I adore Miriam Margolyes. She’s such a comical individual and has a personality all of her own and will be remembered for that. She demonstrates time and time again that she’s rogue when live on TV, especially when she comes out with obscenities and sexual innuendos during interviews, and she certainly has no filter on that mouth of hers, but this is what makes her extraordinary.
She’s famously vulgar and direct and describes herself as ‘short, fat and curly’.
Miriam Margoyles might be one of our naughtiest national treasures but she wants to be respected for her acting, not her foul mouth.
However, she tells it straight and the older she gets, the straighter she tells it and she’s famously filthy. She’s like Marmite, you either love her or hate her.
Perhaps the most memorable story that she told on the Graham Norton Show in 2011, was 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. She said that something crazy took hold of her and she 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 and after said, ‘Can I come back next week and bring my friends?’
What makes her so funny is her cut-glass, upper-class voice, which is a magnificently articulated syllable as a sharp stab. However, she just doesn’t want to be that foul-mouthed old biddy, the potty mouth as she’s so often called because she said she’s more than that.
She said that she has to say what she believes to be the truth and that she’s getting on in age now, so she doesn’t give a flying fuck and that if she wants to say something she’s going to say it.
She’s popular in a way she never expected to be and her personality is incredible.
Her performances are amazing because they’re so unexpected and she provokes outrage, but nothing is planned.
Miriam Margolyes loves to talk about her Judaism and how important the traditions are for her, how she never works on Yom Kippur and how fellow Jews regard her as a heretic because she’s so critical of Israel. She said, that she thinks North London Jews feel she should keep her mouth shut and that she’s a terrorist.
She said that she doesn’t drink and has never taken drugs because she’s not interested in something you can inhale, or take into your body that changes your mind.
Miriam Margolyes said that she’s changed her attitude to a lot of things in her life while her parents never did. She said that she doesn’t believe in circumcision. That was a big thing, but she hadn’t realised until recently.
She said that she doesn’t like circumcision because you’re mutilating a child, and within a beat she was on to her next sentence, saying that she didn’t think circumcision in itself was a bad thing, and that for many women it was a good thing.
She said that she’s had a lovely time on her journey and that she hopes that she’s made people laugh. She said that her approach was too scattergun, and she said within a single thought, she can rage against climate change, Brexit, factory farming and ‘that bastard Rees-Mogg who had the impudence to say the victims of Grenfell lacked common sense.
She said she’s not focused enough on one or two things, but that she hopes to go to Israel and Palestine to make a documentary and that hopefully she will be well enough, and that would mean that she would have done her duty.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 