From The Times (22 Aug 09)
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/celebrity/article6804437.ece

Joanna Lumley: I've earned the right to be heard

After her campaign for the Ghurkas, the actress has obesity, prisons, education and red lipstick on her manifesto

Joanna Lumley is grabbing at the top of her trademark blonde hair: “Wouldn’t it be more truthful, more interesting, to let my hair, which is really lightish brown, go grey?” She then proceeds to demarcate the dangerously piebald Lumley that lurks beneath her immaculate coiffure. “It’s very grey here at the top, but patchy, not attractive.” She would do it, go natural, she says, except that everyone advised her that she would never work again.

This little exchange got me thinking. It was, of course, inimitably Lumley — charming, funny, self-deprecating, and hinting at something spikier. At 63, Lumley has managed so many transitions in her career, from posh totty in The New Avengers, through comic genius as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous to triumphant campaigner for the Gurkhas (last month the Nepalese hailed her as a “goddess”), while always remaining inimitably herself.

But what is that? We think we know her, but, I realised after only an hour in her company, we really do not. Of course she is all she appears at first to be — she says the word “f***” in jest and I have never heard it sound so enchanting — but that’s a kind of decoy. Lumley is also one of the most fiercely political people I have met outside politics. And she does not just have political opinions, but difficult, radical ideas — on everything from obesity to state schools — that the public would love yet would have the likes of Gordon Brown and David Cameron running for the hills. That is what lies beneath.

We are talking on the occasion of her latest documentary, Catwoman, on ITV1. In it, she meets all sorts of bonkers, cat-obsessed people, necessitating all her powers of diplomacy. This is the Lumley we are familiar with, her Diana, Princess of Wales-like ability to flirt elegantly with anyone from Japanese monks to American suburban moms. “Politeness was instilled in me by my parents,” she says (her father was a major in the Gurkhas).

“I’ve never believed in saying what you think — not only the big issues, but when getting along with people. Even if people say it’s much better to tell the truth, often the truth is the last thing you should say. You should find a way of not telling the truth. Try to be as nice as possible.”

This is the official face. She is effortless polite, abhorring the “abrasiveness” of modern life. But it still seems a kind of mask. Does she ever get angry? “No, not in public. I don’t think it takes you anywhere. I think you can say and do foolish things. But it’s that old thing that if I saw a man beating a child in the street I’d go up and kick him in the balls.”

Yet, almost immediately, and for the rest of our conversation, she can’t help but get herself fired up. She found it hard, she says, in the course of filming to witness big cats in captivity. “I don’t think we have the right to keep anything, including prisoners, in captivity.”

So, no prisons? “I might have awful camps. Where people have to work like buggery to expiate their sins. But locking them up is no way forward. I think everyone should try to work together for good.”

By the time we get on to women’s prisons, she is really quite furious. Then there is her desire to open up every railway station ever closed in Britain so that no one is more than 3 miles from one. Or her barnstorming drive to “make every state school as good as Eton”.

“Pay through the nose, pay the right people, house them in the very best, grandest houses you could get, halve class sizes, and drop laptops and pay for teachers instead.”

She smokes — quite a radical act in itself, now. “I know, it’s bloody mad. They picked on smoking as they didn’t dare pick on the alternatives, which were drinking and getting fat. They pretended smoking was the only thing that killed you. But the truth is, if you do get very fat you’re not going to be very well.”

My goodness, I say, this is adding up to quite a manifesto — what about a seat in the House of Lords? She laughs. “But they haven’t got any power. I think it would be so irritating not to be emperor of all you survey. I’d much rather snap my fingers and get things done. This democratic process seems to be the best there is, but it grinds very small and goes very slow. I not sure I have the patience for it.”

So how about just lending her influence to a party — Cameron has surely been angling for her patronage? No, she says. She knows all the party leaders — she is also friends with the Prince of Wales and has a good relationship with the Dalai Lama — but she is “not party political”. She first met Brown many years ago, when he invited her and her husband, the composer Stephen Barlow, to dinner. She is diplomatic about him — “I still find him a good, honourable man” — then the other Lumley breaks out.

“Do you think Mandelson is ever going to lead Labour? I’m just so interested, as he seems an outsider, but so powerful. All this Prince of Darkness and Lord Voldemort and all these things, it’s kind of scarily true . . . I have a feeling Gordon Brown will stay on, and if he wasn’t to, everyone says, ‘I wouldn’t throw my hat in the ring’. I wonder what the hell is going to happen? And all the while Mandelson . . . there’s this great thin dark shape that keeps circling around in the background, like a basking shark.”

As someone who had been defined by her looks, how much did Lumley’s glamour help or hinder her ambush of the Government over the resettlement of Gurkhas? “The aura of Purdey? I don’t think so. As you get older you have earned your place to be heard.”

She has always wanted to be older than she was, ever since she was 12 — “I think you get wiser” — and she is enjoying being taken more seriously. She has “not led an easy, straight life” — a reference partly to her status as an unmarried single mother to her only son, Jamie, in the 1960s. “When you are 21 practically everyone knows more than you do. Since then I’ve been out of work, in work, I’ve been fêted in motorcades in South Africa, I’ve begged with tins with people at St Martin-in-the-Fields, I’ve been around. I know more about the Gurkhas than people in the Cabinet because I had experienced Gurkha life.”

She always “puts a face on” to go out. More than she ever used to. Much of that is “the tyranny of the mobile phone” — people wanting a picture of her. But it’s also her prescription for older women, not to be invisible.

“I think you’ve got to wear really bright red lipstick. People always look at you if you’ve got red lipstick on — they might hate you, but they look at you.”

Another part of the Lumley manifesto to sort out the planet single-handed? She laughs, huskily. “You’re quite safe from me, I promise.” I’m not sure I want to be.

My perfect weeekend

Town or country?
Country

Full English or fruit salad?
Fruit salad

Polo or Pilates?
Absolutely neither — I can’t bear organised fun

Cocktail or champagne?
Cocktail, darling, and I’ve just invented one. I was in a pub and unbelievably it didn’t have tonic water for gin and tonic. So my cocktail is called the Finborough, after the road that pub was on. It’s gin, cranberry juice, ice and Angostura Bitters

Cat or dog?
Dog

Marni or Marks & Spencer?
What’s Marni? Is it nice, is it very glamorous? I love M&S but how nice to have something delicious

Candlelit dinner or takeaway?
Candlelit dinner

Lipstick or mascara?
Mascara

Green tea or builder’s brew?
I don’t drink tea. Coffee

Film or theatre?
Theatre. I just saw The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic

I couldn’t get through the weekend without ...
Classical music

Haha, thanks for that! She seems always almost worried about her hair, doesn't she? I wouldn't want her to go grey, because she's one of the very few that can handle the blonde look at older age.

We should take all the surveys she fills in ourselves too...

That's a good idea Maartje

I absolutely loved reading this, and I agree, I wouldn't want her to go grey either. Although I'm sure it would suit her, Jo can get away with nearly anything!

Haha, great article, good lines like the one in which it's explained that Joanna says F... like everybody.
Funny and beautiful at the same time, Joanna is full of life, very human, and natural, involved in political or Television Programs.
Strong girl, really with lots of talents !
Go Joanna !

There's a sort of reference to AF I think when she's asked if she prefers Champagne or Cocktails !