To call Joanna Lumley a ‘national treasure’ feels somehow inadequate. In truth, she is closer to a sacred monument – one of that rarefied group of people, like David Attenborough and Michael Palin, who are as essential to Britain’s idea of itself as Shakespeare and spotted dick. From her early days as a 60s cover girl to her recent round-the-world TV travel jaunts – via James Bond, The New Avengers and a mid-career re-launch as chaotic boozehound Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous – she’s been “thrashing about in the business” (her words) for more than 55 years now.
“I’m a circus artist, really – that’s all I am,” is Dame Joanna’s own modest assessment, when I catch up with her at home in London. “Actors, performers, entertainers of any kind – we all just joined the circus, really. And we’re lucky to do it. I have such joy in all the things I do. I can’t imagine ever giving it up.”
As if we’d let her. Indeed, at 78, she is currently enjoying another of her many purple patches. Fresh from her role in Fool Me Once – Netflix’s most-watched show across the world last year – she’s signed on to another of the streamer’s global smashes, Wednesday, playing the Addams Family’s Grandmama. Before that, though, she’s reprising her scene-stealing turn as Felicity, the brutally unsentimental mother of Lucy Punch’s eponymous sloanie in Amandaland, the eagerly awaited (and – phew! – very funny) new spin-off from beloved sitcom Motherland.
Once the undisputed queen bee of the school gate, the recently divorced Amanda has been forced to downsize, leaving Chiswick for “SoHa” (South Harlesden) and enrolling her children Manus and Georgie at the local comp. And while her mother might appear initially sympathetic – rushing round with an emergency “tuck parcel” from Waitrose – it soon transpires she’s only there to hide from her “PA” (who’s actually her carer).
“Felicity is an absolute snob,” says Joanna. “She’s always slightly looked down on people. It seems she was a fairly useless mother to Amanda, and I think Amanda’s snobbish qualities and bad behaviour came from Felicity. She’s also become slightly strange – she seems to be losing it a bit. She does odd things like sucking crisps, then putting them back in the bowl.
“In Motherland, I only had a couple of scenes, really. But it was so well written, and so well observed – it was terribly funny, but also had great poignancy. I thought it was a brilliant show, and hugely popular, so it was thrilling to hear it wasn’t going to disappear into the dust, but was being revived with the wonderful Amanda. So of course, as her mother, I lurched back into action.”
It’s not the first time Joanna has played Lucy Punch’s dreadful mother. “We worked together in [2004 Hollywood film] Ella Enchanted,” she recalls. “It’s a Cinderella story, and Lucy played one of the Ugly Sisters – as it were – and I was the evil stepmother. I’m always an evil, horrible stepmother or an aunt or something. It’s been lovely to watch Lucy’s career blossom. She’s got funny bones. I think that’s the way to describe her. Such an innate sense of comic timing. I love it when you see young people you’ve worked with, rocketing up to become huge stars.”
It’s odd, I suggest, that such a beloved figure as “Lummers” – who in real life dotes on her two grown-up granddaughters – is so often cast as wicked mothers and evil aunts (see also Fool Me Once, James and the Giant Peach et al). Is it the Ab Fab effect, does she think? “I’m sure it is,” she says. “Patsy was a pivotal part in my life. Until then, most of the people I’d played were either smart high-achievers – like Sapphire [in the brilliantly unsettling 70s teatime chiller Sapphire & Steel] or Purdy [in The New Avengers] – or just good, ordinary people. But Patsy was such an extraordinary change – she was glamorous, but also quite ghastly. And very funny, of course.
“Everybody will tell you that playing bad people is more fun, and it is,” she adds. “But I think as we get older, the parts for women still tend to be slightly polarised. Not in Amandaland, I hasten to add. But in general, it seems older women have to be slightly categorised in a way they don’t do with men. Women are hardly ever just a grandmother: you either have to be incredibly clever or a bit loopy or something. It’s still quite hard to get away with writing ordinary women.”
Joanna’s life, of course, has been anything but ordinary. A daughter of Empire, she was born in Srinigar, British India, where her father was serving in the 6th Queen’s Own Gurkha Rifles (hence her tireless campaigning, over many years, for the right for Gurkha veterans to be allowed to settle in the UK). Growing up, she spent time in Hong Kong and Malaysia, as well as Kent and a convent school in Sussex, before turning to modelling at 16.
But just as London was reaching the height of its Sixties swing, she became pregnant with James, her son by photographer Michael Claydon. It seemed like “the perfect time to draw a line” under the modelling career and try her hand at acting – even though, by her own admission, her only previous experience was in school plays. An actor friend arranged for her to say a line in a film he was making, so she could get her Equity card – and that’s how she “jumped into the industry through the back window”.
One of her first roles (in which she doubled her dialogue to two lines) was as the brainwashed ‘English Girl’ in the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, for which she spent two months living in the Swiss Alps with George Lazenby, Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas, earning £100 a week (“which seemed to me beyond riches”).
More screen work followed, including a short stint on Coronation Street – where she sensibly rejected Ken Barlow’s proposal of marriage – but, as a former model, the future BAFTA winner and Tony nominee struggled to be taken seriously. She became a household name thanks to The New Avengers, the mid-70s reboot of the stylish 60s spy caper, in which she beat 800 applicants to bag the part of Purdey, a martial arts expert and former Royal Ballet dancer whose distinctive short bob haircut became a global sensation: what ‘the Rachel’ was to the 90s, ‘the Purdey’ was to the 70s.
“I was nervous about the Damehood. I said to my husband, ‘Will people think I’m getting ideas above my station?'”
Much of the 80s was spent either in the theatre, or appearing as herself on TV, including stints filling in for Terry Wogan on his chat show. Then along came Ab Fab’s Patsy, the permanently sloshed foil to Jennifer Saunders’ narcissistic fashionista Edina.
It was a game-changing role that almost didn’t happen: after the read-though for the pilot episode, Joanna got cold feet and tried to pull out of the show. “I was just so anxious that Jennifer didn’t want me, but was too polite to say she didn’t want me,” she explains. “I thought it would probably be better if I just disappeared. But my agent said, ‘oh, just do it – the pilot might not get commissioned’. Thank goodness she did!”
In more recent years, Joanna has combined acting roles in everything from Paddington to The Wolf of Wall Street with a series of TV travelogues that have taken her from the Arctic Circle to her birthplace of India, greeting every new face in every country with the same jolly, head girl enthusiasm. She also remains an energetic activist and supporter of more than 60 charitable causes, from wildlife conservation to human rights – so no-one was surprised when, in 2022, her OBE was upgraded to a Damehood. Well, no-one except Joanna.
“I was weak-kneed,” she recalls, of receiving the nomination letter. “I was up here in London, on my own, and I sat at the table and burst into tears. I was happy as pie about getting the OBE, but this… It was such a shock. But then I became nervous, and I said to my husband [she’s been married to the classical music conductor Stephen Barlow since 1986]: ‘Would it be awful? Will people think I’m getting above my station?’ I didn’t want the public to think of me as different from what I am, which is plain old Joanna Lumley. But my husband said it was like being handed a bunch of flowers – it would be rude to push them back. He said I should accept it gracefully, so I said, ‘how lovely, I will’.”
Last year, Joanna’s showbiz royalty status was further cemented when she was chosen to deliver the UK’s Eurovision vote results. I’d go further, I tell her, and make her the voice of Britain’s four-minute nuclear attack warning – because what could be more comforting, at a time of such fear and panic, than those famously breathy, cut-glass tones?
Amazingly, it turns out I’m not the first person to suggest this. “Years ago, they did sound me out to say, ‘if push came to shove, would you mind being the voice that tells people what to do and how to prepare?’” she says, breezily. “I said, ‘we’ll never come to that’. But it has been mooted – me being the voice of doom.”
As a baby boomer who spent the 1960s hanging out with everyone from 007 to Frank Sinatra, Joanna came of age at a time of great optimism. For all her naturally Tigger-ish bounce, does she ever despair at the state of the world today? “Well it’s terribly difficult, because I’m old – I don’t feel old, but I am technically old,” she says. “And I’m terribly afraid of becoming one of those people who are always complaining about the young, and how everything used to be better. But there was more optimism, for sure. And it seems that essence of carefreeness has gone. People were less self-conscious – they weren’t always looking at themselves, regarding themselves, wondering what people thought about them on TikTok…”
Other worries keep her awake at night: she reels off statistics about the number of animals in captivity, or being bred in appalling conditions, and all the “hormones and drugs” we are ingesting in our food (she’s been a vegetarian for over 45 years) that are making us “sicker and sicker”. She also talks passionately about the climate emergency – of “famines and droughts and floods and fires” – before concluding, in the most Joanna Lumley-ish way possible: “All you can do is just bash on, doing the best you can.”
Even death, which thinks about “every day”, she approaches with a cheery fortitude. “I don’t see death as ghastly. The fact you’re alive means you’re going to die. So make the most of it, and be prepared for when death comes along to gather you in – when the Uber of death, as it were, is outside your door. I mean, try to avoid it all times – but be gracious about it. There’s certainly no point being afraid of it.”
That said, Joanna says she fully expects to live for another 20 years. “I seem to be okay – though I’m touching wood as I say that, because nobody knows what’s going to happen. But more and more I want to savour the pleasure of today, because that’s the only thing we can influence. Yesterday’s finished – we can’t change that – and we haven’t got tomorrow yet. So do it today.”
Retirement, as discussed, is not an option. “I asked my husband Stephen, ‘what would it be like if you didn’t have music?’ And he said ‘I’d be dead. It’s like the air that I breathe.’ So we can’t, either of us, give up what we do, because it’s our life.”
And by creating work that will outlive them, they also gain a kind of immortality. “That’s right,” says Joanna. “Even if old Death has leaped up with his scythe and said, ‘here’s your taxi’, some part of you is still living on – still, as Elvis said, forever young.”
Watch all episodes of Amandaland on BBC iPlayer
This interview was published in Waitrose Weekend on 6 February, 2025
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