This Much Is True

Miriam Margolyes This Much Is True

About the Author

Born in Oxford, England in 1941 and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, MIRIAM MARGOLYES is an award-winning veteran of the stage and screen, and an internationally acclaimed voice-artist. Winner of the BAFTA Best Supporting Actress award for The Age of Innocence, she received an OBE in 2002 for Services to Drama.

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www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Murray (Publishers)

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Miriam Margolyes 2021

The right of Miriam Margolyes to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Photograph © Claire Sutton

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978-1-529-37991-4

John Murray (Publishers)

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

Introduction

For Heather

and

in memory of my mother and father

Suddenly I am eighty. How can that possibly be? Eighty is OLD! Eighty means maybe five, maybe ten years left. Where did my life go? There’s much I still want to do. What have I learnt? Have I done the best I could? Have I made a difference? Those are the questions that rush at me.

I am writing this book in an attempt to make sense of my life, to take stock. It’s been a full, if chaotic, eighty years. I was born in 1941 at the darkest moment of the war; my parents were convinced that Britain was about to lose. Despite this, the Holocaust and its horrors didn’t really impinge on my childhood; it’s only later I’ve come to realise how powerfully and inescapably that shadow has become part of my life.

Growing up in the post war period, with loving parents, I skipped from moment to moment. I’ve travelled through every continent bar Antarctica, I’ve slept with a curious variety of humans. I entered a precarious profession where a short, fat, Jewish girl with no neck dared to think she could stand on a stage and be successful. I’ve completed over five hundred jobs and relished every minute of them. But have I merely skimmed the surface? Why do I still feel so unsure about things? Might a certain level of uncertainty be a good thing? Complete confidence carries smugness alongside — and I do not want that. Smugness shows on stage; when you can see a performer admiring their delivery of a certain line, it kills the performance stone dead. It’s possible that my insecurity is the very quality that connects me to everyone else. I don’t hide my vulnerability. I don’t know how.

From the beginnings of my coherent existence, a common thread has been the ease with which I could connect with others. Latterly I’ve found the joy of using that gift to make documentaries and listen to others, rather than talking myself.

I’m quite sure you picked this book up hoping I’d make you laugh. That’s what I seem to have become best known for. I lack the filter others possess and out of my potty mouth pop filthy sexual anecdotes, verbal and physical flatulence on a grand scale. I swear, I fart, I draw attention to things best left unremarked — and it seems it’s made me popular. Please don’t think I’m unaware of my duty to both entertain and shock you, but I won’t allow my book to be just dirty talk. Let me tell you the truth about myself, too.

When asked, I said I had never made an attempt to write anything down before. This is not entirely true: when I was nine, in 1950, I wrote my autobiography in a large, blue book without lines. I wish I could find it, but in one of the many moves of my life, that youthful testament disappeared. Since then, I have simply lived my life to its fullest — until 2020 trapped me in Tuscany for eight months and I finally had the time to write it. With help from my loyal friends, many of whom have known me for most of that life, I’ve been piecing things together and teasing out memories from the deepest recesses of my mind. It’s been a fascinating process.

My partner of fifty-three years, Heather, finds such spilling out of all one’s deepest, most personal thoughts and fears, excruciating. She said: ‘Now, don’t let this book be like one of your Graham Norton interviews where all you do is talk smut — it’s got to be about things that matter, Miriam.’ Heather is a serious person.