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.
