Please Do Not Wear Shorts
Santa Monica is the beachside suburb of Los Angeles, and when you’re at the beach, you wear shorts. Everybody in LA wore shorts, so I did too — all the time. I don’t think other people wore theirs to interviews though. I often had to drive down the motorway (I refused to call it the freeway) into Burbank to see the film people in the studios there and I wouldn’t bother to change out of my beach attire: blue-and-white striped T-shirt, canvas shoes with little embroidered anchors on them, and my baggy shorts.
I admit shorts are not a flattering garment on anyone of my size and age, but it was left to my agent Susan to give it to me straight. I’d just got back from one of my meetings in Burbank and had barely got my foot inside the apartment when the telephone rang. It was Susan. The director I’d just met had obviously called her immediately I’d left to say, ‘This Miriam Margolyes you sent to see us turned up in her shorts, Susan. That doesn’t work for us.’ Susan said, ‘Miriam, you’re my favourite client. Absolutely my favourite client!’ Then she continued, ‘I’ve just got one thing to say to you: don’t wear shorts, Miriam, OK? In an interview, a meeting or an audition: please, just Do. Not. Wear. Shorts!’
I never did wear my shorts to interviews after that. I did what I was told and put on one of my smart new outfits. That was Susan all over; there was no filter, she told you the absolute truth unvarnished. She was also often terribly rude and abrasive, especially to her junior staff who were always leaving; she went through assistants like diarrhoea.
Susan was constantly sending me for auditions. Quite quickly I got a job on Lawrence Kasdan’s 1990 black comedy movie I Love You to Death, starring Kevin Kline and Tracey Ullman, with William Hurt, River Phoenix, Joan Plowright and Keanu Reeves. I played Kevin Kline’s mother. Norma Aleandro, the celebrated Argentinian actress, was originally cast in the role, but the part was for an ugly old bag; Norma Aleandro was a very beautiful woman, and one day at rehearsal she decided she didn’t want to be an old bag. Susan sent the director a tape of my work and I landed the part. I didn’t mind being an old bag.
Kevin Kline was delightful. He called me from his hotel shortly after he arrived and asked if I’d mind rehearsing the one scene we had together. In it, I had to slap his face. It’s a funny scene and worth rehearsing but few stars would have bothered to take such pains to get it right. I went over to his hotel and we rehearsed. I seldom watch my own scenes, but I did watch that. We worked well together, and I was very good, so was Kevin.
River Phoenix was another cast member. What a lovely young man, very polite and gentle. He showed no signs of a drug habit and I was terribly sad when I heard he’d died from an overdose. William Hurt was quite the opposite: surly and self-involved. When I was introduced, I put out my hand to shake his. He simply turned away. I wasn’t worth shaking hands with. What an arsehole.
The other two English actresses on the film were Tracey Ullman and Joan Plowright. I’d known Tracey years ago, when we shared a flat in Glasgow during the filming of A Kick Up the Eighties in 1981. It was clear from the start that Tracey was a gigantic talent. And Colin Gilbert and Tom Gutteridge had got together quite a starry cast: Rik Mayall and Ron Bain and Roger Sloman and Robbie Coltrane. And me. Tracey had a boyfriend, a nice electrician, but when Allan McKeown, a famous producer, came on the scene, they became a couple and got married. Tracey bought her ex-boyfriend a house; she was very generous to him.
Joan Plowright was worried about her husband, Sir Laurence Olivier, who was too ill to travel from England. I remembered meeting him outside the stage door of the New Theatre Oxford when I was at school. The power of his physicality brought a rush of moistness to my area. That’s when I creamed in my knickers as I later told Graham Norton.
Of course, I didn’t tell Joan that; it would have offended her, but I asked her about Sir Laurence. ‘What was he like when you met?’
I’d taken her for supper to a good Malibu restaurant one Saturday night. She gazed out of the window at the ocean. She looked reflective and a little sad. ‘He was… animal,’ she said. There was a wealth of memory in that enigmatic sentence.
Larry Kasdan was fun and smart and very hospitable. He invited the whole cast for a party at his Beverley Hills house. We swam in the pool and laughed a lot. I felt I was really up there with the stars.
While I did a lot of voice-overs in LA, it was much harder to get work there than it had been in Soho. Everyone had to test, sometimes several times. I resented that; I expected to be given the job because I knew I could do it. I had ideas above my station.
At one casting session I recognised an elderly woman sitting opposite me and I thought, ‘That’s Carol Channing. What the fuck is she doing sitting in a casting pool with everyone else?’ I went to the reception desk, and I said firmly, ‘You have one of the greats of all time sitting here, completely unheralded. You will give her a separate room, a coffee and biscuits, and you will show her huge respect. She is a great lady. Her name is Carol Channing.’ The receptionist said, ‘Oh, my God, is she here? I hadn’t realised.’ And I said, ‘Well, realise now.’ I don’t know about the coffee and biscuits, or even whether she got the job, but they took Carol Channing to a separate room after that. I did the right thing.
There’s a lot of fear in LA. When you go for a casting session, you are herded into a waiting room full of other hopefuls; it’s like a zoo — full of other actors; you have to sign a register and sit there, waiting to be called. You sit until someone summons you in for your audition. You stand in front of a desk full of people who look at you coldly. One of them barks, ‘OK, what’s your piece? What have you done before?’ As a rule, they are not interested. They are extremely tough on actors; they don’t care how scary it is.
I had one too many of such casting ordeals. I thought, ‘I’m not going to be made to feel like a piece of dirt under their feet.’
The crunch came at an interview with Steven Spielberg, who is actually a most courteous and pleasant man. I brought with me copies of the brochure of my Tuscan farmhouse, and before they said anything to me, I said, ‘Good afternoon. Thank you so much for inviting me to this audition. Before we start, may I show you my farmhouse near Siena, in case any of you would be interested in renting it?’ I handed them each a brochure. ‘I’ve had copies printed for you, so you may take them home to show your family, and put them in the office.’
I needed to feel confident, and once I took control of the interview, they weren’t able to make me feel small. How could they make somebody who owned a house in Tuscany feel like a piece of dirt? They couldn’t. They would look at the brochure, then they would open up and we would have a conversation. They would say, ‘Oh, my God, it’s gorgeous. How long have you had that?’ They saw me as a human being, not just somebody who desperately wanted a job. That’s important, because when you’re at a disadvantage, you can’t do a good audition. I’ve always wanted to be taken seriously. Don’t dismiss me. You think I’m a little, roly-poly person? No: you’d better pay attention. And it worked. I can’t say that I ever actually rented the house to any of the casting people, but they were impressed.
I was still channelling Shelley Winters: when a casting director asked her what she’d done before, she leaned down into her bag and took out one Oscar, then the other Oscar and thumped them down on the desk. ‘That’s what I’ve done,’ she said. I also love the story about the brilliant actress Athene Seyler. When a director asked her what she had done, she said: ‘Do you mean this morning?’ On another occasion when she was asked, ‘What parts do you like playing?’, she looked at them with a curled lip and said, ‘Scornful parts!’