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.
Imprint Page
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
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.
Well, I can’t please everyone all the time. But I honour the Truth. And within these pages, you will only find Truth, or at least my Truth. There will be some smut inevitably, and it might be a bumpy ride, but I promise you the REAL Miriam Margolyes.
Daddy
Daddy was extremely handsome as a young man, despite being below average height. He had a high forehead, glossy black hair, a ravishing smile and a little moustache. He looked rather like Charlie Chaplin. He was a very fine doctor, well-mannered, with a profound sense of right and wrong, and a strong Glasgow accent he never lost. He was an observant Jew and he had no vices — a dram of whisky after the stars came out on Shabbos (Sabbath) was all he ever drank. He smoked the occasional cigar, never cigarettes. But he was a weak man. He was basically afraid: afraid of confrontation of any kind, afraid of being overlooked, and yet unable to push himself forward. Of course, he didn’t need to: my mother, Ruth, did all the pushing. I think she crushed him a little with her energy and ambition.
Genealogy is my passion: it’s being a detective in history. I have no family, no children, no husband, no parents, no brothers and sisters. Genealogy offers me the family I never had. I’m not a lonely person, but I need to investigate the past and find out about lost cousins. It’s how I discovered that Mummy’s fear of childbirth was based on fact, not just family lore. And when Daddy ended up with dementia he forgot everything from his past, and so it has always been very important for me to remember where he came from… Let me tell you about the Margolyes family.
Like many Scottish second-generation immigrant Jews, Daddy was born in 1899 in the great Glasgow slum, the Gorbals. He grew up in poverty in Govanhill, a short walk from the city centre on the south bank of the Clyde. The first born child of Philip Margolyes and Rebecca née Turiansky. I never met my paternal grandfather; he died in 1937, but I did get to know my grandmother, Rebecca, quite well, as she lived till 1959.
Grandpa Margolyes was born in 1874 in a small shtetl called Amdur (now Indura) in Belarus, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Anti-Jewish feeling started to gather and grow and by 1880 large numbers of poor Jews had made their way across Europe. Many European Jews arrived in Scotland as a stopping post on their way to America. They spoke no English, had no idea about Scotland and probably got out at the port of Leith in Edinburgh, thinking it was New York, the goldene medina they dreamed of reaching. The sea captains encouraged them to disembark so they could return more quickly for another boatload of immigrants. They ended up staying, settling mainly in Glasgow, and in particular in Govanhill and the Gorbals.