Last Thursday afternoon, I had the pleasure of meeting the English actress Miriam Margolyes, whom I interviewed for a piece in the forthcoming issue of MCV about her tour of the one-woman show Dicken's Women. We spoke of many things besides, not the least of which was that she provided many of the voices for the female characters in the TV series Monkey (aka Monkey Magic) that I watched religiously in the 1980s.It was one of those interviews that became a conversation, and was quite lovely; and ended with her asking me, "Was I what you expected?" which was rather unexpected.
Even more unexpected was the email I received from her today.
"I wanted to thank you personally for the time you spent with me yesterday," she writes. "It was a real pleasure to be interviewed by a sensitive & intelligent person, who focussed on me & had CLEARLY done a lot of research."
I've never had an interview subject contact me before to thank me for my work. It's rather lovely. Thank you, Ms Margolyes; I'm flattered!
4 comments:
Great work Richard.
I've got tickets to see her in November - can't wait!
a thousand years ago (1987, to be precise) miriam margolyes was in amazing prouction of 'gertrude stein and a companion' at the universal. as an enthusiastic young drama student i saw the show three times and for the first (and last) time in my life wrote a thank you letter to a performer. she sent me a thank you note back, then about a month later when she was back in england she followed up with a letter answering my questions about the script.
i've loved her ever since.
I loved her in Martin Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence, especially when she commented "He hed the effrontery...."
She's good for actually responding to people, you actually get the feeling that that she wants to do interviews and actually talk. I saw Gertrude S & Co. all those years ago and she and Pamela Rabe used to stay around for a post performance Q&A (probably the first of their, now common, kind) and Margolyes was fantasticly astute and could speak at length on any question put to her. She used to appear on a BBC Radio comedy programme called "Just a Minute" where each contestant had to speak for 60 seconds on a surprise subject without pausing, repeating or deviating. She usually won it, even when she was up against motor mouths like Kenneth Williams and Clement Freud (grandson of Sigmund)
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