When her daughter Bessie was small, Imelda Staunton would read her bedtime stories. “I’d say something like, ‘And then the witch came in,’” says Staunton, cackling away like a wrinkled old woman. “And she’d say, ‘Oh, don’t do the voices, Mum!’” The 69-year-old actor adopts the world-weary sigh of a precocious six-year-old. “I think you thought you could do them better than me,” she says to her daughter, now 31. “Oh God, I remember that,” says Bessie, who takes the surname of her father, Downton Abbey star Jim Carter. “Or maybe I was thinking you needed a bit of direction.”
Twenty-five years later, mother and daughter are in the same dressing room at the Garrick Theatre, ahead of the evening’s performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. The production marks the first time they have worked together, and if Carter, best known for playing hoity-toity Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton, has indeed been giving her mother directing tips in the rehearsal room, then she is braver than most.
