There was the usual round of pre-publicity interviews for the show. The CBS publicist in charge double-booked the LA Times (the most important interview) with another much less prestigious one. When I asked him to rearrange it, he just brushed me aside. I thought ‘No mate, I’m not having that.’ So I phoned his voicemail and left this message: ‘This is Harry Margolis, Miriam’s manager, the LA Times interview WILL go ahead. You WILL alter the schedule and if you don’t, you’re fired!’ Amazingly he rushed to obey and I got the interview. He didn’t find out till much later that the gruff, rude Harry was me. Don’t mess with the Margolyes!
In my interviews the reporters kept saying to me, ‘Don’t you realise you’re gonna be incredibly wealthy? You won’t even know what to do with all the money you make!’ I never believed them. I didn’t think it would happen, so when it didn’t, I wasn’t cast down. I minded for my lovely cast, who were all adorable, especially Tomas Milian, who played my husband; he and I had a real rapport and kept in touch long after the show ended. I worked for Chuck one more time: in 2002, I played Chloe in an episode of Dharma & Greg. It was written by Dottie Dartland, who’d also written some of Frannie’s Turn.
I have to say I wasn’t very good But this quote from it makes me laugh:
Dharma: [reading a book about pregnancy] Set aside time each day to dialogue with your vagina.
Greg: Is that the new Harry Potter book?
My whole American adventure never truly entered into my soul; it was a superficial experience, so when my sitcom bombed, I wasn’t consumed with feelings of catastrophe. However, I noticed that the day after Frannie’s Turn was cancelled, everybody stopped calling: I did not receive a single phone call. Before I had been positively overrun with invitations, but the minute I became a failure, everybody ran a mile.
My agent, Susan Smith, could be caustic, and she told the unfiltered truth. Much later she said to me, ‘Miriam, you’ve gone cold in Hollywood. When you came in, you were hot, and you’re not hot now: you’ve gone off the boil.’ I knew she was right. They always want the new, the different. I was highly regarded, but now I was a known quantity, therefore I was no longer remarkable nor passionately interesting to anyone. I could have told Susan that it was her job to make me hot again, but I didn’t. I realised that the moment had come to leave America, but it was a hard decision. It was such an easy life; I had a five-star apartment overlooking the ocean and a car and friends I didn’t want to leave behind. Special among them were writers Hal and Lilian (Lil) Hara. They’d escaped the McCarthyist purges in New York to start a new life under new identities. (Hal even became a jeweller: a very Margolyes thing to do.) They held an open house for passionate and articulate intellectuals of all stripes, who argued politics and ate Lil’s amazing food with equal relish. When the truth about Stalin was revealed, both renounced Communism, dedicating the rest of their lives to working for true democracy in America. With the Haras I could leave behind the nonsense of Hollywood and competitive television, and talk about books, ideas and things that mattered. It was like having a Hodgkin family in LA. They kept me sane.
So I stayed for a few more years.
I don’t quite know how I weathered that storm, what reserves I had within me, but maybe I had other priorities. I’m not interested in the trappings of celebrity. I like the money but nothing else. If I’d been building all my hopes on the sitcom working out, I might have crumbled, but happily I hadn’t.
And other things happened quite quickly: I recorded the BBC radio version of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I in LA, for example. On its subsequent release on cassette, the audio recording proved a stunning success — in fact, it sold so well that it was between Elton John and Patsy Cline in the pop charts. I was gobsmacked.
A year after Frannie’s Turn flopped, in 1993, I was in the ‘comedy horror’ film Ed and His Dead Mother, directed by Jonathan Wacks. I played Mabel Chiltern, a resurrected corpse and mother of Ed (played by glorious Steve Buscemi) who runs around killing people with a chainsaw. That’s become a cult film and can be seen in the small hours, on minor TV channels. Then, barely a year after receiving my BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress in The Age of Innocence, in 1994, I was cast as the Nurse in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Hollywood production of Romeo + Juliet.
That’s show business.
Adventures in Cinema
I’m not a film actress. Acting on film is completely different to acting for the stage. On stage, it’s all about talent. In films it’s luck. On stage, we actors have some measure of control, but on screen, the director calls the shots. You can act away for all you’re worth; but if you’re not in shot, forget it.
My first major film role was as Elephant Ethel, a Chinese prostitute at the Golden Grape whorehouse in Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977). (I did say that I’ve played a lot of tarts in my career!) The film’s tagline was: ‘England expects every man to do his duty.’ The women don’t even get a mention…! It was quite fun being in this film because my make-up made me quite unrecognisable. It was a substantial if politically incorrect stab at becoming Chinese. Ninety minutes in make-up, fish-scales at the side of my eyes to drag them upwards into an Asiatic slant, very heavy red lips and two wigs, one on top of the other. Tits corralled under my chins and the tightest of revealing costumes. When I came on set, I was greeted with piercing wolf whistles and howls of desire from the crew. When I left in the studio car to return home, I was unheralded and ignored. No one had a clue who I was.
My first brush with Hollywood, though, wasn’t until 1980 when I was called to audition for Warren Beatty for a small part as the secretary of the Communist Party. I didn’t even have a line but it wasn’t a bad role. The film was Reds, and it was about the life and career of John Reed, the American journalist and communist activist. Mr Beatty who, according to his biographer, has had sex with 12,775 women (a number he disputes), insisted that he could only meet me in his trailer at lunchtime. I knocked at the door, he said, ‘Come in.’ He then looked at me up, down, up, quite slowly and said, ‘Do you fuck?’ ‘Yes, but not you,’ I replied. ‘Why is that?’ he asked. ‘Because I am a lesbian,’ I said. He grinned and said, ‘Can I watch?’ I replied, ‘Pull yourself together and get on with the interview.’
I rather regretted what I’d said afterwards. For one thing it wasn’t accurate. We lesbians don’t do anything as simplistic as ‘fuck’, and for another thing it brought me down to his level. But he was trying to intimidate me and I wasn’t going to be intimidated. And it worked: I got the job. I’m pleased that I’ve met him and he’s in my life — he is Hollywood royalty, after all — but Warren remains a naughty boy who needs a smack.
Reds was his obsession: he co-wrote, produced and directed, whilst also starring in it. He wanted to control every aspect of the film. During the making of it, he would go around surprising people and filming them unawares. He would suddenly call out, ‘Miriam!’ and, as I turned around, startled, he would take a shot of me. He did it to everyone and they all hated it but only I was prepared to call him out on it: ‘Warren, please. I don’t like you doing that. We are actors; we should be able to simulate whatever it is that you want us to do.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t have time, and a lot of you can’t do that.’