“I hope they don’t want me to look wacky,” frets Josie Lawrence on the way to the photoshoot for this interview, because she’s here to talk about a serious film. On the other hand, she’d love a plug for her regular Sunday night slot at London’s Comedy Store, where she has been improvising on and off for 38 years. The contradiction is a fact of life for a performer whose gift of the gab on Friday night TV bagged her a permanent place in the heart of the nation, eclipsing the parallel career in which she was excelling as a classical actor of Shakespeare and Stoppard.
The interview is over lunch, at Lawrence’s request, though she looks momentarily horrified when a plate of long, chewy pasta arrives, dripping with the sort of sauce you really don’t want down your front for a photoshoot. She has arrived early, as she always does, and killed some time in a vintage shop close by, where she has bought herself an elegant coat dress. She jumps enthusiastically from her seat to show it off, exclaiming, at head-turning volume, “I’m terrible at buying clothes – my wardrobe is full of old things that I like to wear. But it’s funny how things turn up when you’re not looking.” Far from deliberately drawing attention to herself, she seems oblivious that other diners might recognise her.
Her new film neatly marries the two sides of her career. It is the story of a pair of middle-aged sisters who return to their childhood home after the death of their charismatic but difficult mother, and decide to make their clear-out into an art installation. Directed by Jon Sanders and titled A Clever Woman, the film was shot over 10 days in an old curiosity shop of a house on the Isle of Wight, and is an entirely improvised exploration of bereavement, memory and the bonds of sisterhood.
A Clever Woman is also the realisation of a pipedream for Lawrence and her co-star, Tanya Myers, who met at theatre college and once shared a home but have taken more than 40 years to find a project to work on together. Myers’ husband is the playwright Stephen Lowe, who was instrumental in getting Lawrence an Equity card, back in the days when young actors were barred from professional contracts without membership of the actors’ union, she explains.
She had been working her socks off in the clubs of Manchester when Lowe telephoned to ask if she’d like to play a young boy in his adaptation of Robert Tressell’s fable of working-class life, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – with an Equity card thrown in. It was a huge success, which set her up with an agent too.
In Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the improvised comedy show on Channel 4 that made her name in the late 80s and 90s, she developed a specialty of making up songs on the spot from randomly suggested words and song styles. “Dodecahedron” in a gospel style, for instance. In A Clever Woman, the sisters strike up a maudlin duet accompanied by their mother’s old pianola. Most scenes were filmed in a single take. “I was asked what key I sing in and I gave the wrong one,” she says, “So I either had to go very low – but Tanya was singing that – or very high. And I didn’t quite hit it.” Far from standing on her dignity and demanding a second take, “I thought ‘This is perfect.’ That voice doesn’t fit, the dresses don’t fit. I’m a big galumphing thing who loves her wine – obviously, my father’s child rather than my mother’s.”
The film’s crew added to the improvisational chaos by throwing in some glamorous costumes that, unbeknown to either actor, were way too small for them, with the result that Lawrence gets indecorously pinioned by a sequinned top, arms waggling helplessly above her head, while Myers spends part of the film wandering around in a dress that doesn’t zip up at the back. The point was not to make fun of two middle-aged women but to illustrate what a petite beauty their mother was, says Lawrence. How hard she must have worked to keep it up becomes clear when they contemplate her improbably high, torturously pointy stilettos.
At one point, Lawrence whips out a pink lipstick that belonged to her own mother. “I had it in my makeup bag so I just put it in my costume before that final scene, and said ‘This is mummy’s’, and put it on. Nobody knew I was going to do that.” She quickly adds that her relationship with her own mother bore no similarity to the one depicted in the film, though she and her two siblings – brother and sister twins who are 10 years older – also gathered to clear out their childhood home after their mother’s death, so she understands the impulse to make a performance of it.
Their dad, who had worked for British Leyland near their West Midlands house and died years earlier, was a home brewer, and there were still lots of bottles in the cellar. “There was one particular bottle of stout that was still full, so I said to my brother and sister, ‘On the day we leave, let’s open this bottle and pour it on dad’s vegetable patch and thank the house.’” Two generations of the family were standing in a circle when her brother cracked it open. “He sniffed it and said, ‘I think this is all right’, so we all had a little sip.”
There was no acting tradition in the family but her siblings knew their little sister was different. “They said as soon as I could speak, I was putting on shows. I used to open the back door in the morning and shut it again. They didn’t know why. And then they realised I was letting my imaginary friend in.” She would have liked to go to drama school in London but was persuaded to do a theatre studies degree because it would give her the option of teaching. She chose Dartington Arts College in Devon, “basically because it was in the countryside and lovely. I was very naive.”
She has hung on to her Black Country accent, saying, “You should hear me when I get home. It gets very broad.” She remains close to her family and goes back often. Though she is now a local hero with several honorary degrees, her most cherished accolade is having a gritting truck named in her honour by Sandwell council. It’s called Frozie Lawrence – though she’s not alone, she says; there’s also a Julie Salters named after her fellow Midlander Julie Walters.
For three decades, her home has been in east London where she lives with two rescue cats called Eric Morecambe and Glenda Jackson. “I did have Ernie [Wise], but sadly we lost him.” She’s resolutely single and an enthusiastic joiner-in. Despite all her starring roles at many of the grandest theatres in the land, including the Globe, Manchester Royal Exchange and RSC – where she won a Peggy Ashcroft best actress award as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew – she happily mucks in with an annual community reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a local common. “Really enjoyed showing my Bottom,” she tweeted, to much merriment, last Summer. She’s also been Puck, one of the fairies, and some years has simply helped out with the props.
She recently added a cameo in Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens to a list of TV credits that include a stint in EastEnders and guest appearances on QI and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. She’d like to do more television but it isn’t happening at the moment, she says, partly because she’s choosy about what she will take, and partly because she has never hustled for work: “I just go where it takes me.” One of her happiest memories involves a screening of a film she made in 1991, Enchanted April. “I’d done premieres in New York and LA and had a proper red carpet and met Liza Minnelli.” But nothing mattered as much to her as watching it in a local cinema with her mum and dad on either side of her. “At the end, when the credits came up, they both just squeezed my hand.” She breaks into an uncomplicated smile and adds: “That was amazing. I’ve been very, very, very lucky.”
• A Clever Woman is released in UK cinemas on 21 April
