ACTRESS Miriam Margolyes regrets wearing blackface during her early years in the theatre. “I regret to say that I blacked up. You don’t do that now. It’s not acceptable. But I didn’t know back then,” the Harry Potter star said at a Fane event this week.
Margoyles, right, says she first blacked up in 1966, then did it again 10 years later for Mike Lindsay-Hoggs’s production of The White Devil at the Old Vic. “It was a terrible production... just awful,” she said. The BBC had a prime-time “blackface” show, The Black and White Minstrel Show, with white actors in black make up, until 1978.
At the Cambridge Theatre talk with Julian Clary, Margolyes spoke of her support for trans rights and Palestinians. “We have to treat people better” she said.
Waxworks lead a merry dance
SPARE a thought for Chris Mason, left, the BBC’s new Political Editor, having to cover the Tory leadership race during a heatwave. Mason tells us he got confused while asking for directions in Whitehall this week. “A chap looked official and well-dressed. I politely said ‘Excuse me?’ and got no answer”. Mason told us. “Little wonder. It was some sort of waxwork.” Better than some of the contenders for PM?
Pulp (non) Fiction
JARVIS Cocker, above, doesn’t listen to his own music. The former Pulp singer told The Idler festival in Hampstead this week that he used to run out of nightclubs when they played Common People. Now he’s written a memoir and found it very different to songwriting. “When you write a song you just repeat things a lot: that’s a chorus,” he said. “If you repeat things in a book they say, ‘That’s a typo’”.
Tory tech tricks
COMPUTER tricks aplenty in the Tory leadership race. Penny Mordaunt’s team appear to have bought the URL with Nadhim Zahawi’s slogan “NZ4PM”, sending his fans to her election video. Other Tory hopefuls also have tech skills: anti-woke favourite Kemi Badenoch once admitted to hacking a Labour site in 2008 to help Boris Johnson’s bid for London mayor. Perhaps their next jobs could be in cyber.
SINGER St. Vincent worked the decks at the launch of her fashion collaboration with brand Gant at The Standard last night — and actor Emma Appleton enjoyed the party. Over in Mayfair, Lady Sabrina Percy, model Betty Bachz and writer Yomi Adegoke feasted on dim sum at Park Chinois for alcohol-free bubbly brand French Bloom. While DJ Zara Martin and model Ikram Abdi Omar looked glamorous at the Hanover Square launch of two Bulgari perfumes, actor Tom Hollander looked a tad nervous at the press party for his new play, Patriots, at The Almeida. He shouldn’t: The Standard gave it four stars.
