20 Questions With … Lynda Bellingham

Well known for her performances on a wide range of TV series and dramas, Lynda Bellingham’s extensive credits include roles in Doctor Who, All Creatures Great and Small, At Home with the Braithwaites, The Bill and Faith in the Future. She is still remembered as an icon of motherhood in the series of Oxo family ads, which ran for 16 years.

More recent stage work has included Sugar Mummies at the Royal Court, Losing Louis at Hampstead Theatre and Trafalgar Studios and Marry Me, You Idiot at Jermyn Street Theatre.

Vincent River, by Philip Ridley, received critical acclaim when it was first staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2000. Bellingham appears in the West End premiere alongside Mark Field and plays a woman visited by a teenager who has some connection with the death of her son.

Date & place of birth
Born 31 May 1948 in Montreal, Canada. There is no significance in being born in Canada. It’s just that my father worked for an airline and my parents happened to there at the time. I was actually brought up in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

Lives now in
Friern Barnet, where I have a flat in a former psychiatric hospital. I’ve always lived north of the river, ever since I first came to London when I was at drama school and shared a flat in Marylebone High Street with Nickolas Grace.

Training
Central School of Speech and Drama, 1966-1969.

What made you want to become an actor?
As a small child, I always wanted to be a show jumper, but I had to give up horse riding altogether when I developed bad hay fever. The acting kicked in when I was eleven. I played a servant in Macbeth at the Hendley Shakespeare Festival, an outdoor semi-professional company near Tring in Hertfordshire. The next year I was Puck in a Midsummer Night’s Dream and I just loved every minute of it. I won drama and poetry speaking awards at school as well, but that’s where it all began.

If you hadn’t become an actor, what might you have done professionally?
Well apart from working with horses, nothing remotely interested me other than acting. Nowadays, if I wasn’t acting I’d quite like to run a restaurant or a hotel.

First professional job
Frinton Summer Theatre, where I did an eight weeks season of weekly rep consisting mostly of Brian Rix farces and Agatha Christie thrillers. I was an assistant stage manager, which meant you did everything from painting the sets to playing small parts. I remember being slightly put out because in the very first programme they misprinted my name as “Lyfta” Bellingham. Then I went to Crewe rep for nine months where they got it right.

First big break
My first ever break in television was two episodes of an early Seventies series called Kate, with Phyllis Calvert playing an agony aunt. But it was the year in General Hospital which really got me going. In theatre I thought I was going to make my mark in 1974 in a new musical called Bordello, about the life of Toulouse Lautrec, but it only ran for 41 performances. I was, however, the very first nude ever to appear on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre.

Career highlights to date

Playing Helen Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small, because I got that job at the same time as I signed up for the Oxo family television commercial campaign, which ran for 16 years. You could see me doing vet’s wife acting and healing animals on BBC, and then switch over to ITV and watch me cooking them with gravy. I loved doing Faith in the Future with Julia Sawalha, for which we won the 1997 Best Comedy award, and more recently spending six months in The Bill playing horrible leather-clad villainess Irene Radford. I guess that when you get into your fifties you just have to keep reinventing yourself as an actor. They kind of don’t know what to do with you. Thankfully, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren have shown the world that there is acting life after 50, although equally there still aren’t all that many strong parts for women parts on television today, which is why doing theatre is so important to me.

Favourite playwrights
Patrick Marber – I’d love to do one of his plays. Shakespeare is a favourite too. Most of all I’m a big Edward Albee fan, with A Delicate Balance and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the top of my list.

What’s the last thing you saw on stage that had a big impact on you?

Without question, Patrick Stewart in Macbeth at the Gielgud Theatre. It’s vital to have drama as strong as this in the West End as opposed to all the big musicals.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I ever gave myself was to believe in myself.

If you could swap places with one person (living or dead) for a day, who would it be?
Actingwise, it’s got to be Katherine Hepburn. She epitomised how a woman could be funny, witty, intelligent and attractive all at the same time. Historically, I quite fancy being Boudica – Queen of the Iceni maybe, but a bit of a lad’s girl too.

Favourite books
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez with its fantastic historical sweep. But I truly adore crime books, especially Mark Billingham and Patricia Cornwell. I guess that’s why I was destined to be in The Bill.

Favourite holiday destinations
For years I wouldn’t allow myself a holiday because of my work and the children, although my two sons are now aged 19 and 24 so I’m able to explore more. When I was married to my former Italian husband we always went to Italy. My own choice will always be remote and exotic islands, The Maldives is out of this world. I’m always desperate to escape to some uninhabited desert isle, although there can’t be many left now.

Favourite after-show haunts
The Ivy, J Sheekey and Jo Allen. When I was in Losing Louis at Trafalgar Studios, sometimes I’d allow myself to stay over on Friday nights at The Athaneum in the posh part of St James’s. I’d walk there and say hello to the man on the door at the Ritz on the way, sometimes even pop in for supper. It’s the posh part of London that I’d never normally frequent in a million years.

Favourite websites
I’m not very web aware, even though I have a site of my own. I really must get down to updating it because it says I would never ever get married again, but as I’ve just got engaged it’s now out of date. I email of course and I understand how wonderful the internet can be, but for reference and information I’d still rather read a book or go to a library.

Favourite music
I did try to keep up with the latest drum and bass through my sons, but I love classic singers like Ray Charles and I’ve recently had another go at Barbra Streisand. I bought lots of her CDs and when my other half and I drove down to the South of France this summer I played her very loudly all the way, which encouraged him to drive faster and faster so we would arrive and I would have to switch off.

How did being the Oxo mum for so long affect your career?
It stopped me doing quite a lot. I am proud of it because it was daring at the time – almost like a mini soap opera. But there was a real snobby thing about it. Certain parts of this industry were always going to shut the door on me for having done that. But then I didn’t find my feet on television all through the seventies because I got into comedy mode – you had to do what I call “tits and arse” stuff. Now it’s very different for actresses but then you were only usually employed in comedy shows as the butt of men’s jokes. You couldn’t be funny and attractive. I think it was something I was rather good at and could have probably achieved higher things. Nowadays it doesn’t really matter what you do so long as you put bums on seats. It’s depressing. TV has truly gone for the lowest common denominator at the moment – a bit like the equivalent of John Major and his grey politics.

You’ve recently begun to play yourself as a panellist on Loose Women. What’s that like?
It’s very different and I’m thrilled to be going back to it after Vincent River. We talk about our lives and people see me as myself, but it’s also great that audiences will accept me as a character in a play. I realised that these days it’s a lot to do with “profile” –you have to keep reminding people that you are still around. Loose Women does that but in a way that doesn’t compartmentalise you.

Why did you want to accept the part of Anita in Vincent River?
I’ve always tried to find theatre roles that stretch me. Anita, the mother in Vincent River, is a fantastic challenge. I mustn’t give too much away because it’s important that you don’t understand too quickly the dynamics of what’s going on between this older woman in her fifties and a young lad who she invites into her flat. As the play unfolds, you begin to understand why Anita is bound to this boy through the death of her own son, whom she discovers was gay. It’s a daring piece exploring grief, violence and homosexuality from a mother’s perspective and it’s about tolerating how people express themselves, be it sexually or verbally. It’s also timely, this year being the fortieth anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality in this country.

Does being a mother of two sons yourself help you understand Anita?
Of course it has, although as actors you don’t have to experience something in order to portray it. But to discover that your dead son has a secret life, as Anita does, is quite something. I’d be horrified if I found out that my sons had lives that I knew nothing about. Still, short of listening at the keyhole, I guess you have to let them go their own way. I’ve been branded with a motherly image ever since I played the mum in the OXO commercials and after sitcoms like Faith in the Future, in which I was Julia Sawalha’s mum. As an actor I’ve got a myriad of mothers within me, but not necessarily jolly mums carrying in the Sunday joint and the gravy boat.

Any roles you would still like to play?
I’d love to have a go at Gertrude and Lady Macbeth. As I approach sixty, I’ve begun to understand why people talk about becoming invisible after a certain age. I hope that somewhere in the scheme of things there’s a role out there that says to women of my age that you can be visible without being eccentric, a doddery old lady or a geriatric sex maniac. I am sure it’s there. I just have to find it. Maybe that’s my mission.

What are your plans for the future?
I’m planning to write my autobiography so I’ve been looking back and forward recently: the seventies was starting out; the eighties was television; the nineties was divorce and hauling myself out of that; now I’m challenging myself by doing things I have never done before. As an actor, people do feel safe with me. I’m not threatening. In recent years, I’ve used that to draw people in. Sometimes audiences can be quite shocked. In Sugar Mummies last year at the Royal Court, I played this awful woman who has lots of sex with young black men. I loved it. I’ll be sixty next May and I’ve decided that over the next ten years I’ll tackle more roles like that – and hopefully clear a few notions about me. As for a title for my book? I haven’t decided yet, but maybe it should be Triumph Over Adversity, because my former marriage was quite the most painful thing in my life.

– Lynda Bellingham was speaking to Roger Foss

Vincent River opens on 2 November 2007 (previews from 390 October) at the West End’s Trafalgar Studios.