She impaled ministers with a stare as cold as Medusa’s. One moment they
quailed under the lash of her tongue, the next her charm reduced them to
squirming puppies. For a glorious few days last week, Joanna Lumley was
transformed from good egg to warrior queen as she sowed blind panic in
Downing Street.
We have not previously seen this kukri-wielding aspect of the 63-year-old
actress, best known as a haircut on legs in the 1970s series The New
Avengers and as an ageing alcoholic slag in Absolutely Fabulous. Riding a
wave of popular support and her own righteous anger, Lumley’s campaign to
obtain justice for retired Gurkhas has projected her onto a public stage
which she has made her own.
Being a trouper, Lumley might quote Winston Churchill’s line that he had the
luck to give the lion its roar. But from whence does her unflinching courage
spring? In 2007 she confronted a man with a gun in a Sheffield bar, telling
him in that hushed, plummy voice: “I do hope you’re not going to use it. Are
you in some sort of trouble? Can I do anything to help?” Naturally, he
waited until the police arrived.
As a friend of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, Lumley is not
intimidated by authority. Gyles Brandreth, the author and former Tory MP,
has known Lumley for 40 years and introduced her to Prince Philip at a lunch
held on the prince’s 70th birthday.
“In common with Prince Philip, she has a quality of questing intelligence and
a desire to get things done,” he said. “Whatever cause she takes up, she is
fearless, intelligent and has staying power. None of the week’s events are a
surprise to those who know her.”
Lumley’s doughty mix of elegance and determination is often attributed to her
upbringing as a daughter of the British Raj. Much has been written about her
family’s connections with India, where she was born, but she left the
country at too young an age to remember much. The three most formative years
of her youth, she has said, were spent in an equally exotic, but more
dangerous, corner of the Empire – Malaya.
The Malayan “emergency”, as it was euphemistically called, was a vicious war
of independence waged by Chinese communist terrorists against colonial rule.
Lumley was keenly aware of the perils of this conflict, witnessing her
father, Major James Lumley, disappearing for months into the jungle with his
Gurkha troops and returning much thinner, with a long beard.
Every day military vehicles would deliver Lumley and other pupils to the army
school in Kuala Lumpur. “Many of the teachers were officers’ wives, so the
standard of education was pretty low,” a contemporary recalled. “Joanna was
incredibly beautiful, and had this butter-gold hair that seemed to add to
her aura. All of us boys were smitten.”
She grew used to travelling outside the capital in armoured convoys, for beach
holidays at Port Dickson or the cool hill stations at the Cameron Highlands
and Fraser’s Hill, where the sight of cows and log fires was a novelty.
Her father became aide-de-camp to General Sir Gerald Templer, the British high
commissioner, described by some as a martinet, whose tactics were
acknowledged as a model for counterinsurgency. Joanna Lumley therefore had a
ringside seat at what became known as a rehearsal for the Vietnam war.
The colourful festivals of Malays, Chinese, Indians and Tamils became
indelible memories: “The beautiful stuccoed houses . . . heat and storms and
vivid flowers and sounds. You always spoke of England as ‘home’ even if
you’d never been there.”
The experience left her with the feeling that “the world was out there to be
conquered”. Yet all the world required of her as a young actress in the
1960s was to be a dolly bird prepared to “take your kit off”. She recalled
in her 2004 memoirs No Room for Secrets: “The threat was that you weren’t a
proper actress if you didn’t get your tits out.”
Even after she had become a national icon as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, and
was happily installed at her elegant south London home with her husband,
Steven Barlow, the conductor, she evidently hankered for adventure. Hence,
perhaps, the Bhutan journey she made in the footsteps of her grandparents
for the television film In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, her assignment
as a “Robinson Crusoe” on a tropical island where she eschewed make-up and
made shoes out of her bra, and her BBC travelogue to see the northern lights
in Norway last year.
She championed a garden bridge across the Thames as a memorial to Princess
Diana, only to be stymied by those lobbying for the unloved water feature in
Hyde Park. She has espoused the cause of a free Tibet and human rights in
Burma, supported mental health charities and travelled abroad for Comic
Relief to promote Sight Savers International.
To her friends, she is the same warm, jolly, head-girlish soul she has always
been, talking a mile a minute with a dizzying and infectious enthusiasm.
She was born on May 1, 1946, in Srinagar, Kashmir, where her father was
serving in the 6th Gurkha Rifles. In 1944 his life was saved by one of his
men, Tul Bahadur Pun, who accompanied Lumley to Downing Street last week.
Lumley’s mother, Thya Rose, was a keen mountain walker who taught Joanna “how
to deal with snakes”. Four previous generations of Lumleys had served in
India, including her great-grandfather, James Lumley, who fought in the
second Mahratta war under Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington.
After Malaya, Lumley lived for a spell in Hong Kong, and then at the age of
nine went “home” to an alien England, which seemed “strange and cold and
pale and misty”. Lumley and her older sister, Aelene, went to St Mary’s, an
Anglican convent boarding school near Hastings, where she was the classroom
clown, dreaming of the stage. She was a bright girl, but left at 17 with
only one A-level. “I didn’t want to go on being at school. I wanted to be
the kind of grown-up who was in films like Brigitte Bardot, driving round in
cars with the top down.”
In 1964 she walked into the Bond Street headquarters of the Lucie Clayton
modelling agency. “We learnt how to get in and out of E-type Jaguars with
our knees together, so no one could see our knickers.” It was not much help,
but it led to sporadic modelling work until an assignment for Queen magazine
catapulted her into the league of most-booked models in the post-Jean
Shrimpton era.
Finding the work boring and shallow, she pined to be an actress: “I spent my
money watching Jill Bennett, Vanessa Redgrave, [Laurence] Olivier in The
Master Builder. That was what I had to be, something to do with that world.”
A different drama lay in wait. In 1966 she began an affair with Michael
Claydon, a 26-year-old photographer’s assistant. Believing she was infertile
and that she did not need to take contraceptive precautions, the following
year she found she was six months pregnant. However, by the time her son,
Jamie, was born, her affair with Claydon was long over, and at 21 she faced
the stigma and work problems of unmarried motherhood.
“I lay on my bed and cried my eyes out some days,” she recalled. “I had to pay
the gas bills. I couldn’t think how to crack the carapace. Then the Chinese
panel moves and you’re in a different world.”
Although turned down by Rada and despite having no acting experience, she was
cast as one of 12 starlets in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service in 1969.
The following year she was married. Jeremy Lloyd was an actor specialising in
upper-class twits who had progressed to scripting Rowan and Martin’s
Laugh-In, a hit television show in America. “He could charm the eagles off
crags,” Lumley said. Their marriage lasted six months: Lloyd was granted a
divorce on the invented grounds of Lumley’s incapacity to consummate
the marriage.
Meanwhile, Lumley’s acting career limped on. By 1975 she had appeared in an
episode of Steptoe and Son and played Peter Cushing’s granddaughter in The
Satanic Rites of Dracula, among other roles, before her next break arrived.
As Purdey, the long-legged sidekick of Patrick Macnee’s John Steed in The
New Avengers, Lumley set a fashion for pudding-basin hairdos and won an army
of male fans.
An affair with Rod Stewart, the rasping singer, lasted two months.
Her worries about Jamie’s upkeep abated during the six series of Sapphire and
Steel, in which she played opposite David McCallum, but a succession of bit
parts in Pink Panther films, the screen hit Shirley Valentine and the
Lovejoy television series followed until she struck gold with Absolutely
Fabulous in 1992.
Her character of Patsy, the beehive-haired, chain-smoking fashion monster,
revealed comic talents few had guessed at. The rest is history: Lumley is
acknowledged as a serious actress, widely praised for her performance as
Madam Ranevskaya in Jonathan Miller’s 2007 production of The Cherry Orchard.
“Joanna Lumley for prime minister,” declare the blog sites. She would not turn
down the post of transport minister – “I want to reopen every goddamn
railway station.” Or education secretary – “so that I can make every
state-run school in the country as good as Eton”. But prime minister? “No, I
think we need a bloke.” Men don’t want to be led by women, she thinks. Mind
you, “they don’t mind being spanked by them”. Oh, Joanna.
