Joanna Lumley reveals “I’ve had no career – I was trying to earn money to keep myself alive"

The look of a character’s hair equates to the cut of her jib? “I love to have a wig or something, something that stops me looking like I look like in front of you now – particularly because I do travel shows as myself and people know that this is me, Joanna. So, if I have a wig, I look different and it brings a different feeling. You feel different and then I think you can give a different performance. You hope you’ll be so different in a part that people will go, ‘Who can that be? Oh my goodness, it’s Joanna!’ but that’s not always the case.” She sounds almost rueful, before declaring, “Laurence Olivier used to say he loved a good nose.”

A good nose? “Transformative,” Lumley nods. “All acting is hoping you’ll get a break from your own face.”

Lumley must, to a certain extent, live in hope. Over a career that began when she became a model in swinging 60s London, she has rarely had a break from her own face. From early roles as a Bond girl, a part in Christopher Lee’s last Hammer Horror Dracula film and a brief appearance in Coronation Street as a girlfriend who dumps Ken Barlow, through her big break as Purdey in The New Avengers, to the role that began her career’s second act – Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy Stone – Joanna Lumley is now almost always on TV playing Joanna Lumley or a Joanna Lumley-esque character.

The only attribute more recognisable than Lumley’s face is her voice. She’s at a level of fame when she’s booked because they want “Joanna Lumley” for the part. Lumley isn’t complaining. “You’re mad if you don’t realise that part of acting is typecasting, but the point of an actress is that you can change, change, change. After Sapphire & Steel, all I was offered was the same sort of thing and I turned them down, even though they were quite good things written for me. But I wanted to keep changing.”

Lumley is amused at the idea that she has a career, carefully planned and executed. “I’ve had no career – I was trying to earn money to keep myself alive. I’ve never had any idea of a destiny or where my career would go and I have never ever asked myself, ‘Will this damage my career?’ I loved acting, so that was going to be my chosen thing.

"We actors just wanted to get to be better actors, and we wanted to work so we could pay the rent. We weren’t longing for stardom. We’re jobbing actors and we’re no different, really, from painters and decorators. It’s a precarious profession at the best of times and I’ve just done anything to keep my head above water.”

The latest role in her non-career is perhaps the biggest: Wednesday’s grandmother, Hester Frump. Morticia’s much-discussed but previously unseen mother, Hester is being billed as Wednesday’s closest ally, even as she antagonises Morticia. Wednesday creator Miles Millar says, “That Wednesday-Hester relationship is unique. You see the twinkle in their eyes when they’re together on screen.” Crucially, Hester’s hair is, like her daughter’s, lustrous and perfectly coiffed. But unlike Morticia’s, in what is surely a nod to Ab Fab’s Patsy, it’s beehive-esque.

“It is spectacular,” Lumley says, both of Hester’s hair and Wednesday as a production. “I’ve never seen such attention to detail and beauty and extravagance. I get to wear many, many huge wigs one on top of the other.”

Lumley worked with Tim Burton “a thousand years ago” on James and the Giant Peach and Corpse Bride – both in roles that gave her a break from her face. In the former, a combination of live-action and stop-motion animation, she wore prosthetics to play the vile Aunt Spiker. In the latter, which was entirely stop-motion, “Albert Finney and I played the parents of a character I can’t remember. She was awful.

“Tim is like a screwball professor – brilliantly visual and creative but vague. He doesn’t finish his sentences and drifts off,” she says. “He rang and asked if I’d read it. I thought it sounded gorgeous.”

By all accounts, Lumley was a big hit on set. Millar describes her as “perfect and hilarious. She nailed every single line, and it’s just so delicious.” So delicious, in fact, that, according, to Lumley, the part of Hester became “a bigger part than I agreed to, which was lovely, as the writers wrote her lots of new scenes”.

I note that Jenna Ortega, at 22, is the same age as Lumley was when she started acting. How would a 22-year-old Lumley have coped with the extreme fame that Ortega experiences?

“I’d have been terrified,” Lumley admits. “Although I was working and doing all kinds of things – a Dracula film and Coronation Street and James Bond – it was really only The New Avengers that locked me in place, as it were – and that was when I was 30 and I could cope with it. Any applause, appreciation or adulation went over my head: it didn’t matter to me and it didn’t affect me. But I think if I’d been young…

“It’s a completely different age now. She’s American and there’s an American way of doing things. Jen is hugely powerful, a big, big figure. I was never that and I’m not now. She’s as smart as a whip, watching everything as I think she wants to direct at some stage in her life. She has input. It’s her show. She can do it. She’s terrific.”

When I ask Lumley what she thinks is key to her longevity, she isn’t sure, but she’s grateful for it. “When I started, all acting was to a certain extent, ‘Are you pretty enough?’ Because I’d been a model, all I was seen for was pretty girlfriends and there’s usually not much you can do with those parts. Actresses were told to keep going until 29 and then you might be too old and you’re out. But you think to yourself, ‘Stick around, stick around, stick around.’ It’s hard but you stick around.

“Now, you look at the wonderful parts for people as old as me, and also interesting, different looking parts that don’t need a pretty face. Men have always been allowed to be whatever they want to be, but women have always had to look attractive or alluring or something. That’s fading away. Now you have all kinds of extraordinary people like Frances McDormand or Judi Dench, or any of our great actresses. They’re not necessarily raging beauties, but they can play anything they want.”

I ask if she has any advice for aspiring actors and actresses. “The least you can do is offer complete professionalism, which is to be clean, tidy, on time, optimistic, flexible, and ready with all your words. You’ll often get really lousy scripts, but do the best you can. You’re lucky if you get a good director and a good script and a wonderful cast, but quite a lot of the time you’re dragging the log of plot around the stage, trying to make things come to life.

“Even then, you’ve always got friends around you and everybody’s trying to do their best. Nothing is going to be a smash hit all the time. We all go in and out of the shadows, and that’s how it should be. You’re lucky enough if you’re remembered at all.”

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