Call the Midwife legend Judy Parfitt reveals the show’s upcoming hiatus "shakes" her a bit: "It'll be hard for all of us"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Judy Parfitt is in a reflective mood. It would be strange if she wasn’t. When we meet, on the wintry and sprawling Surrey set of Call the Midwife, Parfitt and the rest of the cast and crew are filming the final episode of the stalwart Sunday-night drama before it’s “paused”.

It isn’t being axed, cancelled or canned – everyone is very emphatic about that. Rather, it’s being rested, so that a prequel series, set during the Second World War, can be made, along with a spin-off movie, set overseas in 1972. How long that rest lasts is undefined, so even though the BBC says that it “will remain at the heart” of the Corporation for years to come, it is undeniably an end of era for Call the Midwife.

“This time of year, you thank God you’re nearly finished because you’re so tired,” Parfitt explains as she recounts the rhythm of the last 15 years during which she has played the magnificent, fragile, cerebral and mischievous nun, Sister Monica Joan. “From about the beginning of March, you start thinking how lovely it’ll be to see everyone and start working again. Then it’s April and I usually look forward to April. So for it not to be there really shakes me a bit. This company has been through so much together that we are a family. It’ll be hard for all of us.”

Parfitt turned 90 in November last year and she’s found this last block of filming especially challenging – partly because of the circumstances, partly because of the storylines and partly because that’s the kind of actress she is.

“I have to be a character and inhabit them,” she explains. “I can’t act any other way. I can’t sort of be external and watch myself. In these episodes, I’m playing scenes that there’s no way I can leave behind. It’s been horrendous, on occasion. For an actor, a vivid imagination is wonderful to have – and hell to live with.”

So how has she found inhabiting Monica Joan over the years? “I’ve always wanted to play a nun because I was educated by nuns – and I loved Monica Joan’s character. The way she was written as quirky and offbeat was a joy; she spoke in a different way from everybody else, which is hell to learn. People come to her for advice but she’s also highly strung, very sensitive. If she’s thrown off-course, she loses the plot. Having all that to play was wonderful. I don’t know what I’ll do without her, actually.”

Call the Midwife creator and writer Heidi Thomas regards Parfitt as similarly special. “Sister Monica Joan was a stand-out character in the original Call the Midwife memoirs, and I knew she was going to be important to the drama. In the books, she quotes eloquently from the Bible and the great poets. It is as though the love of language had seeped into her bones.

“Once Judy was cast, her own extraordinary speaking voice and skill with verse came into play. I loved writing for Judy – she really is one of the finest and most precise actresses of the past century. I have never known her not to say a line exactly as I imagined it, unless of course it was to say it better!”

Born in Sheffield, Judy Catherine Claire Parfitt only ever wanted to be an actress but she isn’t sure why. Her mum used to take her to the theatre and the cinema, which she loved, and when Judy was 10, she met Margaret Lockwood, then Britain’s biggest film star, and told her, “‘I want to be an actress’. She said, ‘Then you must do your voice’ and gave me an 8 x 12 inch photograph, which I’ve still got.”

Years later, she bumped into Lockwood in a Mayfair hairdresser, and reminded the older woman of their first meeting. “I think she’d forgotten a lot by then,” Parfitt says, sadly. (By way of contrast, Parfitt is as sharp as a tack).

In between those meetings with Lockwood, Parfitt trained at Rada and built an impressive career that ranged from The Avengers to Z Cars via Play for Today and The Jewel in the Crown to name but a few. She starred in a Laurence Olivier Presents… with Olivier himself and was Gertrude to Anthony Hopkins’s Claudius in Tony Richardson’s 1969 Hamlet. And what about Anthony Hopkins, I ask her. “We all said he wouldn’t amount to anything,” she replies, deadpan.

As the century turned, Parfitt broadened her horizons further, playing the mother of Dr Elizabeth Corday (Alex Kingston) in ER from 2000 to 2002, and, in 2005, playing the monstrous Mercy Woolf in Jeremy Dyson and Simon Ashdown’s black comedy for BBC3, Funland. The latter has never been repeated on television, possibly because of Mercy’s toe-curlingly foul mouth.

As I enthuse wildly about Funland, Parfitt is surprised and flattered that I remember it at all. “She was so horrendous I loved it,” she recalls. “When I was talking to them about it, I said ‘I won’t be allowed to say the things she says,’ but I did. So, she said things that I could never say in a million years myself!”

Parfitt is diffident about her long career and summarises it thus, “I’ve played some interesting people and I worked with some amazing people. I did three things with [Peter] O’Toole.”

As Heidi Thomas says, “Judy can be so playful that one often forgets she is the age she is. She once hitched up her habit on set and did a sort of Can-can, and I’m telling you she has the best legs in the show. But then she’ll tell you about working with John Gielgud [at the time when he was charged with ‘importuning for immoral purposes’] or remember being on the set of The Avengers the day Kennedy was shot. And you think, ‘She’s seen it all’. She’s truly one of the greats. I feel blessed that she took on the role.”

Sitting on the sofa in the parlour of Nonnatus House with the glare of the electric fire illuminating the garish geometry of the historically accurate carpet, Parfitt says that come April, she’ll miss some aspects of playing Monica Joan less than others. Specifically, the outfit. “Ugh,” she exclaims, theatrically. “It ruins your hair and you can’t hear anybody. You’ve got a cap, which has a rim round it, and then the wimple, which is double-stitched. It really presses on you.”

With our time nearly up and having discussed at length her dog, the impatience of the young, how everyone’s angry, our mistrust of politicians and the bizarre Channel 4 dating show Naked Attraction, I ask Parfitt what perspective age has awarded her.

“I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I was younger, I didn’t think I was sexy, I didn’t think

I was good-looking – like all young people. But now I look back at pictures…” She sounds not so much wistful, as tender, towards her younger self. “And I used to worry about what people thought of me. But I’m Yorkshire. In Yorkshire, they say what they think and I’m very direct. That’s not necessarily a good thing. I’m sure there are people who think ‘I can’t stand that woman’. But, you know – nobody’s perfect.”

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