Good Life actress Felicity Kendal: 'I had affairs when I wanted'

Speaking of her “dark side”, the 66-year-old said she couldn’t be further from the doting housewife Barbara Good

Speaking of her “dark side”, the 66-year-old said she couldn’t be further from the doting housewife Barbara Good. (GETTY IMAGES)

The Good Life actress Felicity Kendal has boasted of having affairs “when I wanted”, claiming she’s nothing like her famous character in the 70s sitcom.

Speaking of her “dark side”, the 66-year-old said she couldn’t be further from the doting housewife Barbara Good.

“I always did have affairs when I wanted,” she told the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine. “It’s just how you are at the moment. Look, the aura of sweetness and light associated with Barbara Good has got b****r all to do with my life.

“The Good Life was a short period 40 years ago but it’s extended to now because it’s on all the f****ing time and it’s what people talk about. Barbara Good, she wasn’t a real person. She wasn’t a Chekhovian character with the dark and the light.”

Kendal, who is currently starring in Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, is twice-divorced.

She parted with her second husband, Michael Rudman, in 1990, and embarked on an affair with then-married playwright Sir Tom Stoppard.

“I don’t think I’ve ever not had a dark side,” she said. “But one of the wonderful reasons why you go into this business is that half your life you live in a fantasy, which is somebody else’s life. It’s actually a great release because you’re not having to deal with the itty-bitty bits of life.”

Now Kendal is back with Rudman, a theatre director. “I suppose, for us, the vows didn’t quite take the first time,” she said in a previous interview.