Miriam Margoyles lets out a tiny snort of derision. What may not sound like an auspicious start to an interview is delivered with a reassuring twinkle in the eye and a gentle smile.
I had noted to the venerable English actor, who turns 85 in May, that many of the articles written about her in the past few years include the epithet “national treasure” before her name.
“Well, it has been revised to national trinket,” she counters in her instantly identifiable cut-glass articulation. “By a rather acidulous Scots reporter,” she adds. “But I don’t know anything except that I’m nearly 85. And I think when you live as long as that, people just kind of suspend disbelief—just let you get on with it.”
It’s true that Margoyles has been active in the film and television industry for so long she’s become part of the cultural furniture. She won a BAFTA more than 20 years ago for her work in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, played Juliet’s nurse in Baz Luhrmann’s take on Shakespeare, and was Hogwarts professor Pomona Sprout in the Harry Potter franchise. There have, of course, been television roles too numerous to mention and perhaps yet more animations that have benefitted from Margoyles’s capacity to shape shift her voice.
More recently, she has experienced something of a small-screen renaissance as the perfect chat show guest. Her appearances on The Graham Norton Show are deliciously scandalous.
“I’m a decent person, you know,” she tells me on video link from Tuscany, where she has a house with her longtime partner, retired professor Heather Sutherland. “I’m a kind individual, and I am obviously slightly potty-mouthed sometimes, and I’m good on chat shows, but I haven’t done anything remarkable. I’ve just been around a long time, and I think now I’m someone who tells it like it is, and that’s what people want to hear. They want to hear the truth. They’re desperate for the truth. And I do tell the truth.”
Born in the middle of the Second World War into a Jewish family, Margoyles has lived a rather nomadic life, with homes in the U.K., Australia (Sutherland’s homeland), and Italy, the last of which she hoped to make her permanent residence before the Brexit vote torpedoed that plan. The U.K.’s decision to leave Europe is, she says, part of a wider destabilizing political climate.
“The world is riven with horror and nastiness, and that is shocking,” she says. “I live in shocking times, and I can’t help noticing them. I can’t shut my eyes to them. So I become more and more political, and therefore possibly more and more boring—I don’t know—but I do get incensed by what’s going on, and I will put that in my book.”
That book is Margoyles’s latest foray into memoir—Miriam’s Full English—a collection of anecdotes and observations from her recent tours of the country. “It’s a kind of discursive memoir, going around England and trying to work out, who are the English. Am I English? What does being English mean? And why are we so nasty to other people?
“I hope I will be able to dredge up some filth from somewhere, because filth is what sells,” she adds, drolly. “People want to hear shocking stories, and I have lived. I mean, when I think about it, I’ve been remarkably untouched by filth, but I have handled it.”
(For a very literal example, look up her “man in the tree” clip from Norton’s show. But be prepared for your jaw to risk dislocation as it drops.)
As bawdy as Margoyles can be, she is also a total sweetheart who is attracted to work that offers more wholesome entertainment. Her latest film, the Canada-New Zealand coproduction Holy Days, released in Canada this week, she cites as an example.
Written and directed by Nat Boltt, Holy Days follows a comedic cross-country dash across New Zealand by a trio of senior nuns desperate to save their convent from the wrecking ball. Starring alongside Margoyles are two absolute powerhouses of the craft, Judy Davis and Jacki Weaver. Vancouver-based actor Boltt (Riverdale, District 9) also takes a small part in her debut feature film as director.
Boltt, a South African, wrote the script many years ago when living in New Zealand (her husband is a film technician who worked on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy), after the author of the original book, Joy Cowley, suggested it as a project. Between the usual independent movie financing struggles and the enforced stasis of the pandemic, the film was finally greenlit.
“Miriam came on almost immediately,” Boltt notes. “And that was wonderful, because once Miriam came on, then the other two came on, I think within a few weeks.”
With her long connection to Australia (Margoyles and Sutherland have been together since the 1960s), the English actor was excited to explore its smaller neighbour, she says. And then there was the script.
“I want to be in films that make you want to be glad to be alive and positive about the human race, and so much is happening in the world that’s not positive and really grim,” Margoyles explains. “I was delighted to do this one, and I was really impressed by Nat’s abilities as a director. I mean, she is an actress, and she did write the screenplay, but it was remarkable how well she was able to direct us all. It was a very happy experience.
“I’m always very frightened of work, of acting—that makes me very nervous,” she admits. “I come with enormous humility to work and gratitude that someone’s employed me. It wasn’t always like that. I wasn’t always employed, and so I’m very grateful when I am. And increasingly, people, for some reason, want to work with me. I’m turning down work at a ferocious level all the time.”
She looks at me, her face showing genuine surprise. “I really don’t know why.”
Holy Days opens across Canada, Friday, March 27.
