• Q & A and e.award
  
  Question: Phil from Wisconsin USA has been inspired by the Oscars to ask about my film and acting career.
  
  Answer: Yes, I have appeared on the silver screen in two movies, “Absolute Beginners” and “Eat The Rich’. The first was produced by husband no.2, Nik Powell, and the second which was produced/directed by Peter Richardson, he distributed.
  I appeared in Absolute Beginners as a favour to Nik who was in the middle of shooting the film. At midnight he desperately needed someone with an actor’s union card to deliver some lines on screen, as Baby Boomer’s mum, at 6am the following morning. Nik has always seemed to produce in a state of emergency. It was a major feature of our marriage and continues to be a major feature of our on-going friendship and joint parenting efforts!
  
  I arrived on set after 2 hours in wardrobe and make-up to make me look frumpy and middle-aged. My baby, Jack was watching from a pushchair off screen with toddler Amie hanging on to the handle bars. Madness…
  
  Eat The Rich was full of famous walk-ons. In the early Eighties Peter Richardson produced and directed all the currently major but then up-coming British comedic talent of the day. I remember a particular dinner at his place in honor of Ben Elton’s London show debut. Every comedy talent you can imagine sat around the table, all in complete awe of Ben, waiting for him to come off stage and join us. Those assembled included Robbie Coltrane, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Lenny Henry, Rowan Atkinson, Adrian Edmondson, Rick Mayall and practically the complete cast of The Young Ones, Black Adder, Mr. Bean, Absolutely Fabulous and more. I laughed so much I could not keep my food down. To this day I crack up just thinking about it.
  Nik was and still is a major force in the British film industry. My favourites of his productions while we were married were Scandal (well, it would be wouldn’t it?) and The Crying Game for which we won an Oscar!
  
  All the family went to Hollywood to take part in the ceremony. Unfortunately because of another, this time financial, emergency Nik had to sell the rights to the movie to a company called Miramax who got all the public credit and acclaim for his production company’s work But we won the best director Oscar. How fantastic. I was SO proud. Nowadays Nik is also Chairman of the European Film Academy. But it’s all still fraught with emergencies and dramas ….that’s the way he likes it.
  
  One little known film fact that you might not know is that in the Sixties I turned down the chance to be a Bond girl in a movie because I did not like George Lazenby. Coo.

As for treading the boards, this came about because the actress (and now Labour politician) Glenda Jackson and her husband Roy shared the same local glazier as my first husband, Jeff and me. We all kept him in business repairing the French windows that we habitually smashed with our stage exits. The glazier told us one day that he had overheard Glenda and Roy talking about my acting potential and from then on we all started contemplating a completely different kind of smash hit - on the stage, dahling. Doing firstly Shakespeare, playing Ophelia and then playing Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan. The latter part entailed me standing on stage delivering long soliloquies for hours. Lord knows how I learned all those lines. I rehearsed them standing in the middle of an Irish field shouting at a herd of bewildered Dairy Short Horns who probably thought that I was a daft English cow! Certainly not a French saint.
Roy had the idea of doing the play in contemporary dress and I appeared looking like a modern day female guerilla fighter. Voila!

• So there we are. I hope this newsletter was worth waiting for. See ya in April