It took Miriam Margolyes 80 years to write her memoir. Two years on, the actor, documentarian and raconteur extraordinaire has written another – of sorts. Whereas This Much Is True was a (relatively) conventional autobiography, Oh Miriam! is more of a self-help guide: Margolyes’s manifesto for a fulfilled life. Why did she feel the need to write it? “I have to say the reason I did it is exactly the same reason I did the first one. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” An advance of £250,000, seeing as you’re asking. “I didn’t particularly want to do it. But I thought I cannot turn down such a huge amount of money because I’m going to need it for carers. So I wrote it.”
Margolyes loves to tell it straight. And the older she gets, the straighter she tells it. She’s also famously filthy – perhaps most memorably telling the story, on Graham Norton’s show in 2011, of how, when riding her bike as a student in Cambridge, she stopped at the traffic lights by an open car with an American soldier inside. “Something crazy took hold of me. You know that feeling. And I said, ‘Would you like to follow me to my college and I’ll suck you off?’” Sure enough, he followed. And very grateful he was, too. “‘Can I come back next week and bring my friends?’ he asked as he left.” What makes her so funny is that she tells these stories in a cut-glass, upper-class RP – every magnificently enunciated syllable sharp as a stab.
