‘THE THING I LOVE’
‘I’m one of the lucky ones, I think,” says Miriam Margolyes.
Luck has, in fact, played an unexpectedly oversized role in the English actress’ life. If a recruiting officer had not taken a bribe to stop her father being draft ed in World War I – the life expectancy of young officers in the trenches being about six weeks – or if her sports-averse GP father had not been working as a locum in London and bumped into her mother at a Jewish tennis club, or if her mother, who had two relatives who died in childbirth, had followed through on her wish not to have a child, Margolyes might not have been here at all.
All this is related in her fascinating, frequently scurrilous and often very funny autobiography. In fact, in another turn of odd fortune, This Much Is True would not have been written at all had it not been for Covid-19. If the actress, who turned 80 in May, hadn’t been confined to her house in Tuscany for eight months, she would never have got around to it.
“Absolutely right,” she says over a crackly Zoom call, her sentences complete, thoughts entire without pause or falter, each word enunciated like an elocution teacher. “Because it is a task – it’s not something that flows
