This Much Is True

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.