Miriam Margoyles
About
Biography
Filmography
Notes
Made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the New Year's Eve honors, December 2001.
"An actress's greatest asset is her availability." --Miriam Margolyes to The Boston Globe, August 30, 1999.
Biography
A British character actress, Margolyes has performed primarily on the stage and radio, generally in eccentric comedy roles. After studies at Cambridge, she began acting in radio with the BBC. Over the next decade Margolyes' ripe delivery could be heard everywhere in radio spots and TV commercial voiceovers, including a stint as a seductive rabbit plugging Cadbury's Carmel Bunny candy and as a charwoman chimp for a tea ad. Margolyes did not act regularly in film until the mid-1970s, and for a time most of her roles were in little-seen British films including "The Battle of Billy's Pond" (1976), "On a Paving Stone Mounted" (1978) and the experimental "Crystal Gazing" (1982), or small parts in the US-made "Yentl" (1983) and "Little Shop of Horrors" (1986). She gained critical and public attention with her performance as flirtatious spinster Flora Finching in the two-part film adaptation of Charles Dickens' "Little Dorrit" (1988). She followed with an amusing turn as Kevin Kline's outraged mother in the black comedy "I Love You to Death" (1990), a highly successful one-woman touring show, "Woomen, Lovely Woomen" (1991), spotlighting Dickensian females, and a sitcom, "Frannie's Turn" (1992). Margolyes received her greatest popular acclaim as the elderly, sharp-tongued Mrs. Mingott, the primary source of comic relief in "The Age of Innocence" (1993). The widely expected Oscar nomination for Margolyes' work as Mrs. Mingott surprisingly did not appear, but the actress continued in prominent roles in ambitious films like "Immortal Beloved" (1994). Voiceover work kept her busy as well, her most popular effort in this vein being Fly, the maternal but pragmatic dog who learns about not compromising one's dreams from a pig named "Babe" (1995). She returned for the sequel, "Babe: Pig in the City" (1998) and also lent her voice to the Matchmaker of "Mulan" (1998). Margolyes continued to work frequently, appearing in mainstream films such as "Magnolia" (1999) and "End of Days" (1999), but it was in 2002 that she nabbed the role that would make her a star, at least among juvenile moviegoers: Professor Sprout, the delightful proponent of mandrake in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." The actress continued to work in a variety of projects, most notably playing one of the circle surrounding the aging theater diva (Annette Bening) in "Being Julia" (2004) and actor Peter Sellers' frighteningly ambitious mother in the HBO biopic "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" (2004).
Filmography
Cast (Feature Film)
Special Thanks (Feature Film)
Cast (Special)
Cast (TV Mini-Series)
Life Events
1963
Got a job after graduating from college with the BBC's radio repertory company (date approximate)
1969
Made feature film debut in a small role in "A Nice Girl Like Me"
1980
Made first American films, "The Apple" and "The Awakening"
1987
First major appearance on US TV, in a three-part adaptation of "The Little Princess", which aired on PBS
1991
Starred in the one-woman show, "Woomen, Lovely Woomen", onstage in London's West End; played a variety of female characters from the works of Charles Dickens; later took the show on tour internationally
1992
American TV series debut: starred in the title role of Frannie Escobar in the short-lived CBS sitcom, "Frannie's Turn"
1993
First starring role onstage in a major play, as Mrs. Hardcastle in Sir Peter Hall's staging of Oliver Goldsmith's classic 18th century Restoration farce, "She Stoops to Conquer"
1995
Provided the voice of Fly, the sheepdog who serves as surrogate mother to the title piglet in the Oscar-nominated "Babe"
1996
Played the Nurse in Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation of "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet"
1996
Was one of the voices on the soundtrack for the award-winning documentary "The Long Way Home"
1998
Reprised Fly for the sequel "Babe: Pig in the City"
1999
Cast as the original matriarch of a Hungarian-Jewish family in Istvan Szabo's "Sunshine"
1999
Returned to the London stage to star as Ranyevskaya in "The Cherry Orchard"
2000
Co-starred with Stacy Keach and Jeffrey Jones in the L.A. premiere of "Another Time"
2001
Appeared in the London staging of "The Vagina Monologues"
2002
Played Professor Sprout in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets"
2004
Cast in "Being Julia," based on the novel "Theatre," by W. Somerset Maugham
2004
Co-starred as Peg Sellers in "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" with Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron
2005
Cast in "Modigliani," a story of Amedeo Modigliani's bitter rivalry with Pablo Picasso
2006
Cast in the Australian-produced computer-animated film, "Happy Feet"
Videos
Trailer
Family
Bibliography
Notes
Made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the New Year's Eve honors, December 2001.
"An actress's greatest asset is her availability." --Miriam Margolyes to The Boston Globe, August 30, 1999.
"For me, the voice is the way into a character. Other actors may start from the shoes or the walk. I love listening to people talk, and I particularly like combination accents--a Jewish Scots accent, for example. Maybe that is the voice from my grandparents, who were Russian, Polish and German." --Miriam Margoyles quoted in The Boston Globe, August 30, 1999.
"I'm in the autumn of my life and I do feel it. I hear time's winged chariot and I have this feeling that I will suddenly drop dead. An overweight woman can't expect a long life, and I am physically like my mother. She was a huge personality, overweight and hyperactive, and she died in 1974 after being paralysed by a stroke for seven years, unable to move or speak. I swim and walk and try not to eat too much cheese but probably won't survive very long." --Margolyes quoted in the London Times, September 17, 1999.
"I'm a feminist but not a boring one. Hating men is as absurd as hating children or hating butter." --Margolyes to the London Times, September 17, 1999.
"Darling, I loathed the Pythons at the time and they loathed me. I've met Eric [Idle] and John [Cleese] since then, and they are perfectly pleasant people. I think they thought I was repellent, too--and I probably was. I was an arrogant young person and I knew I was as talented as they were and I wasn't going to give an inch."The person I really didn't like was Graham Chapman but that could have been because he was a very tortured and unhappy person. I didn't get on with him at all. I was asked to attend his memorial service in L.A., and I didn't because I thought it would be hypocritical. I thought, no, don't do that, that's sentimental and not truthful."Look, there isn't a person in the world, from Glenn CLose onwards, who doesn't feel they deserved a better career. But I do think the people who ran light entertainment when my generation were forming our career had an extraordinarily narrow view of what women could do."--From the London Times, September 17. 1999.
Margolyes was named Britain's "best radio actress" for performing the roles of the entire Royal Family in a radio presentation of "Queen and I" by Sue Townsend, in which the English rulers cope with life in a housing project (1992).
She was elected three times to the governing council of British Actors Equity.
