Preview of Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure

How on Earth can Joanna Lumley be 77 years old? Astonishingly easy on the eye, she looks a good two decades younger than she is, and her beauty is far more than skin-deep. She radiates such an aura of positivity, enthusiasm and all-round good humour that being in her company feels rather like being bathed in sunlight. How does she do it?

“I feel it’s so important to make every single minute count,” she says, flashing that wonderful smile. “We all only have a certain time on this earth. The first 20 or so years are taken up with growing up, then there’s work and possibly raising a family. When you think about it, that doesn’t leave an awful lot of time left.

“That’s why you’ve got to get out there, be curious and also a bit brave. Explore and meet different kinds of people. It beggars belief what you end up discovering as a result and this can only enrich your life.

Joanna has an endless curiosity about her fellow human beings. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her famed TV travelogues – the most recent of which, Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure, was broadcast on ITV last month.

“During my travels around the world and also in this country, I have had the greatest good fortune to meet so many different kinds of people – all ages, races, religions, shapes, sizes and colours,” she enthuses. “The older I get, the more I realise we’re all exactly the same – and yet completely different.

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“The truth is that human beings are tribal. We’re born to think that our own lot – our own tribe – is better than anyone else’s. You still get this in football teams. Yet the kindness and courtesy of some of the people I’ve met has taken my breath away. We must get over the feeling that we are somehow different from others because they don’t look like us, live like us, behave like us…”

Joanna believes one way we can all overcome this tribalism is to pay closer attention to the strangers we meet. “When you talk to somebody, talk to them utterly. Concentrate on them utterly. Because then a five-minute conversation becomes fascinating no matter who you’re talking to.

“Everybody is like a jewel. The stories we’ve all got inside us – if you can find that, you can make people feel assured and then the oyster shell opens and out come the pearls. You should never ignore anyone. They have all got a story and are all just as valuable and as important as you are.”

Joanna suggests we also pay closer attention to our existing friends. “Take care of those you do know,” she says. “Make sure you understand. Make that phone call. Be consciously kind. Make a big effort to make things better. Every day, just a few tiny things, and the world will turn into a better place.

“As Eric Idle said, ‘Always look on the bright side of life’. Try to be happy, savour things.”

These life-lessons, if you will, are at the heart of a new short film Joanna is starring in called My Week With Maisy.

It tells the story of Mrs Foster, a retired, buttoned-up, somewhat bigoted and negative-minded lady who is embarking on
chemotherapy for cancer and is understandably anxious.

The last thing she wants is to share her treatment room with a sparkly, eternally optimistic, yet seriously ill child, Maisy Jones. But through their unexpected friendship, Maisy gives Mrs Foster much more than just a glimmer of hope.

At its core, the film also addresses the subject of that one inevitability in life: death.

“People are over sensitive about death,” Joanna muses. “In the old days, it was so familiar to us because people lived in houses where, horrifyingly, children died, grannies died, people died. Death was ever present all around. And now it’s something that only happens behind closed doors or in distant rooms and is always considered a great failure.

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I think we have become unrealistic about it and so we dress it up. There’s nothing odd about dying. Anyone alive will die. That’s the one surety about life. We should make it our friend. We just don’t want it to become a friend too soon, or for it to come with pain or for wrong reasons. Death doesn’t discriminate. Good or bad, it will come to all of us.”

The new film will be shown at up-and-coming film festivals but Joanna hopes it may, at some point, become available to those undergoing chemo. “I have obviously met people who have been through it – we all have,” she says.

“Very, very fortunately I haven’t experienced it myself but we are all surrounded by cancer. It’s everywhere. And the more we can learn about it, the more it’s talked about, the more we understand it.”

Born in India to a prosperous army family in May 1946, Joanna enjoyed a happy childhood with her parents, James and Thyra, and older sister, Aelene. At the “paralysingly young” age of eight, she was sent to boarding school in England.

“I especially loved my second boarding school, an Anglo-Catholic convent in the hills behind Hastings,” she once said. “The nuns wore blue stockings and were brainy and lovely. There were 70 boarders and I was happy as a clam.”

On leaving school, she applied for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but was unsuccessful. Instead she became a model in London during the swinging 1960s before moving into acting work. Early roles included a small, uncredited role in the film Some Girls Do, and then as a Bond Girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

She went on to play Elaine Perkins, one of Ken Barlow’s many girlfriends in Coronation Street, also appearing in other popular TV series such as Are You Being Served?, Steptoe and Son and The Protectors, as well as a Hammer horror flick called The Satanic Rites of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee.

But her big break came when she was cast as the staunchly feminist Purdey in The New Avengers in 1976 – a character who became so popular that women across the country were soon clamouring for the famous Purdey bob haircut.

Over the next decade or so, she was a regular on our screens, but it was in 1992 – as the chain-smoking, Bollinger-guzzling, free-loading Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous – that she cemented her place as a national treasure. “More people connect me to Patsy than I do myself,” she laughs, looking back on that unforgettable character.

“Sometimes people come up to me and say lines that are clearly from Ab Fab and I just don’t recall saying them. Any of them.”

Her latest role, as a cancer patient, couldn’t be further from Patsy.

“I’m sometimes asked how easy it is for me to play non-comedic roles – like Mrs Foster – when I am so associated with Patsy,” she adds.

“But it’s what we do as actors. Many, many actors who play serious and possibly tragic characters, have also played wildly funny people, too.

“Tragedy and comedy are actually very close together. There is no distinction. And never forget that all acting is based on the quality of the script, the quality of the writing. Without that, there’s nothing.”

Joanna’s next project is an eight-part thriller for Netflix called Fool Me Once, based on a 2016 novel of the same name by American writer Harlan Coben. It will be broadcast in January next year.

“We’ve been shooting since February and so it’s been eight months,” she explains. “I really had the chance to develop my character. We’re taking broad brush strokes rather than quick, nuanced sketch strokes like in My Week With Maisy.”

Regularly offered demanding acting roles, it looks as if our national treasure will be working well into her ninth decade – great news for her many fans.

So just what is her secret to still looking so good? She says a vegetarian diet over the last 40 years helps enormously, as does a tendency not to eat too much. Exercise has played its part, too.

“I don’t go to gyms, but I do rush about,” she says. “I never stay still for long and do stuff with vigour, such as housework, gardening and going up the stairs of my tall, thin house two at a time.”

Perhaps we should all be a bit more like Joanna Lumley.

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