Miriam Margolyes is nothing if not forthright. In response to an admirer's fond compliment, she replied, "I'm not beautiful. I'm a fat old cow. I speak my mind."
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And speak her mind she did. In Canberra for a season of her show The Importance of Being Miriam, she quickly weighed in on the recent incident in which the male partner of the Australian Ambassador to France was asked to wait in the car and not greet the Prime Minister at a Paris airport.
"What an arsehole!" she said.
"This person is called Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister. I think this should lose him the election."
She said, "I'm a gay woman but it offends me as a human being... We are like everyone else – totally different and all the same. Everybody pisses out of the same hole, more or less."
When discussion eventually turned to her show, she said she was "very happy with it. I was scared at the beginning but now I'm very pleased with it."
She said it was "very much a personal punt; I could easily have fallen on my fanny" in her adopted country. The British-born actor became an Australian citizen a couple of years ago and was very pleased at how the show had been received. She was touched by the standing ovations.
The Importance of Being Miriam is, she said, "about me – about my coming to Australia and also some of the pieces of literature that have delighted me."
Margolyes has had a long career on stage and in television and film. She said the stage show, a "very curious melding of my life and my loves" featured readings from some of her favourite authors, including Charles Dickens and Clive James and – for the first time, she said – she would sing. Not Rex Harrison-style Sprechgesang, but singing.
"I can't sing but I'm going to do it anyway."
She said she loved classical music – particularly Beethoven and Schubert – and country and western music. Of the latter, she said, "I just really love the syrupiness of it – it's just sheer emotion."
But in the show she would be singing some of the music hall songs her mother used to sing to her like I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am.
Margolyes didn't want to give too much away about the show itself, preferring that people come along and be surprised, but she was prepared to reveal her favourite book: Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit.
"It exposes Dickens himself, the time he lived in, human frailty. The prose is magnificent and the world picture is both accurate and heart-rending, I think. I like the darkness of it. People think of Dickens as a comic writer and he wasn't: he wanted us all to be better people. I think he would say the same thing if he were writing now. It's an eternal problem."
The Importance of Being Miriam is on at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, until Saturday May 9. Bookings: canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 62752700.
