27 May 2006
Christopher Lambert's mullet. Sean Connery's Egyptian- Spanish- Fountainbridge accent. Slow-motion decapitations to the music of Queen: there's so much that's brilliantly bizarre about Highlander that it's easy to miss Celia Imrie - but there she is, a lusty medieval wench, cheering her hugely foreheaded husband off into battle. "I was twice his size," she recalls, "He looks like a giant on screen doesn't he? Tiny! Charming but tiny. In the script he was supposed to pull me up on to his horse to kiss me goodbye. Well, I met him the night before and I said, Christoph, this is a bit embarrassing but I think I'm going to have to lift you on to my horse - you'll never get me off the ground. In the end you'll see I run along beside him."
Imrie is much smaller than the statuesque figure she cuts on film. With her cropped hair, clipped syllables and elegant bearing, she could be any well-bred Home Counties lady, if it wasn't for the wicked curl to her full mouth. It's this suggestion of mischief lurking beneath a matronly bosom that has made Imrie such a success as the tweedy Miss Babs in the Acorn Antiques segment on Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV, the home help in Still Game and turkey-buffet hostess Una Alconbury in the Bridget Jones films. Although only 54 (and looking ten years younger), onscreen it sometimes feels as though she's been middle-aged forever.
Her latest such role is the dragonish Lady Riva Hardwick in Richard E Grant's semi-autobiographical drama Wah-Wah, which also stars Acorn Antiques cohort Julie Walters. Set in Swaziland, the film depicts an Unhappy Valley of bedhopping English ex-pats boozing their way through the fag end of the Empire. The title refers to the baby talk among this posh set. "Everything's tootle pip and hush hush, it sounds like a load of 'wah, wah, wah'," moans an American interloper. Imrie's Lady Riva is Queen Wah-Wah, enforcing an outmoded class system with a lethal armoury of putdowns. When the feisty Yank reveals her nationality, for instance, Riva raises her nose and dispatches her with an icy, "how very hubbly jubbly for you".
Adored by fans for her deadpan drollery, Imrie relished Riva's undiluted nastiness. "A friend of mine came to see a screening and said, 'Ceels, I was longing for you to suddenly become funny. And you didn't'. I said, 'I know, it's quite weird isn't it?' Originally Richard offered me another part but I said, 'yes, but what about this old bag?'" Imrie modelled the battleaxe on some of the "rather ferocious" women who visited her childhood home in 1950s Surrey. "I drew inspiration from my mother's friends. I can remember them wearing those huge, full-skirted skirts and marvellous feathery hats."
The fourth of five children, Imrie got her cut-glass accent from her mother Diana and her Scottish looks and love of dancing from her father David, a radiologist from Glasgow. "My father was a marvellous Scottish dancer. One of my very happy memories is looking over the banister as a girl and seeing the dancers on the lawn. He ran the Scottish Society and threw Burns Night Suppers where me and my sisters would speak on behalf of the lassies and all that. He always kept his accent. He put it on a bit on the phone, actually. I never knew if that was out of nerves or what."
She describes her upbringing in Guildford as "unromantic" but it wasn't entirely without a certain upper-crust dash. Her mother employed a nanny, for example, to look after them, "because she was this absolutely glorious woman who loved going to parties and going to the races and she just didn't have the time". Imrie credits her with giving her an early taste for theatre. "My mother was the most amazing actress in her own right - as a storyteller after a couple of gins. Never read bedtime stories. No, she was always relating her own adventures."
Young Celia was desperate to be a ballerina and passed all the exams, right up until the one that would get her into the Royal Ballet school. They recognised her talent too but also the fact that, at 11 years old, she was already "too big". This disappointment led to an on-off struggle with anorexia which landed her in a hospital psychiatric wing aged 14. When Imrie recovered she determined that if it wasn't going to be ballet then it would jolly well be the stage. While her two sisters became nurses "which pleased my father very much", Celia left school at 15, "a bit of a black sheep. On a quest to be noticed. Pathetic isn't it?" At the time, being an actress was still frowned upon, she says. "It wasn't quite respectable. I know my mother had to take quite a bit of stick." Her father never really understood what she was about either. "He did once ask, 'when are you going to be on the goggle box?'" she says, but he didn't live to see it. After training as a dance teacher, Imrie moved to London, where she supported herself by waitressing and working as a cleaner. "Nothing was going to stop me," she says, "You've got to want to do this or die. I had this blind belief, so I just put my head down and got on with it. When I was charring for Arthur Schwartz, the American composer of Bandwagon, he said, 'Celia, my advice is to make a nuisance of yourself'. At first she didn't bother the critics too much. There was a 1968 stage debut as a dancing rat in a panto chorus line and an early screen outing in the 1974 sexploitation flick The House of Whipcord, about a correctional facility for beautiful young girls.
"I played one of the inmates, dressed in sackcloth. Literally, a sack with a rope around my waist," she smiles. "And I threw my Bible out of the window in an effort to escape. I had long hair in those days. Somebody told me that I looked like Giant Haystacks. Dame Judi Dench spotted it in my programme notes once when we were working together and said, 'what's all this?' I said, 'oh that's a soft porn film I did when I was 17'. To her complete brilliance, she tracked down a copy and gave it to me. I don't think she ever watched it, I just don't think she believed that such a thing existed." Wasn't Imrie at all worried about playing the whipping girl in some sideburn-heavy S&M? "Not really, because I didn't have to take my clothes off. No, I thought it was a bit of a hoot, actually."
Better roles came her way on the small screen, in Upstairs Downstairs, Shoestring and Bergerac. Then she was taken up by Victoria Wood and a parallel career developed, sending up such TV dramas and sitcoms, first in spoof TV economics show McOnomy and later, of course, in Dinnerladies and Acorn Antiques. "It's an absolute cult," Imrie says of the sketch that lately mutated into a sell-out West End musical. "People know the lines better than we do. Miss Babs is still what I'm best known for. Even though I don't go around with bright yellow hair." It hasn't all been camping it up and bumping into furniture, though. Theatre work has included School for Scandal with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a production of Edward Bond's The Sea, directed by Sam Mendes at The National. In the late 1970s Imrie was a member of the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow. "I had a wonderful time working there. At the time, it was the place everybody wanted to go. It took me about five auditions to get in. It was a bit of a golden era. So radical."
In the early days, Imrie also spent some time touring Edinburgh schools with an educational production put together by the now eminent TV producer Sue Birtwistle (of TV Pride and Prejudice fame). "I'm terribly proud of my half-Scots blood. I love going up to Scotland and I've worked quite a lot up there. Directors have taken a chance on me because I sound a bit posh. Tom Cotter, for instance, cast me in Cloud Howe - the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel. That was one of the best parts I've ever been given. Doing the Aberdeen accent was almost like learning Dutch."
That was in 1982 and other heavyweight TV roles followed in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Darling Buds of May, Gormenghast and the Mitford saga Love in a Cold Climate, which saw her dowdy Aunt Sadie married to Alan Bates. "I'd known him for years and absolutely adored him," says Imrie of her late co-star. "He really is naughty. Terrible. Or was, God bless him. But then, you see, Dame Judi's got that too. Everybody who's ever been one of my heroes is very naughty. Naughty sense of humour. Naughty sparkle in their eye."
When Imrie was pregnant with her son Angus she told everybody she wanted a "naughty" child - something the 11-year-old likes to remind her of today. The pregnancy was "sort of" planned "because I was running out of time a bit," she admits, "I always thought I was rather ancient to have a child so I was shocked and delighted when I found out."
The father is actor Ben Whitrow, although there was never any question of them getting married. "I can admire people who want to do it, who actually plunge into this lifelong thing with no way out, but I'd just feel trapped," she has said. "All that certainty. No surprises. I love not knowing what's going to happen next. Better to be independent if you can, I think." Perhaps it's got something to do with growing up in the 1950s. "I'm not sure the generation of young women that's coming up now has any idea what went on then," she says.
"Not that they have to be grateful or anything, but I think they're completely unaware of what used to be. Which is quite alarming. Divorce was terribly frowned upon. When I was growing up 'a divorcee' really had the same besmirching as someone who had an illegitimate baby. Mother really didn't approve of that at all. It wasn't done. I'm afraid I broke that rule too."
In 2003's smash hit film Calendar Girls, Helen Mirren's onscreen son goes into a monster sulk about his embarrassing mum taking off her clothes. Did Angus have a similar reaction to Imrie going topless but for a pile of strategically positioned buns? "He never said that he minded. In fact he took it in his stride. I suppose he was just that bit younger so not to be too embarrassed."
I guess it helps if you can tell your mates your mum is also in Star Wars: Episode I? "Absolutely. It's a bit cool to have your mum as a fighter pilot isn't it? I loved saying 'I'm Bravo Five', that was one of the biggest thrills."
Angus made his own acting debut on the radio at Christmas. "He was extremely good actually," says Imrie. "I wouldn't put it past him to go into acting and I certainly wouldn't put him off, either. I don't quite understand why people say that to their children. Of course you have to be tough and take things on the chin. Of course you have ups and downs - still do actually. Highs and lows of confidence. He understands that. But nonetheless, I do think it's a wonderful job, when you're working."
Imrie never seems to stop, recently squeezing in films such as Wimbledon, Nanny McPhee and Imagine Me and You, as well as TV dramas Dr Zhivago, Daniel Deronda and Doc Martin.
After a career as a stalwart supporting player, and at an age when many actresses begin to be sidelined by casting directors, Imrie seems to be moving not further away from the spotlight, but towards it.
Next week she's filming a comedy pilot with Nicholas Lyndhurst and last year she performed off-Broadway in her first solo show. "I never thought I'd do something on my own," she says, "Sometimes you get to a first night and think you're going to die with fright. But then you hold your nose and jump in and it disappears. And the feeling afterwards! That first drink is fantastic!"
No more running alongside for Imrie - it's her turn to play the star.
• Wah-Wah, starring Celia Imrie and directed by Richard E Grant, is released in cinemas on Friday.