This Much is True

by Miriam Margolyes

My family story illustrates the archetypal trajectory of a working-class Jewish immigrant family: first, a peddler, then in trade, then in the professions, and then, with me – the third-generation immigrant – in the Arts.

said I was always asking: ‘Do you like me?’ I desperately wanted to be liked. I’d do almost anything to be liked. I haven’t changed.

She was gentle and hospitable, and I had no idea till much later that she was a genius. I just liked her enormously.

We giggled about it because we knew that sex was something you giggled about.

Other people’s lives are always gripping.

want to acknowledge the people who took on the challenge of continuing their heritage in a strange land.

‘We were certain that the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust. And when it didn’t, nothing has seemed quite so bad ever since.’

it gave me the person I am.

This was before feminism: women were not meant to be funny; they were meant to be decorative. These chaps wanted to sleep with women, not compete with them. I was neither decorative nor bedworthy, and they found me unbearable.

should judge people according to the purity of their morals: the purity of their vowels is neither here nor there.

I’m happy to die wondering

but I feel mental lust for Heather.

realise now that telling people things that they can’t deal with is an indulgence.

I know that kindness and gentleness are the most valuable commodities. Now, more than ever, they demand distribution.

I avoid analysing my own technique because I’m frightened that it’s a small, weak thing and that if it hits the light and the sun shines on it, it might completely fragment and disappear, so I tend to let my instinct guide me and hope for the best.

It’s lonely, but you can keep the pencils.

I was protected by all the things my parents had fought so hard to provide me with: the confidence of my class, education and social status.

There’s nothing more valuable than friends who really know you and still like you.

We all should try to make people feel good: if you can’t say something nice, then shut up and don’t say anything at all.

bind your friends to you with hoops of steel.

Thankfully it wasn’t smelly, just deafening.

Comedy is life, built big perhaps, but always built true.

Kenny had the gift of shifting the clouds away for other people, but not for himself.

‘drempelvrees’ – ‘fear of thresholds’.

The law of the box office is the first law of the movie industry.

In Australia, I know that Man is young, and it is Nature that’s old and powerful. You feel the power of the land in the red rocks, you marvel at the huge, twisted trees. When you’re in Europe, by contrast, you feel that Man is ancient and has created timeless works of art and built great churches and cities, that Man

has been around for a long time. Not in Australia; it’s another dimension of existence, and it’s had a profound effect on me.

I’m fascinated by the pull of Judaism and its culture – the food, the jokes, the vitality, the suffering, the guilt and the history – it’s all part of who I am and what I’ve inherited. The fact of my being Jewish informs the whole of my life. It informs connections with people. More than anything else, being Jewish informs my actor’s aesthetic: emotion is always trembling on the brink for every Jewish woman. It comes with the territory, and it’s very useful as I don’t have to delve to find joy, despair, laughter and tears.

This is what can result when some people become ‘less important’, when it’s frighteningly easy to take life away.

I am puzzled by the lack of rage in the country.

Some British people don’t like facing the truth of our colonial past and that’s part of the problem; they don’t want to be re-educated about our long history of exploitation and cruelty. Those people have always thought of England as the best country in the world. Well, it isn’t. It was cruel and greedy and unjust, much like the rest of the world, and the aftermath of Empire has given rise to a hateful legacy of racism.

The English are not open to the outside, or to outsiders.

She thought that Britain could be run like a grocer’s shop. Well, it can’t.

I believe that people have to face up to the moral implications of their actions, and not sit on a fence, and I’ve made my choice.

In The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, my lovely stand-in, Margery Lyons, awkwardly asked me if I’d mind actually getting into my character’s coffin as she couldn’t face it. I didn't mind at all. I will mind when it’s no longer optional, however.