A little Irish
girl from
Archway
Looking out with the stars: Judi Dench,
Imelda and Eileen Atkins
Cranford star Imelda Staunton, as she joins the grandes dames of British drama, tells a Burgh House audience
about her life.
IMELDA Staunton, all five feet of her, is an actor who constantly amazes herself by thrills and spills. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
Piers Plowright, her interviewer in the nourishing “Lifelines” series at Burgh House, Hampstead, called this “truthfulness as always,” as if this were her mantra.
Like a new breed of actors including Timothy Spall, Tom Wilkinson and Jim Broadbent who have no interest in surface appearances, risk-taking is everything to her.
In the past few weeks, she has been equally at home acting in Cranford on BBC1 alongside two dames, Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, as the prickly and insatiably curious Miss Pole, who takes on all-comers and has eyes at the back of her head.
It was an exceptional treat seeing the three of them all together in the early episodes.
Mary Philomena Bernadette Staunton was born at the Whittington Hospital on January 9, 1956.
An only child, she was brought up in a hairdresser’s salon in Archway with a distinctly Dickensian feel to it. Her father, Joe, a labourer, and her mother, Bridie, a hairdresser, were first-generation Irish immigrants.
There was no acting tradition in the family that anybody could ever discover.
The hairdresser’s salon at the bottom of Highgate Hill has long since been demolished and replaced by a roundabout.
“My mother played the fiddle and accordian,” she told the audience. “When she pressurised me to sing at parties, I implored her not to make me with the same four words: ‘Don’t make me sing’. It didn’t make a scrap of difference. I never set great store by singing myself.”
Imelda was convent-educated at La Sainte Union School in Highgate Road. The watershed moment came when she saw Sir Laurence Olivier as Richard III at the Old Vic. She was electrified to the very core of her being.
Earlier on, Bette Davis had provided a similar revelation by not being beautiful.
At 17 Imelda went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the same time as Juliet Stevenson and Jonathan Pryce: “Rada was a big education for me.”
She travelled the length and breadth of the country for the next six years, ending up proving to all at the Northcote Theatre in Exeter that she was just as adept at performing in Elektra and St Joan as she was in the musicals Cabaret and Side By Side Sondheim.
At the time a vast difference was made between rep actors and London actors. She auditioned to replace Elaine Paige in the musical Cats, but did not succeed.
However, in 1982 she got a place in the chorus line of Guys and Dolls, revived at the National by Richard Eyre, and starring Bob Hoskins and Julia McKenzie.
Being in the back line felt like something of a comedown until she entered into a new relationship with actor James Carter, who was playing Big Julie. They were married in 1985 and have one daughter, Bessie, born in 1993.
They have only been apart for three weeks since. (He played Captain Brown in Cranford).
Imelda is best known for playing the part of the caring cleaner, with a sideline in illegal abortions in Mike Leigh’s 2004 film Vera Drake. She carries out the abortions out of kindness, not for money.
Curiously, Mike had twice turned her down, including when she had auditioned for Topsy Turvy in 1999.
The six-month build-up of intense research, rehearsal and improvisation for Vera Drake proved to be the most exciting of her life in terms of risk-taking experience.
It was only at the end of a seven-hour improvisation in a little flat in Crouch End that she found out that she was an abortionist. It came as a great shock.
Vera Drake was acknowledged to be Mike Leigh’s masterpiece. Imelda won a Bafta, and was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe.
All the excitement helped to take her mind off the death of her beloved mother Bridie.
Imelda first performed with Daniel Radcliffe, the star of the Harry Potter films, in a television adaptation of David Copperfield when he was 10.
“At that young age, Daniel was literally plunged into the terrifying world of adults. A year before Equus [Peter Shaffer], he had prepared himself with special lessons from a voice teacher.
I respect that. He has enjoyed a different type of apprenticeship to mine in rep, but one that is equally valid.”
Imelda plays the officious bureaucrat Dolores Umbridge alongside Daniel in the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
JOHN HORDER
Camden New Journal, 20th December 2007
