ON SCREEN

A right royal time for Brit actress Samantha Bond

Star of 'Downton Abbey' plays title role in Sue Townsend's 'The Queen and I' on TV


Samantha Bond talks to Eleanor Steafel about being a reluctant sex symbol, and her joy at stepping into the Queen’s shoes
Samantha Bond is pacing primly up and down the library of the Covent Garden Hotel as a fire roars and someone pours tea from a china teapot.
Though incredibly well put-together herself, she is emulating someone rather more regal: Her Majesty, whose gait she has perfected during filming for a new adaptation of The Queen and I, by Sue Townsend on Sky One.
Her imitation began with “the handbag”, Bond explains, which always leaves “your arms in a particular position; and then there’s her stance, which is very, very different from mine, and her walk is very different.
“The Queen, who has to stand for hours on end, has her feet below her hips so that her weight is evenly balanced between her two supports. She also walks with her toes facing forwards. She’s ramrod straight."
Other than a brief bit of training on how to get the voice (“unlike any other”) and rewatching a few episodes of The Crown (“any excuse, I’m missing it so much”), the cast decided that they wouldn’t attempt impersonations in their portrayal of the most famous family in Britain.
In Townsend’s wonderfully funny tale, they are dethroned and sent to live in a council house on Hellebore Close in the North of England. It could come across as less than complimentary, but those who have read the novel, know it is anything but.
It is in fact gentle and sharp in equal measure, with the real baddies being the useless politicians (led by David Walliams, brilliant as a sort of camp, dastardly Jeremy Corbyn) intent on getting rid of the Windsors and selling off all the royal palaces.
It fills you with fondness for them all, says Bond, who found the experience “very heart-warming, funny, incredibly moving. I have previously played the Queen, and each time one approaches a portrayal of her, it does fill me with enormous affection.”
Bond, 57, is one of those actors you feel almost certain you have met before, so constant has her presence been.
Whether you know her as Lady Rosamund in Downton Abbey, Auntie Angela in Outnumbered, Frances Barden in Home Fires, or Moneypenny to Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond, she seems never to have been out of work.
That doesn’t mean, she says, that it hasn’t felt like an uphill battle at times.
“I honestly don’t think there’s a moment when you think it’s easy, and immense luck does come into it.”
Her “huge break” came in 1986, when she played Juliet opposite Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo.
“That shifted everything,” she recalls. “Then Ken and I did Much Ado [in 1988]“, after which she married, had her first child and went on to star in As You Like It in Stratford-upon-Avon.
It was during Romeo and Juliet, incidentally, that Branagh stuck his tongue in her mouth during the death scene. As she lay there, a recently deceased Juliet, Branagh went to kiss her.
“I’m being a corpse at that point. He thought it would be funny. He put his tongue in my mouth, so I bit it. And then he had to die.”
That must have been awkward, I venture.
“Well it was awkward, it was a matinee,” she deadpans.
I suggest it might even be considered a MeToo moment now.
“Yes it probably would, I don’t know. Hopefully we have still retained our humour,” she replies.
If a situation like that happened to her daughter, Bond acknowledges, “she would probably have hit him. But in my day, you didn’t”.
“I think the last two or three years have been incredibly important in terms of changing how everyone thinks. The feeling, certainly across the youngsters, is that everything has shifted in terms of what you may or may not do,” she says.
Both her children (Molly, 27, and Tom, 26) with actor husband, Alexander Hanson, have followed their parents into the business, which isn’t remotely a surprise, she says.
“I did exactly the same. I was raised by an actor father and a mother who had been an actress and then became a television producer. So I grew up in a house which was filled with actors, laughter, funny stories, occasional singing. My children have, too.
"It would be different if they weren’t very good, but they are – proud Mummy – but it is a bit like going into the family business.”
It’s much harder for the younger generation to find good work, she says.
“And I’m afraid it still remains harder for the young women than the young men. My daughter is finding it much harder than her little brother. There just aren’t as many roles for women.
“There needs to be an active stance,” she suggests.
“In the same way that the BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] movement has happened, there needs to be an active movement to make it more equal.”
It would help, of course, if there were simply more interesting roles for women across the board.
“I’ve never understood why the stories of middle-aged women are not being told,” she says, incredulous.
“When you hit middle age, you’re dealing with parental illness, your own illness, friends with cancer, Alzheimer’s, you’ve got problem children, you’ve got anorexia, you’ve got divorce ... And all those things, every middle-aged woman will have seen, if not had her own experience of them.”
The BBC’s latest attempt at a portrayal of mid-life marriage in Wanderlust didn’t go down well in the Bond-Hanson household.
“I wanted to go ‘oh, really?’ Maybe naively, I don’t believe that many people live like that,” she says of the drama, which starred Toni Collette and followed a couple looking outside of their marriage in order to reignite the spark between them – a strategy she describes as “damaging”.
Bond wonders whether she is “becoming a bit prudish” and is aghast at my suggestion that she was once something of a sex symbol in her Moneypenny days.
“No!” she remonstrates. “Sex symbol? I’ve always thought of myself as a character actor.”
She considers herself as having “survived the slightly poisoned chalice” of that particular role, but says she had a wonderful time.
Downton has been a more recent juggernaut, but fans of the drama will be bereft to learn that Bond will not be appearing in 2019’s hotly anticipated film.
“It’s fine,” she says. “The executive producer rang me more than a year ago to let me know. He said you can be in it, but you’ll have nothing to do. Julian [Fellowes] can’t write storylines for 19 leading players.
“I hope it’s lovely,” she adds.
Bond refuses to voice aloud the dream roles she hopes might one day come her way, for fear of jinxing them.
All she knows for sure is that she’ll never give up acting, and won’t subscribe to the idea she’ll have to work hard to stay looking youthful (her figure, maddeningly, would be the envy of most 25-year-olds).
“I don’t do anything. I walk fast, that’s the only thing I do, it drives everyone mad.”
She is unimpressed by surgery – “I don’t like needles” – and, given that she is approaching 60, “I don’t think there’s any point me suddenly looking like a 45-year-old.”
Not least because “I can’t bang on about there being no parts for middle-aged women if I stop looking like one. And this is what 57-year-old women look like.” – The Sunday Telegraph

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