Miriam Margolyes

Miriam Margolyes

Miriam Margolyes, OBE (/ˈmɑːrɡəliːz/; born 18 May 1941) is a British-Australian actress and voice artist. Her earliest roles were in theatre and after several supporting roles in film and television she won a BAFTA Award for her role in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) and was cast in the role of Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series.

For many years she has divided her time between England and Australia, and she has starred in productions in both countries, including the Australian premiere of the 2013 play I'll Eat You Last. In 2013, she became an Australian citizen, thereby holding dual British and Australian citizenship

Early life

Margolyes was born in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, on 18 May 1941,[2] the only child of Ruth (née Walters; 1905–1974), a property investor and developer, and Joseph Margolyes (1899–1995), a physician from the Gorbals,[3] Glasgow.[4] She grew up in a Jewish family;[5][6][7] her ancestors migrated to the UK from Poland and Belarus. Her great-grandfather, Symeon Sandmann, was born in the town of Margonin in central-western Poland, which Margolyes visited in 2013.

She attended Oxford High School and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English.[8] There, in her twenties, she began acting and appeared in productions by the Cambridge Footlights comedy troupe.[9] She represented the university in the first series of University Challenge, where she may have been one of the first people to say "fuck" on British television; she claims to have used the word in frustration on the show in 1963.[10] However, at least two others said it on British television before that: Brendan Behan on Panorama in 1956 (although his drunken slurring was not understood), and an anonymous man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's magazine show, Roundabout, that his job was "fucking boring".[11][12]

Acting career

With her distinctive voice, Margolyes first gained recognition for her work as a voice artist. In the 1970s she recorded a soft-porn audio called Sexy Sonia: Leaves from my Schoolgirl Notebook.[13] She performed most of the supporting female characters in the dubbed Japanese action TV series Monkey. She also worked with the theatre company Gay Sweatshop and provided voiceovers in the Japanese TV series The Water Margin (credited as Mirium Margolyes).

In 1974 she appeared with Kenneth Williams and Ted Ray in the BBC Radio 2 comedy series The Betty Witherspoon Show.[14]

Margolyes' first major role in a film was as Elephant Ethel in Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977). In the 1980s, she made appearances in Blackadder opposite Rowan Atkinson: these roles include the Spanish Infanta in The Black Adder, Lady Whiteadder in Blackadder II and Queen Victoria in Blackadder's Christmas Carol. In 1986 she played a major supporting role in the BBC drama The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. She won the 1989 LA Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Flora Finching in the film Little Dorrit (1988). On American television, she headlined the short-lived 1992 CBS sitcom Frannie's Turn. In 1994 she won the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mrs Mingott in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993).

In 1989, Margolyes co-wrote and performed a one-woman show, Dickens' Women, in which she played 23 characters from Dickens' novels.[15]

Margolyes came to the notice of younger audiences when she starred as Aunt Sponge in James and the Giant Peach (1996); she also provided the voice of the Glowworm in the same film. During the same time she played the Nurse in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996). Around this time, she voiced the rabbit character in the animated commercials for Cadbury's Caramel bars[16] and provided the voice of Fly the dog in the Australian-American family film Babe (1995).[17]

She played Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets released in 2002. In a 2011 interview on The Graham Norton Show, in regard to her fellow castmembers, Margolyes claimed that she liked Maggie Smith, but rather bluntly admitted that she, "didn't like the one that died", meaning Richard Harris.[18]

In 2004, Margolyes played the role of Peg Sellers, the mother of Peter Sellers, in the Golden Globe winning film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

She was one of the original cast of the London production of the musical Wicked in 2006, playing Madame Morrible opposite Idina Menzel, a role she also played on Broadway in 2008.[19]

In 2009, she appeared in a new production of Endgame by Samuel Beckett at the Duchess Theatre in London's West End.[20]

Margolyes voiced the role of Mrs. Plithiver, a blind snake in 3D-animated-epic film Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010). Margolyes reprised her role as Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011).

She played recurring character Prudence Stanley in the Australian-based TV series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries from 2012 to 2015.

In 2014, she voiced Nana in the Disney Junior animated series for pre-school-age viewers Nina Needs to Go![21]

In January 2016 she appeared in The Real Marigold Hotel, a travel documentary in which a group of eight celebrities travel to India to see whether retirement would be more rewarding there than in the UK.[22] The series was reprised for two Christmas Specials The Real Marigold On Tour, from Florida and Kyoto.[23] She narrated the 2016 ITV documentary about Lady Colin Campbell entitled Lady C and the Castle.[24]

In December 2017 Margolyes appeared in the second season of The Real Marigold On Tour to Chengdu and Havana.[25] She appeared in the first episode of the third season when she travelled to St Petersburg, Russia with Bobby George, Sheila Ferguson and Stanley Johnson.

In January 2018 Margolyes hosted a three-part series for the BBC titled Miriam's Big American Adventure, highlighting the citizens of the US and the issues facing the nation.[26]

Since 2018, Margolyes has portrayed Mother Mildred in the BBC One drama, Call The Midwife.

She played Miss Shepherd in a 2019 production of The Lady in the Van for the Melbourne Theatre Company in Melbourne in Australia.[27]

Other work

Margolyes is a supporter of Sense (the National Deafblind and Rubella Association) and was the host at the first Sense Creative Writing Awards, held at the Charles Dickens Museum in London in December 2006, where she read a number of works written by talented deafblind people.[28]

In 2011, Margolyes recorded a narrative for the album The Devil's Brides by klezmer musician-ethnographer Yale Strom.[29]

Political activism

Margolyes is a member of the British-based ENOUGH! coalition, which seeks the boycott of Israel. She is also a signatory of Jews for Justice for Palestinians.[30] "What I want to try to do is to get Jewish people to understand what's really going on", she has said, "and they don't want to hear it. If you speak to most Jews and say 'Can Israel ever be in the wrong?' they say 'No. Our duty as Jews is to support Israel whatever happens.' And I don't believe that. It is our duty as human beings to report the truth as we see it." [31] Margolyes is a campaigner for a respite care charity, Crossroads.[32]

Margolyes is a member of the Vauxhall Constituency Labour Party. In August 2015, she was a signatory to a letter criticising The Jewish Chronicle's reporting of Jeremy Corbyn's alleged association with antisemites.[33]

In November 2019, Margolyes endorsed the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 UK general election because he "is going to protect the NHS".[34][35] Later in the month, along with other public figures, she signed a letter supporting Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election.[36]

Personal life

Margolyes is a lesbian.[37] On becoming an Australian citizen,[32] on Australia Day 2013, Margolyes referred to herself as a "dyke" live on national television and in front of the then prime minister, Julia Gillard.[38]

Since 1967 her partner has been Heather Sutherland,[17][39] a retired Australian professor of Indonesian studies.[40] Margolyes divides her time between homes in London and Kent in the UK, Tuscany in Italy and Robertson, New South Wales, in Australia.[41][42][43][44]

Author and comedian David Walliams says he used Margolyes as a model for the title character in his children's book Awful Auntie after a rude exchange with the actress during a stage production. He stresses that he has nothing against Margolyes and is a fan of her work.