Joanna Lumley: 'Even when my name was famous, my bank balance was still red'

In the age of disconnection, no clock seems to be running on time. But it’s somewhat unsurprising to log into Zoom and find the perfectly prepared Joanna Lumley had arrived seconds before me. As a young model in London, Joanna explains, she learned the most important lesson of her career: punctuality.

“You have to work on time, but you also have to do your hair, wigs and hair ornaments; You have to access everything – necklaces, earrings, and your own pieces like that. With your very little model money,” said the 76-year-old film and television star.

“We are booked by the hour and, if you are a minute late, half an hour’s pay will be deducted. You have to be very fast, ready for everything. It kept me in good stead all my life. I’ve never had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, so it’s easy to get ready, and that makes me stand well in the movie world, where getting up at 4am is normal.”

As a very fit and very fit woman in her 70s, Joanna has a resume that shames most of us. An accomplished actor and model, resourceful world traveler from Paris to Khartoum, and single mother of one son, Jamie. She is Purdey in New Avengers and Patsy Stone at Absolutely Amazing. He is passionate and seems tireless.

When the script for his new project, comedy Falling in love with Figaro, landing on his lap, he sat down to read it and quickly found himself drawn into the story. In the film, Millie (Danielle Macdonald), an American investment executive, quits her job to pursue her dream of becoming an opera singer. He moves to Scotland to learn from reclusive opera legend Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop (Lumley), only to find himself competing with another Geoffrey-Bishop student, Max (Hugh Skinner).

Joanna Lumley as Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop and Danielle Macdonald as Millie Cantwell in Falling For Figaro.Credit:

At Geoffrey-Bishop, Joanna finds someone she wants to explore. “I love the idea that he’s a bit of a nuisance but he’s made even more savage by his circumstances,” she said. “He’s been successful, he’s had a great career, but for some reason, which we never know, it’s wrong. So, even though he caught a glimpse of the spotlight, he stumbled and fell on the last rail.”

In particular, says Joanna, she is linked to the poverty that follows success. As a younger actor, when he played Purdey in New Avengers – a woman so famous that she inspired global hair trends – “even when my name is famous, my bank balance is still red”.

“People can’t imagine that,” Joanna added. “They think with fame comes mass money, which of course it doesn’t. In my country, the stars Carry on film, some of them got 200 pounds for the film. And some of them end their lives virtually as poor people.”

Joanna and I first spoke in 1992 when Absolutely Amazing premiered, again in 1994 for a documentary series Girl Friday, and over the years for smaller projects. We met face to face for the first time on set Absolutely Amazing film at the end of 2015.

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Of the many conversations, one from 1994 immediately comes to mind. It was the night before he left for Tsarabanjina, an uninhabited island off the coast of Madagascar, to shoot. Girl Friday. Our interview ended almost midnight, London time, and while her husband, opera conductor Stephen Barlow, was on tour, Joanna asked for my help: since I was the last person she spoke to before flying, if something happened, would I do it? tell her husband that her last thoughts are about him. I promise I will.

“Within 10 days I can tell when the tide will turn, when it will rain – in a minute.”

The experience at Tsarabanjina – she was left alone with the camera for 10 days to fend for herself, for some kind of Patsy-in-the-wilderness project – was transformative, she says.

“What I learned from the island is that beneath the skin, we have our second sense,” he said. “Within 10 days I can tell when the tide will turn, when it will rain – up to a minute. I could feel how things were in a very short time, because I had nothing left.

“I learned how we shackled ourselves with responsibilities and objects. We overload ourselves with a whole bunch of extra bullshit that makes our lives really miserable and tense, and then we take pills to stop being so tense. This is crazy.”

Joanna says that Jennifer Saunders, author of Absolutely Fabulous, gives her a lot of creative freedom. “You will create a ladder of madness that seals this character.”

In many ways, Joanna’s career has been a study in collaboration with
series of directors – Peter Hunt in Bond films In His Majesty’s Secret ServiceBlake Edwards at Pink Panther movies, and Ben Lewin on Falling in love with Figaro. And, of course, with Jennifer Saunders on Absolutely Amazingthe TV comedy that gives us Joanna’s most nuanced performance, as Eurydice Colette Clytemnestra Dido Bathsheba Rabelais Patricia Cocteau Stone, aka Patsy.

While most of the credit for Patsy Stone deserves to belong to Jennifer Saunders, who wrote Absolutely Amazing, there is a character fragment that precedes the show. It was in another British TV comedy, Full Candlethat American comedian Ruby Wax enlisted Joanna to play a drunk, broken, and slightly insane version of herself in a series of sketches.

“When Ruby released me into Joanna Lumley’s alternate crazy world, it was for the best,” Joanna said. “It was like breathing air for the first time. I can bring everything you always limited with scripts. I’m just with Ruby, who would say roughly what she wants me to do, but it’s all ad-lib. He created.

“With Jennifer, it’s pretty much the same. He will write a lot of stuff, but I can complete it, if you know what I mean. He would give me a room and I could decorate it. So it’s very liberating. And it’s also really fun because Jennifer and Ruby are both stand-up. They’re comedians and writers, and they’re creative.”

Assembling the Patsy Stone then was like a scaffold going up, says Joanna. His superficial touches: drinking, smoking, and male thirst. And the fine print: his neglect issues and his neglectful mother.

“Jennifer would say, maybe she had taken it off, and I would say, maybe she had taken it all away, and then maybe she took hormones, then maybe she
a man, maybe he’s not a man for a bit… so you’re going to create a ladder of madness that seals this character. ”

“When Ruby released me into Joanna Lumley’s alternate crazy world, it was for the best. It was like breathing air for the first time.”

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When she’s not acting, Joanna has become something of a professional traveler. The two early documentaries, one set in Bhutan and the other in search of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, embark on a series of voyages that take him down the Nile, into Turkey, Oman, and India in search of Noah’s Ark, through Greece, across Siberia and along the Trail. Silk, not to mention Japan, Cuba, and Haiti.

Even the pandemic couldn’t stop it. latest series, Big City of the World Joanna Lumley, is an exploration of Paris, Berlin and Rome. Another series will be filmed later this year, following it on the Spice Route, from New Guinea to Singapore, Zanzibar and the Red Sea.

Joanna says travel offers a rare gift. “We try different things on vacation because we want, for a moment, to get away from our boring old selves.”

“There is a saying that if you want to meet wise people, don’t meet people who are studying books, meet people who have traveled, because travel tells you in a way that no one else can,” says Joanna.

Which doesn’t mean that all trips are great trips. “I didn’t mean to get on a plane and go to a hotel,” Joanna said. “From the plane to the hotel it’s nothing – it’s not a trip. Traveling is being in the country, sleeping, buying things in a shop, meeting people, taking the bus, taking the train, and things like that.”

In his London home, he says, there are plenty of suitcases and trunks used by generations of his family. “In every room in this house, and on the stairs, there are piles of old suitcases,” said Joanna. “I have my grandparents’ travel suitcase, a Tibetan chest and my father’s old army suitcase – every kind of basket and box you can imagine. I stack them and I keep things in them. ”

Travel also offers rare gifts, says Joanna. “You jump out of where you are and you come back into a place where no one knows who you are,” he said. “You let go of your old self – the one emptying the trash or the queue at the post office or whatever – and you become a new person. If you go to Romania, if you go to Uzbekistan or Singapore, you turn into a new person. That’s why we buy new clothes. And we try different things on holidays because we want, for a moment, to get away from our boring old selves. Even though we know our old selves, we want to be new people.”

Falling in love with Figaro is in theaters now.

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