joanna, who is ‘three-quarter Scottish on both sides of my family’ and who has a home in Scotland.
‘Scotland is the land of my fathers – I love it. I have a little cottage in the Dumfriesshire that had been ruined and empty for 50 years.
'I saw it in a snowstorm and knew I had to have it. It’s like a little grey mouse sitting on the side of a hill. It’s where I’m going to be buried.’
She has come a long way from the teenager who was turned away from drama school and became a model in London in the Swinging Sixties and later a struggling actress taking small parts in the likes of Dracula films and Coronation Street before hitting the big time with the New Avengers.
‘I’ve been skint – I had no money, and we lived off Marmite sandwiches for months, and I burnt furniture to keep us warm,’ said Joanna, who became a single mother at 21.
‘But having a son to look after gave me such motivation to work, and it wasn’t so bad – it made me tough, and I learnt resilience.’
But it was Absolutely Fabulous that introduced her to a new generation – a part that she wanted to turn down at first because she ‘couldn’t make Jennifer Saunders laugh’.
Her agent persuaded her to take the part of Patsy Stone, a part she made her own by ‘thinking up ways to make Jennifer laugh. In the end we never stopped laughing together. It was absolute bliss.’
