Dame Joanna Lumley has opened up about her childhood and while things are Absolutely Fabulous now, this wasn’t always the case for the iconic actress
Dame Joanna Lumley is acting royalty now, but she clearly remembers the terror she felt playing a queen in her acting debut, aged six. The 79-year-old star recalled being cast in an adaptation of the AA Milne poem, The King’s Breakfast.
She said: “I was the Queen, and mummy made me a lovely blue dress, a little gold crown made of cardboard. I was to just walk on and say things like, ‘Could we have some butter for the royal slice of bread?’”
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, she remembered having a meltdown when she got to the side of the stage. She said: “I thought my heart was going to explode with terror. I thought I would go deaf and blind simultaneously, so I walked out on the stage, and I had to say the lines.”
But she got through it, and said: “I knew then, for sure, that was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life.” Dame Joanna was promoting her new publication My Book of Treasures, which features lines from her best-loved authors, her pearls of wisdom and nuggets of trivia.
She said: “When I say I have written it, the truth is I have assembled it. It is things in my head or that people have said or poems and things I have collected that I love. It is magic.”
Later in the session at Cheltenham, Joanna Lumley also insisted she was not scared of dying after several incidents had made her more relaxed about her mortality.
The first event was when she filmed BBC documentary Girl Friday in 1994 when she agreed to spend nine days on an uninhabited desert island off the coast of Madagascar with just a basic survival kit.
She said: “I had this piece of sacking, no bed or anything like that. No towels kept dry, and I lived like a little animal. And it was the most thrilling thing.
“It changed me completely, I stopped being afraid of death. because I suddenly thought everything’s here, these little creatures, when the crew came on in the morning to film me, and then went off in the evening, when the sun set, and when it goes down it’s gone black.
“And so it was black for about 12 hours of the night on my own in a cave or on the beach with nothing to read, nothing to do. So you have your own thoughts with you there.
“And I thought, Look, if this is what it is, I belong to the earth, the small turtles running there, the great big fish eagles who come looking at me, the fruit bats who fly close. I could just belong here, and that would be okay, and I could lie on the ground and be asleep. So I stopped being afraid.
“And another time I stopped being afraid was when Patsy fell into an open grave. We’d been up to somewhere like Highgate Cemetery and they put some crash mats in the bottom.
“But one feels a bit spooky about these things lying in a grave. But I went onto the bottom and lay there, and I saw these lovely earth walls empty, and it felt like home.
“No matter what we think or want or do or say, we can’t stop us being alive and being dead. Everybody here is alive, and so all of us will be dead, so we can’t stop that. So you’ve got to kind of come to terms with it.”
Asked if she had advice for young women, she said: “Be brave, that’s all. Just be courageous and brave and pour kindness out of you. And always volunteer before somebody’s finished the sentence say ‘I’ll do that’. Do it because sometimes it will be ghastly, but quite often it will be thrilling.”
If Joanna could have dinner with any three people alive or dead, she said she would like to sit down with Elvis Presley, Beethoven and Shakespeare.
Source: Mirror
Leave a Reply