When Victoria Smurfit arrived at the first-ever readthrough for Rivals back in 2023, she was understandably terrified. Taking on the role of Rutshire Chronicles icon Maud O’Hara was already a daunting prospect, so entering a huge room full of British acting titans made it all the more nerve-wracking. However, there was one particular person who immediately put her at ease.
“At the bottom of the stairs was Jilly Cooper, who I can only describe properly as Paddington Bear with a twinkle,” she says. “She just went, ‘My Maud!’ and gave me the biggest hug. She just had the ability to make everything better and everything safe. She was a cheerleader without the pom-poms.”
Dame Jilly Cooper’s fictional world of polo shirts, perms and pert bottoms has finally bounced back onto our screens, as bonkbuster Rivals enters its second series. Posh male pin-up Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell) is back to wrestle the Central South West television franchise from enemy Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) – when he and the rest of the village aren’t preoccupied with the kind of wrestling that takes place while naked.
Tragically, Cooper won’t get to watch it. The Rutshire Chronicles author died aged 88 in October last year, mid-way through shooting the new series.
“Her fingerprints are all over season two, which is both really wonderful and just heartbreaking that she's not here to see it launch,” says Felicity Blunt, who was Cooper’s literary agent at Curtis Brown up until her death.
Cooper lives on through the Disney+ series and her vast, outrageously camp novel collection – but what was the dame truly like to work with? “Well now, what’s repeatable?” Blunt asks herself, laughing.
It’s well documented that Cooper knew how to have a good time; the author was described as a “champagne soul” at her funeral, where guests were ushered into an entire cathedral full of the sparkling wine. Blunt says that she was an expert at “finding joy” – but an incredibly hard worker too.
“She was somebody who always had an eye on the clock, not because she watched it for any other reason, but was just finding the appropriate hour to open a bottle of champagne to toast life,” Blunt remembers. “She wore her knowledge lightly and she just wanted a fellow conspirator – she wanted to have fun.”
“She would always urge you not to work too hard. And ironically, she worked harder than anybody. Up until the day she died, she was working, she would work really late into the night, she’d review scripts, she was writing a short story… but she was very much the centre of a party, and only because she wanted to be entertaining everybody around her.”
On the set of Rivals, you could tell immediately when Cooper was on set. “There was a buzz, a fizz around when she was there,” Smurfit says. “It was just like having heart and soul and champagne arrive on set. Invariably, she would have champagne.”
When Cooper turned up to a dry set on the first day of shooting the show, she took matters into her own hands, adds the actor. “She said, ‘Oh, where’s the champagne?’ I said, ‘Oh, no. We don’t drink at work.’ On the second day, she turned up and she had her own with her. She knew how to live.”
Rather fittingly, Cooper was a lover of “filthy jokes” – and was liberal with her praise. “She was incredibly generous with her compliments, so anybody left her presence feeling like a rock star. My brother-in-law was like, ‘I have never felt more attractive.’ And I'm sure my husband felt the same way,” says Blunt, who is married to actor Stanley Tucci. One of her brothers-in-law is actor John Krasinski, who is married to her sister Emily.
Smurfit adds that Cooper showered the Rivals cast with adoration whenever she was on set, which was frequently. “She was across all the scripts and signed off everything,” she says. “She was deeply in love with all the boys and deeply loving to all the girls. We all felt that very much. It was like having a matriarchal umbrella of love around us.”
Not only did she deliver compliments in person, but by letter. Valentine’s cards, birthday cards, children’s birthday cards – Cooper would send them all. “I don’t actually know how Royal Mail is surviving in her absence. She wrote so many letters,” Blunt says.
“She would send correspondence to everybody and with the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine. It was glorious trying to understand what she had written because it was always highly complimentary and alliterative. She used to send lots of compliments to my husband, all beginning with the word ‘S’ because his name is Stan. So you can guess what they were.
“It really amused me talking to some people after she had died and everybody mentioned the Dairy Milk advent calendars she used to send out at Christmas. They assumed they were maybe in a close circle of 10 people who might receive this choice favour when in fact, there were 350 people who received advent calendars from Jilly Cooper every year. It’s dawning on me that I’m not going to get one this year.”
Before finding publishing success with Riders – the first novel in the Rutshire Chronicles series – Cooper was a journalist, starting out at The Middlesex Independent in her early twenties before landing a column on sex, marriage and housework in The Sunday Times Magazine. At the time, Private Eye wrote that her cultivated image was one of a “dotty dame, a feather-brained, fast, rather b****y lady who spends most of her waking hours floating from one loony event to another guzzling booze, collecting naughty tid-bits and chatting up gorgeous men”.
“I suppose much like Dolly Parton, she didn’t mind being thought of possibly as a ditzy blond,” Blunt says. “There are all those jokes that Dolly Parton tells about herself, and you know how smart she is. It’s the same with Jilly – she had the big hair, the beautiful bosom that she was happy to showcase.”
In fact, Cooper was “a brilliant journalist” – and an expert at drawing gossip out of the tightest of lips. “She loved a gentle interrogation,” Blunt says. “Usually, after you’d had a glass or two of the aforementioned champagne. She could extract detail from you better than a KGB officer – it’s extraordinary what you would divulge.
“She was so interested in people and she was so clever. She would feather information out of them. You knew what she was doing, but you really enjoyed it because her reactions were always so glorious. She would go, ‘No! Oh, how marvellous!’ You’d realise you had given up all your secrets willingly.”
Cooper branched into fiction in 1975, starting with a series of romance novels before publishing record-smashing bonkbuster Riders 10 years later. The Cotswoldian world of Rupert Campbell Black and Rutshire drew in millions of women, resulting in 10 sequels and eventually a TV adaptation almost 50 years after the first book’s release.
“She was witty, sly and generous and had an extraordinary Austen-esque ability to create this kaleidoscope of characters,” says Blunt, who fell in love with Cooper’s writing after reading Riders at the age of 10. She later began working at Curtis Brown, Cooper’s literary agency, and represented her for a decade before her death.
“I was a fanatical fan and she never disappointed,” she says. “The character, verve, sophistication and fun that you found on the page was the woman.”
Disney’s adaptation of Rivals proved to be an extraordinary renaissance for Cooper, with her stories reaching a whole new audience. Her sudden death in October came as a terrible shock; she died from a fatal head injury after falling in her Gloucestershire home.
“When we found out Jilly was gone, you knew instantly that somebody had died – it was a testament to her life force that at no point did I think it’d be her, not for a nanosecond,” says Smurfit.
“My mum passed a few years ago and she was a massive fan of Jilly and Maud. I was walking around my local common and had this moment of pride – which is not something Irish people get very often – that I was allowed to be a part of this Cooperverse magic. I went to call my mum to tell her, but of course she’d been gone for years,” she continues, voice breaking. “I thought, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ My mum and Jilly, they’re up there and they know, in my kooky little head.
“That’s the power of what Jilly meant to us who grew up with her, and it’s the most extraordinary thing that my daughters – who are 19 and 21 – just like how they steal our music, have stolen Jilly too.”
Cooper was still writing up until her death, still typing away on her famous typewriter, “Monica”. Surviving several decades, the retro piece of kit helped the author bring all of her novels to the world. “She was working on Monica up until the end,” Blunt says. “Amanda, her PA – who she said stands for ‘perennially amazing’ – had ordered as much tape as she could get her hands on because nobody really makes it anymore. It was stockpiled at her house.”
Blunt hopes that the short story the author had been working on will see the light of day. “We have to do a little detective work to piece together what was her latest draft,” she says. “That would be my ambition for her because to have another piece of her work would be a really beautiful thing and a wonderful surprise.”
Dame Jilly Cooper may be gone, but her work will live on forever, with her books being passed down generations and Rivals continuing to bring her Cotswoldian creations to life.
“It is so rare for an author to still be relevant 50 years after she first started publishing,” Blunt says. “She truly is and was an icon. She took her work seriously, but she didn’t take herself seriously and I think there’s a lesson in that somewhere.
“You knew upon finishing one of her books that it was intelligent, smart, funny, riotous, entertaining and page-turning. It wasn’t something you forget – you go back and read it again and again because you’ve enjoyed it so immensely. It was a three-course meal.”
Smurfits adds that she wrote people “at their best and their worst” – and never judged them. “She very much writes British upper-class society, but also talks to every society in the British class system. She talks to the Irish system, the Bohemian lot that come in and go, ‘F*** this, we’re not dealing with your rules’.
“She’s got a real eye into the carnage of the human existence – good, bad and ugly. We toss the word legend around so perilously, but she genuinely, and I’m going to use ‘is’ and not ‘was’, a legend. She’s going to be giving Jane Austen a run for her money, that’s for sure.”
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