This Much Is True

One winter, I had checked myself into Tyringham Hall and it was snowing heavily. They had various water treatments including ice-cold power showers, glacial plunge pools, cold-towel wraps and a sauna. I had read that in Scandinavia, after their sauna, people would go outside and cover themselves in snow. So, once I’d heated myself up to a boil, I ran out buck-naked from the sauna and rolled about on the snow-covered lawns. Suitably invigorated and tingling pink all over, I got up — only to see that a party of visitors was being shown around by Sidney Rose-Neil, the director of Tyringham, who, rather curtly, said to me, ‘Can I see you later?’ I went to his office and he said, ‘I quite understand that you wanted to experience the sauna, but please don’t go cavorting in the snow again, because the sight of a naked Miriam Margolyes is not something all our visitors may appreciate.’ I took that on the chin(s), because sometimes the sight of my unclothed flesh frightens even me.

Fasting for three weeks sounds physically impossible but I had some raw foods and lots of liquids, like green juices and water. I would feel raging hunger for about three days, then it passed; I wasn’t thinking about food and it worked — I did lose many pounds. The trouble is, alas, that I would put it back on again when I went back to ordinary life.

Later, when I was preparing for my Dickens’ Women world tour in 2012, I knew I would need to be super fit; a one-woman show is immensely exhausting. I decided to spend six weeks at an Ayurvedic centre in Jaipur, called Chakrapani Ayurveda Clinic. There they prescribed and administered an oil enema every day: they pumped some oil up my arse and, after about half an hour, I’d go to the loo quite copiously. I suppose it shifts everything that’s caked around your intestines. I would absolutely recommend an Ayurvedic session in one of those places — it’s a severe regimen, but marvellously cleansing and it does somehow kick-start weight loss. I’ve never done meditation though, and I don’t go in for those smart spas where you go and get your eyebrows threaded.

In 2020, I did a programme about it: Miriam’s Big Fat Adventure for BBC Two, a two-parter looking at the obesity crisis and the body-positive movement, and exploring my own relationship with my weight. After a lifetime of worrying about it, I wanted to come to terms with my body. I wanted to work out why I am, and always have been, overweight. Could I change? And I’m not the only one: the whole country weighs more than it ever did. I was on a mission to understand why we do it to ourselves, what it’s doing to us, and how other people cope with it.

It was a surprising experience because I met some gorgeous, empowered women of the body-positive movement, dancing about and having a wonderful time, and I realised that non-skinny people could be entirely at ease and happy in their own skin. I had never really believed that until I met those people, and I admired them and wished I could be like that. Making the programme helped me to be much more compassionate towards myself. I’ve been fat all my life; there it is. I have an endomorphic frame. You just have to face who you are and deal with it, and for the most part I do.

My First Time on Broadway was. Wicked

In September 2006, I opened in Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London as the first British Madame Morrible. At the audition, they’d said, ‘You know that Madame Morrible has a couple of songs?’ ‘Well, I’m sorry but this Madame Morrible won’t have any songs, because I can’t sing,’ I replied. Then they said, ‘Can’t you do what Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady?’ I said, ‘Well, I suppose I could try.’ So that, in fact, is what I did. I just recited the lyrics in time to the music in that classic Sprechgesang delivery.

In 2008, after a sell-out, Olivier-award nomination run in London, I was asked to play the role on Broadway. When I arrived at the rehearsals at the Gershwin Theatre in New York, the musical director, Stephen Oremus, whom I’d worked with in London, said, ‘Miriam, Stephen Schwartz [the composer] would really like to hear you sing Madame Morrible’s song.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d love to hear me sing it too, but I can’t sing, that is the only trouble.’ Stephen said, ‘I don’t believe that, Miriam. I think you can sing — you’ve just told yourself that you can’t. And I want you to come with me and just kick it around. You’ll get there. I know you will. Just be brave. Let’s go for it!’ I agreed, so we went to the rehearsal room. Stephen sat at the piano, and we practised and practised and practised and practised and practised. And at the end of it, he put down the piano lid and said, ‘You know what, Miriam? You’re right. You can’t sing.’