Margolyes is aware of this concern and sweeps it away: “Not a lot of gay women front up on TV, so I hope I give courage to young dykes to be proud and confident. Partly because, as she says, they have a tendency to overshadow her work, which really has been magnificent (I was especially pleased that her brilliantly weird performance in Kenneth Branagh’s 1991 film, Dead Again, gets a mention in the memoir.) But also because it sometimes feels as if she’s reducing herself to parody, playing the overweight older lesbian who talks – ooh! – about sex.

She has become a regular on Graham Norton, who, rightly, finds her an absolute hoot.īut I have had mixed feelings about Margolyes’s talkshow appearances. “You’ve got to support the troops,” Margolyes replied.

“Jesus, Miriam!” one guest shouted, after she recalled the time she gave a handjob to a soldier she discovered masturbating in a tree in Edinburgh. Yet, she is probably best known – certainly to younger generations – for her recent turns on talkshows, shocking the hosts and fellow guests with her tales of licentiousness. She worked her way through radio, voiceovers, drama and then Hollywood, winning a Bafta for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. “My dislike of that whole, largely male, world of comedy has never left me.” The Footlights lot “thought I was a jumped-up, pushy, overconfident, fat little Jew”. She was the only girl in the show and the boys showed her “studied cruelty”: John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Graham Chapman were “total shits,” she writes. Margolyes is one of Britain’s most prolific actors, whose career began with the Cambridge Footlights in one of its more legendary phases, not that she has any sentimentality about it. “I am now better known for my naughty stories than almost anything else,” she writes, a little regretfully, although that then sparks a thought about the hilarity of penises (“Such an odd dangler to have”). This convinced me Somerville College would not be the place for me”), and then, many decades later, acclimatising to global fandom after playing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films (“Usually when Jews are mobbed in Lithuania, it’s to kill them, but this was because of Harry Potter”). ‘DAMN GOOD POET,’ she boomed, slapping her thigh like a principal boy in pantomime. I did like Milton and could honestly say so. When I was reading it this book on a train, a stranger asked if I was OK because I was crying with laughter at Margolyes’s description of her interview to study English literature at Oxford (“‘Do you like Milton?’ the tutor barked. I ’m quite sure you picked up this book hoping I’d make you laugh,” Miriam Margolyes writes in her memoir, This Much Is True.

Author of i know this much is true