Celia Imrie is that rarest of creatures in modern Britain – someone who hasn’t read The Thursday Murder Club. “I didn’t want to spook things, is the truth,” says the actress, who’d “got wind” a while back that she might be in the frame for the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s mega-selling comic crime novel. “So I waited until the green light, and then of course it was marvellous to dip into the book. But I was astonished to learn how familiar everybody was with it. And not only here – I was in America last year, and everybody knew about it there, too.”
Presumably, when word got out that producer Steven Spielberg and director Chris Columbus were turning the decade’s bestselling book into a movie, every actor of a certain age was on the phone to their agent? “I expect so,” says Imrie, who ended up landing the plum role of Joyce, the newest recruit to the eponymous gang of crime-solving pensioners. “And aren’t I lucky? I count my blessings, truly.”
She had a “wonderful” time working with fellow sleuths Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley, she says. “Helen, Pierce and I have worked together before, but I’d never met Sir Ben. That was quite thrilling for me because… well, sometimes people try to categorise you, they think you’re a bit ‘light ents’. And I don’t think the illustrious Sir Ben would ever be in that category.
“We were treated like royalty,” she adds, of the 12-week shoot last summer. “We had great big… what do they call them, Winnebagos? Mine was like a little flat. It was fabulous.”
Given the quartet’s combined experience in the business, the showbiz gossip must have been flying thick and fast? “Oh yes,” she grins. “And I’m not going to tell you any of it. Bad luck!”
Of course, bringing life to such treasured material comes with a certain pressure. Did Imrie worry about measuring up to readers’ expectations? “Absolutely,” she says. “One of the joys of reading, I think, is that you’ve got your own casting session going on in your head. And I’m sure, because these characters are so beloved, everybody has very particular ideas about what they should look and sound like. And I hope that they will approve. Some people won’t, but there we are. Blah blah.”
There has certainly been some grumbling from fans about the Netflix production only getting a very limited cinema release, before being rushed onto the streaming platform this week. “I must say, I was disappointed, too,” admits Imrie. “I thought that’s where it was going. But what the heck, I can’t control those sorts of things. And Netflix seem to own everything now, so we have to do what we’re told.”
A widowed former nurse, Joyce takes it in her stride when, shortly after arriving at her new home in a Kent retirement community, the bodies start piling up around her. “As all medical people do,” notes Imrie, talking to Weekend over video from her kitchen in Notting Hill (she also has a home in Nice). “I have two angels, my sisters, who are both nurses, and my father was a radiologist. My admiration for the whole medical profession is enormous.”
Unlike a lot of the roles in Imrie’s five-decade career, Joyce is noticeably not posh. “That’s rather refreshing,” she admits, in her famous cut-glass tones. “Because I’ve spent an awfully long time trying to jump out of any box anybody tries to put me in.”
Born in Guildford, Surrey, in 1952, Imrie is the fourth of five children whose parents bridged the social divide: her mother, Diana Cator, was from Suffolk landed gentry, the granddaughter of a baronet, while her father, David Imrie, grew up in a crowded Glasgow tenement.
“My mum was, for want of a better word, aristocratic,” she says. “She’d tell you herself, if she were still alive, that she was descended from King Stephen. That’s what she used to tell me when I was young. And I used to go” – she covers her ears – “because I didn’t want to be thought of as posh. I’ve spent my life trying to pretend I’m not. But apparently I do sound a bit posh. Do I?”
Well, maybe a smidge.
“And yes, my father was from Glasgow. He was one of five, the son of a shipping clerk, who gave him a hundred pounds – an enormous amount of money in those days – so he could train to be a doctor. He was terribly modest. He didn’t tell me half the things he achieved, like being a dentist and a doctor in both wars, in the Navy. He was 20 years older than my mother, and I wish, wish, wish I’d known him better [he died when she was 20]. “I wish I’d asked him more questions, but I was too busy running around, trying to be a ballet dancer.”
When that ambition was thwarted, Imrie pivoted to drama classes at the Guildford School of Acting – a smart move, as it turned out, as she’s been a near-constant fixture of stage and screen ever since, including roles in just about every successful British film of the past few decades, from Calendar Girls and Bridget Jones’ Diary to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
She also enjoyed a long collaboration with the late Victoria Wood, with scene-stealing turns in the likes of As Seen on TV – that’s her trying to keep a straight face during the legendary ‘two soups’ sketch – and Dinnerladies.
She knew Wood for 40 years, having been introduced to her by her best friend, the actress and writer Fidelis Morgan, in the 1970s. “Fi and Victoria were at Birmingham University together. I never went to university, and I’ve spent my whole life wishing I had,” she sighs. “Anyway, I was very much in awe of both of them, because they were so… erudite. Is that the right word? And quite critical, actually. They’d been given a critical eye at university, which I didn’t have. But I can’t believe what you just said – that I knew Victoria for 40 years. Blimey. It’s incredible.”
Of all Imrie’s many roles, perhaps none is more enduring than Miss Babs, the frightfully (yes) posh proprietor of Acorn Antiques, in Wood’s merciless spoof of shonky teatime soap Crossroads. “When we started recording Acorn Antiques, the cameramen were appalled,” she recalls. “They couldn’t work out what was going on. ‘Why is she answering the phone while it’s still ringing? Why has he been hit on the head by the boom mic?’”
Two decades later, the West End musical version of Acorn Antiques earned Imrie an Olivier Award. That’s theatre’s top acting prize… for playing a parody of a terrible actress. “I know,” she smiles. “I was always slightly worried that that’s what Victoria thought I was – a terrible rep actress.”
In Jasper Rees’ recent biography Let’s Do It!, a picture emerges of Wood as a complicated woman, whose social anxiety meant she wasn’t always easy to work with. “Yes, but most people of her calibre are complicated,” suggests Imrie. “That’s why they are as they are.”
One arresting deviation from her usual jolly, head girl types was her role as a hotshot starfighter pilot, battling droid attack ships, in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. “Isn’t it marvellous?” she beams. “I can’t tell you how popular I am in America, particularly among young men. The peculiar thing is that I was spotted by George Lucas’ casting director while doing a very serious Harold Pinter play. I’ve absolutely no idea why she thought I’d be right for this role, as I was wearing a nightie at the time. But it just goes to show, you never know.”
‘I will never stop climbing. I’m not ashamed of being ambitious. But you have to watch out for the snakes’
In 2023, Imrie was made a CBE for services to drama in the King’s 2023 Birthday Honours. But over the past decade, she’s had to juggle acting commitments with a second, late blooming career as a prolific best-selling novelist.
Her sixth book, Meet Me at Rainbow Corner, now out in paperback, is a wartime romance centred around a real-life social club for American GIs in Piccadilly – a small piece of the USA in full swing in the middle of bombed out, blacked out London. “It was an oasis – no rationing, 24-hour doughnuts, dancing,” says Imrie. “It was right in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. I really wish there was a plaque or something.”
The book, which features historical research from Fidelis Morgan, follows the fortunes of two young women – ATS corporal Lilly Deane, and Dot Gallagher, a nurse newly arrived from Liverpool. “Lilly is loosely based on my mother – she used to drive ambulances in the war – and Dot is based on Fidelis’ mother,” explains Imrie. “A lot of the details we got are from letters that Fidelis’ mother wrote back home as a young nurse. Some of the things she had to deal with are so terrible – young boys of 17 with their arms and legs blown off. She was only 17 herself. My father hardly ever talked about the war,” she adds. “A lot of people who’d lived through the horror didn’t want to bring it up. Or perhaps they didn’t want to be seen as courageous, which they clearly were.”
Her previous collaboration with Morgan, Orphans in the Storm, told the tale of a mother’s search for her children, set against the backdrop of the Titanic tragedy. It’s a story they chose with good reason: having been friends for decades – in the 1970s, they toured the world together in Hedda Gabler with Glenda Jackson – it was only while visiting a Titanic exhibition in 2010 that they realised they shared an extraordinary family link. “I turned to her and said, ‘did you know I had relatives on the ship?’” recalls Imrie. “And she said, ‘so did I!’”
As it turned out, they weren’t just on the same ship, but the same lifeboat. Imrie’s relation, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a Scottish baronet, attracted public notoriety for ignoring the ‘women and children first’ instruction, then apparently bribing the lifeboat crew to row off before it was full. And the steward to whom he handed that damning five-pound note? Morgan’s’ ancestor, Albert Horswill. “I mean, it’s beyond extraordinary,” says Imrie.
At 73, Imrie remains happily unattached – owing, she’s said in the past, to ‘a childish fear of being trapped’. Does she still feel that way? “I do, but I mean, I’ve never been married, so how would I know?” she shrugs. She did decide she wanted a child, though, and – thanks to an arrangement with the late actor Benjamin Whitrow – is the proud mother to 31-year-old Angus, also an actor, best known for his long-running stint in Radio 4’s The Archers.
Her life, as detailed in her terrific memoir The Happy Hoofer, has had its challenges. Aged 14, she was hospitalised with anorexia, and given electroshock treatment. And in 2005, she survived two pulmonary embolisms – which she says felt like being given a second chance. “I feel grateful every day – and more so, I suppose, as time goes on. It was very frightening. But, again, hats off to the medical profession. Now I just crack on.”
As for the immediate future, she’ll be joining a different sort of murder club in the much-anticipated Celebrity Traitors, and is still waiting to hear if they’ll be doing the second TMC book. “There were plans being discussed, but I haven’t actually seen anybody since the last day of shooting a year ago. I’m sure it will become clearer when we all get together again.”
One of the great joys of Richard Osman’s books is the way they show people in later life still very much up for an adventure, and Imrie herself has said that she still feels an urge to keep ‘climbing up the ladder’. Surely most people in her business would be more than happy to stop and take in the view from her lofty perch?
“Oh lord, no no no,” she says. “I will never stop climbing. It’s interesting, when I was young, a good friend of mine said, ‘you’re so ambitious’. And I remember feeling ashamed, and thinking, ‘what an awful thing’. But actually, I want to be better, and I want to keep going. So yes, I will admit to being ambitious. And also, life is very much like a game of snakes and ladders – and while I’m still trying to climb up, there have also been some snakes, I’m afraid. You have to keep watching out for those.
“Of course, I’m aware that things can’t go on forever,” she adds, brightly. “But it just gives me more fuel to grab every single second.”
The Thursday Murder Club is on Netflix. Meet Me at Rainbow Corner is out now in paperback
This interview was published in Waitrose Weekend on 21st August, 2025
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