Her looks, and her temperament too, are impish – of the naughty-but-nice variety. So it doesn’t seem that surprising that Celia Imrie, celebrated as a quintessentially English character actress, is sipping ginger beer when we meet. Generously, she proffers the can, pouring half for me. But beware: Ms Imrie isn’t all that she seems. Embedded in her petite frame is a backbone of steel. On the surface she may be calm and measured. But so passionate is she about her art that she can spot a killer role at 20 paces. And she isn’t afraid to fight for it.
Take Cranford, the landmark BBC drama series loosely based upon three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. The adaptation, by Sue Birtwistle and Susie Conklin, captured the imagination with its quirky, though genteel, interpretation of life in a fictional Cheshire town in the 19th century.
“I’m surprised I wasn’t knifed for the role of Lady Glenmire,” she confides. “Everybody wanted to be in it.” Not everyone was, though: the cast was the crème de la crème, with Dame Judi Dench and Dame Eileen Atkins at the helm. Undaunted, Imrie picked up the phone and called Birtwistle. “Isn’t there a role for me? A parlour maid, even,” she wheedled. And it paid off. Birtwistle promptly wrote the part of Lady Glenmire especially for her.
This week, Imrie, an Olivier Award winner with a slew of acclaimed film roles to her name, including Calendar Girls and Bridget Jones’s Diary, is in the final stages of rehearsals for her latest stage role in Polar Bears. The first play written for theatre by Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, its central character Kay (played by Jodhi May) has bipolar disorder. Imrie’s role is as her mother who struggles in vain to understand her child’s illness.
“It has been a sobering experience,” Imrie says hesitantly. “My character is worn down, confused and bewildered… and it reminds me of my own mother. Of how she couldn’t understand my emotional illness when I was in my early teens. I can still see her, trudging across the courtyard outside the psychiatric ward every day to visit me, totally bewildered by what was happening to her daughter. I know now how desperately she wanted to help me. But she couldn’t understand my illness. All she could do was witness it. And now I’m so angry with myself for putting her through that. Because it was my own fault. I had made myself ill.”
It is difficult territory for Imrie: she has never before spoken of her three-month spell in hospital with anorexia when she was 14.
One of five siblings, Imrie, now 57, had an idyllic, Home Counties childhood with a doctor father and a stay-at-home mum. There were ponies and beach holidays. And, doubtless, lashings of ginger beer.
She had a typical middle-class childhood ambition to become a ballerina. Imrie excelled. Except that she grew too tall. Which was a shame as she passed all the exams, stumbling only at the final one that would have got her into the Royal Ballet.
Too tall, in the young Imrie’s mind, became a euphemism for too big. And so she became determined to make herself smaller. At 14, she was carted off to the psychiatric wing of St Thomas’s Hospital in London.
“It is the greatest regret of my life, what I put my mother through,” she says softly. “I spent the rest of my mother’s life trying to make that better again. To make up for it. I put her through so much worry, and in this role I can see how helpless one is when a child is emotionally ill and you just can’t understand it.”
Though slim, Imrie has a soft and curvy figure – when she posed naked behind a display of cupcakes in Calendar Girls, the film-makers had to send out for bigger buns, so magnificent was the abundance of Imrie’s bosom.
Anorexia is a thing of the past, but its legacy has been anger. “I get very angry now - and quite unsympathetic – because it’s such a terrible waste of time and energy. You can’t talk anyone out if it; you have to cure yourself.”
Imrie hesitates, momentarily, when I ask how long her mother has been dead. “I’ve blurred it,” she says painfully. “Oh, I guess 10 years. It’s another of my guilt trips that she spent a short spell in a nursing home at the end. I was in Gormenghast and wish with all my heart she had never had to go in there. But my career seemed so important. She was a wonderful woman. On her first evening in the nursing home, she dressed and came down for dinner at 7pm… only to find everyone had gone to bed. 'How boring,’ was her response. That still makes me sad and guilty.”
Modern youth is another bugbear. The day before, a young man had knocked over a DVD display in the supermarket and walked off shrugging. Imrie followed, shouting: “Oy, aren’t you going to pick those up?” Cue another nonchalant shrug and a “that’s the shop’s job” response. Imrie bristles, the magnificent embonpoint heaving. “I know, I got unnecessarily furious. And you can’t fight back at rudeness any more. You run the risk of being knifed.”
She pauses, then sighs. “Families today, they are run around the children. When did you last see a child offer their seat to an adult? My mother would have clipped me around the ear if I didn’t.
“Then there are mobiles and iPods. If I was to paint a picture of modern Britain, it would be a depressing picture of millions of individuals with some technology clamped to their ears. No one is living in the moment. Or interacting. I heard a radio programme the other day about an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet [Juliet and her Romeo, which is at the Bristol Old Vic]. The central characters are not teenagers but two old people in a care home. And instead of the Capulets and Montagues opposing their relationship, it is their adult children who thought that love among the oldies is vulgar. Says it all about today’s generation.”
Ageing, she confesses, is something she doesn’t allow herself to think about. “Recently, I was having supper with my son [Angus, 15]. He was talking about a film on the life of Charlie Chaplin and telling me how he had to commit his mother to an asylum. I turned to him and said: 'You won’t do that to me, darling.’ And straight away he replied: 'But, Mum, he had no choice.’ It was a sobering moment. So, no, I don’t think about old age.’’
Imrie smiles, somewhat embarrassed. “Really, I’m an optimist. I’m not really grumpy. I love life. Grab it, I say.”
It doesn’t bother her at all that she is lauded as a character actor. “I’m the right age at the right time. There are so many wonderful roles out there.”
The role of wife has never been one she has chosen, however. Although Angus is the apple of her eye, marriage with his father, Ben Whitrow, the actor, was never on the cards. “It’s such a big commitment, don’t you think? I know it sounds a bit childish but it was all a bit of the heebie-jeebies for me.”
Her reluctance might be a legacy of her mother’s lifelong ambition to find husbands for her four daughters. “We called her Mrs Bennet after Pride and Prejudice,” she recalls. “She so wanted good husbands for us. When I was pregnant with Angus, I asked her: 'Would you so hate it if I had a baby without being married, Mother?’ There was a long pause and then she said stiffly: 'I would hate it.’”
Imrie took no heed and has brought up her son as a single mother. “It changes one. It calmed me down.”
Afternoon rehearsals beckon. But Imrie leaves me a voice message that evening, talking at greater length about her guilt that her mother had to deal with her anorexia. “It kills me, what I put my mother through. Her love was very, very precious to me.”
When I call back, her answer machine is on. In a sultry, sexy drawl Imrie’s message says: “Hi. Do leave a message. Byeeeeee.”
Impish. Naughty but extremely nice.
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