When it comes to show business, there’s never been a star quite like Miriam Margolyes. The hilarious actress has graced chat-show host Graham’s Norton’s couch more times than she can remember and has starred in everything from Blackadder to The Age of Innocence.
“However successful I am,” laughs the British star, “I will go to my grave best known for playing Professor Pomona Sprout in two of the Harry Potter movies. But if I’m honest, I fell asleep during the premieres of both films!”
At the age of 80, Miriam has written an eye-popping memoir, This Much is True, , packed with intimate details of her own life and shockingly candid stories of the A-listers she’s worked with over the decades.
The self-deprecating actress says she entered the “precarious profession” of acting as a “short, fat Jewish girl with no neck” in the 1960s, daring to think she could make it.
And after building a successful career in the UK, she had her first brush with Hollywood in 1980, when she was asked to audition for a small part in the Warren Beatty movie Reds.
According to Warren’s biographer, the actor has had sex with at least 12,775 women and when Miriam knocked on his trailer door for a lunchtime appointment, he sexually propositioned her and she turned him down.
Miriam got the job regardless and says at one point during the shoot she mooned the Hollywood legend for being unkind to co-star Diane Keaton.
“The expression of shocked surprise frozen on his face still tickles me even now, but he completely deserved it.”
Unsurprisingly, Miriam didn’t have an entirely conventional upbringing.
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