Mrs Tiggy-Winkle or tour de farce? The mystery of the eternally naughty Miriam Margolyes

Sweary, bitchy and paint-strippingly candid, Miriam Margolyes has written a second memoir to follow her bestselling ‘This Much Is True’. But even after two books, the actor remains a conundrum, writes Robert McCrum

Next to her habitual four-letter vocabulary, ‘naughty’ is a word Miriam Margolyes wears on her sleeve (Getty)

When she appeared on The Graham Norton Show in 2021 to promote her autobiography This Much Is True, Miriam Margolyes claimed to have written it because she had been “paid an enormous amount of money”. True or not (hers is a world of fairground mirrors in which everything gets distorted), after two years of the Covid pandemic, and a long showbiz career spent just below the radar, her frank, fearless, and “hilarious” (Daily Mail) memoir caught a national nerve, became a bestseller and, yes, dumped a double hit of money and fame on this self-styled “fat old disabled lesbian Jew” and “national trinket”.

Miriam Margolyes’s shtick was paint-stripping candour (memoir’s golden rule: take no prisoners – yourself, or your enemies), a breezy command of good old English obscenity, a crowd-pleasing inventory of pop cultural walk-ons from her career as an actor (Little Dorrit, The Killing of Sister George) and a lifetime of voice-overs, from the Cadbury’s Caramel Rabbit to the “voice of Anusol”. Margolyes has also played myriad unforgettable characters from Lady Whiteadder with Rowan Atkinson to Professor Sprout in Harry Potter. Now 82, she’s still on a mission to entertain. No one ever went broke in the national service of cheering us all up.

This Much Is True possessed the virtue of telling a whacky life story in the naughtiest possible tones: how she was conceived in an air-raid shelter; was raised by her Scots-Russian parents as an irrepressible Jew; posed in the nude for Augustus John; and was told to pipe down by the late Queen. Next to her habitual four-letter vocabulary, “naughty” is a word she wears on her sleeve: the naughtiest girl at Oxford High; her naughty frown when Warren Beatty asked, “Do you f***?” (a story she repeats again here). And now here she is – having “thought my career was over” – at it again. Forget “weary recycling”, Margolyes still goads herself with, “what took you so long?”

Without the compulsive hook of her life, Oh Miriam! has the air of a shotgun marriage between an opportunistic sequel and a heartfelt memoir. Sometimes, it falls back on theatrical anecdote, green-room gossip, and (occasionally vicious) score-settling. Friends of Leonard Rossiter, Christopher Morahan and Pam Brighton will want to skip this volume. Margolyes may have the air of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, but that smile hides sharp teeth and a caustic mouth. Doubtless funny backstage, or on a repertory bus between the Bristol Old Vic, the Yvonne Arnaud, and the Theatre Royal, Windsor, on the page, it sometimes wears a bit thin.

Still, Oh Miriam! risks the curse of the sequel, and pulls it off. Minus the inspiration of life and times, is she at a loss? Her fans will find her as incorrigible as ever: “Just because I’ve written my autobiography – becoming more famous than I have any right to be – doesn’t mean I’m dead.” Margolyes’s come-on to her audience begins with her Contents: chapter headings include “When did you have your first f***?”; “Always Talk About Sex”; “Breast is Best”; “Always be a C***”; “The Joy of Bottoms”. Her “memory palace is an attic”, and she’s going to give us the benefit of a very bawdy spring clean. She claims to “be totally truthful.” So, having played in Gerald Scarfe’s Ubu Roi as a life-sized vulva, she merrily announces on the third page, “Once a c***, always a c***.” Oh Miriam! may not be for the squeamish. Look closer, however, and you might be surprised at what you find, a shy, vulnerable Jewish girl who is not ashamed to declare: “if you prick me, do I not bleed?”

Throughout Oh Miriam!, Margolyes hides behind feisty gossip, outrageous opinions and flurries of thespian bitching, seasoned with f***s and c***s. This is the “Miriam” she’s nurtured to survive. There is, however, another self lurking within, the tale of a clever girl who went to Newnham College, Cambridge, got into Footlights, sat at the feet of FR Leavis, mastered the art of cock-sucking, and made her way in showbiz as a Dickens fan and connoisseur of the English language. Her chapter about bottoms (“I’ve not mooned for decades and rather miss it”), is a case in point. At first, Margolyes embarks on a delightful riff about “callipygian” (meaning “possessed of a pleasing bottom”). This rare lexical specimen quickly unites her love of words with her well-publicised obsession with cocks and bums.

If we were to approach Oh Miriam! via psychoanalysis, we might be tempted to allude to the passage in Jung’s Psychological Types, in which he defines Enantiodromia as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite over the course of time”. To Jung, this is analogous to the principle of equilibrium in the natural world, the process by which all extremes become neutralised by opposition in order to restore an internal balance. How much do her early humiliations counterbalance the merriment of her story? Like many actors, her lights are on, but who’s at home?

Margolyes is a conundrum as much to herself as her audiences

As a divided soul and born show-off, Margolyes is both a hooligan chatterbox and a responsible daughter – proud to be an Australian citizen, and a devout campaigner for gay rights, who pays a heartfelt tribute to her beloved parents: “The words of advice I most often heard from my parents were, ‘Do the best you can, Miriam.’ They would always stress ‘the best’. My duty was to pursue excellence.”

Margolyes’s pursuit of excellence has inspired many associations with some of the best and brightest: Isaiah Berlin, Vanessa Redgrave, Martin Scorsese, Robbie Coltrane, Kenneth Williams, Julie Walters, Heather Sutherland and Stephen Fry. Her betes noires are predictable: Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nigel Farage and David Cameron.

In summary, Margolyes is a conundrum as much to herself as her audiences. Her chapter “Know Thyself” has the right instinct, but when we join her before the mirror, we only get: “May I introduce you to my body?” Her mind remains opaque. To some, she’s a force of nature, a tour de farce. On the page, rather more complicated than she seems; in person, bold, brave and bright, but also revealing, shocking, touching, and infuriating. An icon, a cocksucker – and the star of her show.

‘Oh Miriam!’ by Miriam Margolyes (John Murray, pp 324, £25), out on 14 September