Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous; Purdey in The New Avengers; Bond Girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Sapphire in Sapphire and Steel; a castaway in Girl Friday, the first ‘reality TV’ documentary of its kind; actress; model; writer; campaigner; inventor; TV presenter and journalist: Joanna Lumley has played many roles in her lifetime, but rarely revealed her true self.
In No Room For Secrets Joanna uses the unique structure of a tour through her home as a metaphor for her life. This unique and very personal format makes for a more intimate, funny, intriguing, moving and revealing autobiography than any sensationalist ‘kiss and tell’ memoir you will ever read and now, exclusively for www.penguin.co.uk, we can reveal Joanna’s thoughts on...
Herself
‘One of my greatest regrets is not having been on my own to talk to Dr Anthony Clare, the psychiatrist. It was a recorded programme for the BBC (In the Psychiatrist’s Chair) and I was his subject. Afterwards I realised that I wanted to talk and talk about the very innermost thoughts I had; but a braking mechanism came into play, as I knew it was to be broadcast, and I didn’t dare seem … Vulnerable? Shallow? Average? Cowardly? Thick? Self-obsessed? Two-faced? Dull? … All those things. A missed chance. A great man.’
Her son, Jamie, and bringing him up as a single mother
‘The darkest times for me and him were when I was in a play: leaving for the theatre always coincided with bedtime when he was little: just as he started on a long interesting story about something that happened that day in school I would start to leave, dragging my feet, going as slowly as I could, desperate to hear his news, terrified of being late for the ‘half’, the thirty-five minute call before the curtain goes up … I wonder if all parents have an abiding sense of guilt that we have somehow done it all wrong, even with the most loving intentions. Most of us, I suspect, just do the best we can and muddle through: and are forgiven by our children who can’t remember these gloomy episodes with anything like the clarity of our tortured adult recollections.’
Meeting her husband, the composer Stephen Barlow
‘We talked for four hours and I had the strangest sensation of absolute calm, as though I had arrived home, and recognised the harbour, as though I could speak the language; as though a long journey was over.’
Her mother
‘She hates to read anything at all slushy or sentimental about her, so I will just say she taught me much.’
Dirk Bogarde
‘I’d only become an actor because I admired him so... the first cut is the deepest; the very first postcard [he sent me] is one of my golden possessions.’
Jean Muir
‘I can’t overemphasise the influence Miss Muir had on me. Not just her flawless taste and rigid discipline and perfectionism in dress-making, but her enthusiasm, broad knowledge, kindness and fearsomeness … she was irreplaceable, a one-off, herself a fashion icon’
Nelson Mandela
While incarcerated on Robben Island, after watching one episode of The New Avengers which Purdey had escaped the clutches of evil by the skin of her teeth he reportedly said ‘If Purdey can get out of that, we can get out of this’.
Her school days
‘Re-reading my old school letters, I seemed to turn very quickly from a cheerful cheeky monkey of eleven into a lippy, aggressive, sneering teenager, rude to people who were kind to me, shallow, bumptious and fairly repellent.’
Modelling in the 1960s
‘Bosoms were ‘out’, unfashionable; cleavage was something very vulgar, for men’s magazines or glamour models. Legs were very ‘in’, and puffy lips with faintly gormless expressions, and straight hair and toes pointed inwards like the dimwit youngest daughter. Exercise was absolutely out: the athletic look for girls, with locker-room muscles and pool-slicked hair, had yet to arrive.’
Acting
‘Not going to drama school, not even trying to get into one after I had been turned down by the R.A.D.A., was a serious error of judgement … in 1964 it was the only way into the profession …Because I’d never been to drama school, had indeed started my career as a lowly model, I always felt as though I was an outsider, someone who didn’t deserve to do well.’
‘Long ago I realised I’d prefer to play second fiddle, to the extent that I shied away from work that might put me bang in the spotlight’
‘I have to admit I never relish having to act out love scenes on camera, particularly if you have to take your clothes off … It’s back to the privacy thing; we are all used to people talking, fighting, eating in public: but very few of us watch other people groping each other, in fact the opposite. If you opened a door and saw people thrashing about in bed you’d make your apologies and leave at once. So how other people actually go about it is quite a mystery, solved by actors on celluloid.’
Absolutely Fabulous
‘Jennifer Saunders had her finger on the pulse of fashion, of women’s magazines, of the PR world and the cult of celebrity, and a huge audience was waiting and ready for it … The show was glamorous and daring and fairly outrageous: the press loved it and so did the fashionistas. Gay men in New York, arbiters of taste in that city, adored it and very soon it was being shown all over the world whilst retaining a cult following’
The difference between herself and Patsy Stone
‘I have turned into a school prefect now – I have volunteered to attend to all and duties and requests and I do what I can, and I never do a wrong thing: but, much as I love my life, I sometimes think I’d like to skip classes and smoke cigarettes in the duck house again. Patsy is the other person I could have been, if I hadn’t turned out to be me. Patsy is a figure of nostalgia, doing everything we daren’t do because of our obligations to our families and society … I think people know the difference because I’ve been around for a long time doing different things: but old Pats, with her disgusting habits and don’t care attitude, was the one they hoped to meet’
Clothes
‘I dread a world where we all waddle about in gym clothes or shell suits. Comfort isn’t everything.’
‘Almost always I cut the labels out of the back of clothes because they scratch. It makes you realise the iconic value of a designer name; unless you can see it’s Versace it just looks like a jacket’
Her appearance
‘Men aren’t good at how it’s done: even when they know your eyelashes are false, or your glossy mane is dyed or your fingernails are glued on they are not good at witnessing the art of creation. Either they laugh or say they feel sick, or ask why. They find hair rollers funny or scary. They are pathetic at tummy-flattening tights, face packs (obviously) and plucking of eyebrows, so I say keep them away from these activities.’
‘Get good lights: sometimes you think you’ve put on a charming foundation and a little pink blusher when in fact you look like an orange baboon with crimson cheeks.’
‘Why don’t I go regularly to the skilled hairdressers I’ve known all of my grown-up life who are now scorchingly famous … The thing is I love mucking about with hair and make-up myself. I want to do it with my own hands, not because I don’t think other people can, but because it gives me great satisfaction.
Dieting and food
‘I’m not fat, but cameras in your life all the time make you aware that as they add seven or eight pounds to your appearance you have to keep a bit under your average weight. If you can …’
‘What do you eat in public when dieting? Accept everything on to your plate, then cut it about like mad, say how nice it is, eat one mouthful and say you’re completely full. Order pudding; same trick. You will give the impression of loving life and being a glutton whilst actually getting thinner’
The modelling diet circa 1966 – grapefruit and steak. ‘Its only similarity with the Atkins Diet was the bad breath factor.’
‘I am interested in food: just not in terrifically complicated recipes. Anything that says ‘leave to marinade for 48 hours, turning every hour, with twelve bay leaves and the juice of a sweated coriander coulis... ‘gets the page flicked over pretty quickly.’
Her love of reading and travelling
‘I am in love with travelling and with books: also with travel books, books to read whilst travelling and books as secret personal journeys. Ever since I hacked in desperation with my Bowie knife to try to save Injun Joe from his ghastly bat-fed death, or listened to the wind blowing in the fir trees as I lay on my straw bed with Heidi, I realised that I could travel everywhere in the world, skip through centuries, experience glory and terror all in my own head, through books.’
On her most successful invention, her ‘bra shoes’
‘I love them and would like them to be buried with me.’
