The hard-drinking, chain-smoking Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous once complained that an attempt to go teetotal was the “worst eight hours of my life”.
Dame Joanna Lumley’s character in the hit 1990s television comedy was so beloved by audiences that she later struggled to find a role which did not involve her holding a “cigarette and a glass of gin”.
“You get bored quickly as an actor, you don’t want to keep on doing the same thing”, she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
Lumley said that when she got her first break in 1976, playing Purdey in The New Avengers, she was immediately offered “a lot of short-haired policewomen” roles to play.
Lumley said her portrayal of Patsy in the 1990s sitcom made her a household name
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She took on the role of Patsy from 1992. “As you can imagine, it’s following me around wherever I go,” she said. “They say, I think she might have a cigarette and glass of gin … so most of my characters, frankly, drink quite a lot. Which is lovely.
“Most actors just like changing. Presenting a moving target, so you can’t be shot down. And also so you don’t bore yourself to death.”
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In conversation with the broadcaster Emma Freud at the festival, she told how her first meeting at the BBC with her co-star Jennifer Saunders did not go to plan. Lumley asked her agent to “get me out of this because I know she hates me and she’s too polite to say”, adding that Saunders looked like a “sphinx with a migraine”. She was only persuaded to continue because she thought Absolutely Fabulous would never actually get made.
Lumley described how, in an effort to make Saunders laugh, she gave Patsy a low, gravelly voice, with a hint of Mick Jagger, and created a back story in which she slept with all the rock groups. “Jennifer began to laugh and that was it.”
Lumley and Jennifer Saunders are pictured together, decades after creating the hit comedy Absolutely Fabulous
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Lumley, 79, was speaking to the audience about the release of A Book of Treasures, a collection compiled from her decades-long habit of documenting poems, writings and thoughts. She said she had wanted to dedicate her previous book, A Queen For All Seasons, to the late monarch but Buckingham Palace had refused.
“Her Majesty does not like having books dedicated,” she was told. Yet a sign of royal approval came a year later when Lumley was made a dame in the Queen’s last New Year’s Honours list.