Well I never

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!

Comments

D said…
Great work Richard.

I've got tickets to see her in November - can't wait!
10/9/07 19:52
par3182 said…
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.
10/9/07 21:54
Anonymous said…
I loved her in Martin Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence, especially when she commented "He hed the effrontery...."
11/9/07 16:10
On Stage And Walls said…
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)
12/9/07 09:41
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Recent Call of Cthulhu work for the Miskatonic Repository

Image
The last time I posted on this poor, neglected blog was in August 2023, and a lot has happened since then - I've been meaning to blog about it for ages, but time got away from me. So, consider this post a quick catch-up on some of the creative work I've been doing over the last 12 months or so. I say quick, but given I'm an all or nothing kinda of guy, let's see how long I write for this evening and how much detail I go into, shall we? Last year, starting on Friday June 8th and continuing on over the weekend, I was a Guest of Honour at the innaugural Chaosium Con Australia ; a celebration of the games published by Chaosium Inc , a company whose work I've long admired and was once a regular contributor to, especially their game of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Call of Cthulhu , which I first encountered in 1984; I also contributed significantly to Chaosium's Stormbringer and Elric! game lines, roleplaying games based on the work of enormously influential Englis...
Read more

Doing the Beats: Kerouac, sexuality and On the Road

Image
The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road , is unequivocally the most famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it ...
Read more

The streets of old Fitzroy

Image
I've lived in Fitzroy for 14 years, and long before I moved here spent some formative moment in its pubs and terrace houses. I have an unpublished novel that set's in Fitzroy in the 1940s (originally it was set in the 1950s but I've realised it was the wrong period). I love this suburb, even as it changes before my eyes, which is why I love articles and photographs and stories of its past.   From the Herald-Sun , here's a series of images of the old inner city slums that once characterised much of Fitzroy. And from The Age just yesterday, here's an article about a photographer who was documenting the vanishing post-war Fitzroy culture in 1973-74.  Happy reading. And maybe allow Dan Sultan to provide you with a soundtrack?
Read more