This Much Is True

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.