Daddy and I were always trying to stop her from having too many potatoes. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, we were having lunch one day — roast chicken. Mummy reached to take a second helping and I said, ‘Mummy, please don’t, it’s bad for you.’ She declared she hadn’t had that much, and so surely she could have some more. And she spooned more potatoes onto her plate, greedily shoving one into her mouth. Suddenly I snapped. I stood up from the table, pushed all the plates so that they crashed to the floor and I ran down Banbury Road — which is a very long road — all the way down to St Giles’ Church at the bottom. I collapsed on a grave in the churchyard and I cried and cried and cried. Eventually I walked home, but I sat in the churchyard for hours. I remember that day so vividly: the intensity of my feelings, my anxiety about Mummy, and my disgust at her needing to have more potatoes.
She had once been a slender little thing, an amateur dancer, and often showed me her ballet routines, and how to use my arms gracefully, like the chorus in Les Sylphides. But once she stopped dancing, the weight piled on. Her belly hung down, her breasts drooped, and it affected her heart. Her weight ruined all our lives — just as mine does now.
My mother was ambitious, for all of us. And in her lifetime, none of her ambitions came to fruition. So there was perhaps an anger behind her appetite. After she had her stroke in 1968, she could only say, ‘I can’t afford a carriage’ — a line from the song ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and ‘Pouf, I want…’ — this last, over and over again. She thought she was speaking sense and her frustration grew as we indicated we didn’t know what she meant.
One day I was shopping with her in Oxford. There was something she wanted me to buy, some item of shopping that she was desperate for, but, of course, she couldn’t tell me what it was. So I was wheeling her chair up and down the supermarket aisle and pointing at various items, hoping that this might jog her mind and make her able to communicate with me.
‘Mummy, look, is it that?’ I said, pointing at a box of cornflakes, or something.
‘I can’t afford a carriage,’ she said.
‘Is it that?’ I asked again.
‘I can’t afford a carriage.’
She was so distressed and desperate that I felt the best thing to do was to park her wheelchair in one of the aisles and go and finish the shopping myself, and that’s what I did. After a few minutes, this great cry came from the aisle where I’d parked her. Her brain had for one moment relented and allowed her to find, for this one time, the thing that she was searching for and with all her strength she roared out to me, ‘JAM!’ It was both the funniest and the saddest thing I ever heard.
I see the same lack of self-control, or self-respect perhaps, in me now — the very same thing! Thank God, I’ve never had a drink or drugs problem. I’ve always been uninterested in that, but whatever I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted with an insane passion.
As a child, I was never skinny, but I was active. I first started putting on weight when I was about eight or nine, and by the time I was eleven, I had a 36-inch bust. As an adolescent, my ever-increasing girth made me miserable. At the school dances, I was a conspicuous wall-flower. Fat and short, staring angrily at the spotty Magdalen College and St Edward’s schoolboys, who were the only available males, I hugged the radiators all night while my friends waltzed around with their beaux. In my fury and pain at the public indignity, I went up to the domestic science room and hurled eggs at the windows. The sight of the yolks sliding down the glass gave me some relief. It’s a humiliation that you don’t forget, and even early in life you learn the pain of rejection because your body isn’t wanted.
As a teenager, being fat made me quite aggressive on occasion, because I won’t be bullied, but it also made me develop my sense of humour: you can’t go around furious and miserable all the time, so you have to make people laugh. At lunch, when I was at school, friends remember me gleefully announcing, ‘A moment on the lips, forever on the hips!’ as I took a second helping of stodgy, calorie-laden, school-dinner pudding. I remember a less amusing incident involving my immoderate appetite, however. One day I took four helpings of chocolate semolina, and I couldn’t finish it, and the teachers made me sit and look at it all afternoon because I was greedy. I remember the shame, hot tears pricking at my eyes as I stared queasily at the congealing pudding, so I suppose I did care. I just didn’t care enough to stop eating.
Happily, my teenage years behind me, I went to university and there I realised that I had a spark of something that was more valuable than beauty: I had energy, and energy is always attractive. Nevertheless, due to my shape, I have never achieved elegance. I look at myself and I feel envious of people who have ‘normal’, slim bodies, and I get annoyed that I can’t get ready-to-wear clothes; I have always hated shopping for clothes. Those terrifying words ‘I don’t think we’ve got anything in your size’ were like stabs in my heart. It’s been the story of my life.
When I started appearing on stage and in film and television, I spent a lot of time in corsets because I was often cast in period drama. Like Dawn French, I’ve always been described as a ‘roly-poly’ actress, although even now when I read that, a rage rises in me. Everybody that I do an interview with has to cope with the fact that I’m overweight. They know it because when I walk into the room, it’s the first thing they see — a fat person. It’s wrong and it’s unfair, but it’s a fact that people are judged on their looks and on their shape. It’s how people are conditioned into seeing people, and I have a round shape. Roundness is my fate.
I have never been asked to lose weight for a part, but I have always wanted to be slimmer, so I have often gone on diets and tried various slimming treatments over the years. I first went to Tyringham Hall in Newport Pagnell back in the seventies, which was an erstwhile naturopathic health farm in a Grade I listed stately home designed by Sir John Soane. It was an upmarket sort of place, frequented by quite a few fellow thespians and ‘celebrities’, notably Julie Christie, Rula Lenska and Roy Hudd. The treatments were carefully tailored to each individual client, and I was put on a fairly draconian regime, where I fasted for three weeks at a time.
One winter, I had checked myself into Tyringham Hall and it was snowing heavily. They had various water treatments including ice-cold power showers, glacial plunge pools, cold-towel wraps and a sauna. I had read that in Scandinavia, after their sauna, people would go outside and cover themselves in snow. So, once I’d heated myself up to a boil, I ran out buck-naked from the sauna and rolled about on the snow-covered lawns. Suitably invigorated and tingling pink all over, I got up — only to see that a party of visitors was being shown around by Sidney Rose-Neil, the director of Tyringham, who, rather curtly, said to me, ‘Can I see you later?’ I went to his office and he said, ‘I quite understand that you wanted to experience the sauna, but please don’t go cavorting in the snow again, because the sight of a naked Miriam Margolyes is not something all our visitors may appreciate.’ I took that on the chin(s), because sometimes the sight of my unclothed flesh frightens even me.
Fasting for three weeks sounds physically impossible but I had some raw foods and lots of liquids, like green juices and water. I would feel raging hunger for about three days, then it passed; I wasn’t thinking about food and it worked — I did lose many pounds. The trouble is, alas, that I would put it back on again when I went back to ordinary life.