The Hewitson Profile: Felicity Kendal hesitates to give away her secrets

The ostensible reason for talking to Felicity Kendal – oh, of course you know who Felicity Kendal is – is that she is appearing in comedian Tom Sainsbury’s telly series Small Town Scandal, which is screening on Neon and Sky Comedy. She plays Sue, the deceptively dotty mother of the
hapless Toby, a disgraced hack who is sacked from his job on a shady Australian tabloid for writing a story about a pet-food company putting former pets into cans and selling them as pet food. Or something absurdly convoluted like that. None of which turned out to be true.

Toby returns to his small home town in New Zealand and moves in with his mother. His millionaire uncle is discovered dead, run over by one of the robotic motor mowers that made his fortune. Toby decides to investigate and turns his investigation into a podcast. It is a parody of true-crime podcasts and a love letter to the idiosyncrasies of small-town New Zealand.

Kendal didn’t actually come to New Zealand. I did wonder why I couldn’t find any mention of her slipping into the country unobserved. “Well, I did it really cleverly by not coming.” She read and liked the script and wanted to do it, but she was busy with other work and to come all that way for the three days required to shoot her role “wouldn’t have been sensible”. Her part was shot in the UK with other cast members travelling there.

She liked the writing, “funny and lovely”; she liked Sainsbury, who she met for the first time over Zoom, and she liked Sue. “She’s very lovely and scatty, adores her son but he drives her mad. It’s a lovely relationship between mother and son because it’s got all the frustrations of the character; he’s not exactly the image of a successful, perfect son. But they love each other and she’s full of life and positiveness and she’s just a lovely character to play.”

So, not too much of a stretch then. It must really be rather odd being Felicity Kendal. Think about it. She played Barbara Good, who was full of life and positiveness in the telly show The Good Life from 1975 until 1977. That accounts for two years of her acting career. She is 79 and has been acting since forever, and still is. She started acting as a child in India in the roving repertory theatre run by her father, Geoffrey Kendal. She first appeared on a stage at the age of nine months, as the changeling child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Kendal with The Good Life co-stars Richard Briers, Penelope Keith and Eddington in 1978. Photo / Getty Images

Yet to many people, including me, she will forever be Barbara, that perennially perky, sensibly sunshiny foil to her annoyingly hopeless husband Tom. He was always botching things up in the suburban backyard they had converted into a ramshackle mini farm, attempting to live a sustainable life. They had a goat called Geraldine, a pair of pigs and a rambunctious rooster called Lenin. They made wine out of pea pods. It is predictably and legendarily disgusting. “Yeah, I can’t imagine anything worse.”

Their snobby social-climbing neighbour Margo, played by Penelope Keith, looked upon these capers with tight-lipped horror. Margo wore floaty kaftans while plumping the cushions. Barbara wore denim. She became a dungaree-clad sex symbol. That is a tricky look to pull off. She might be the only actor who has ever achieved it. The British Film Institute’s entry reads that she was “the epitome of friendly suburban sexiness in her tight blue jeans”. Men and women loved her.

Even Margo, if reluctantly, loved her. I still love her. And what I really want her to tell me is how to look sexy in dungarees, because I have abjectly failed.

“Ha, ha, ha. You must wear a tight T and big dungarees and you’ll be fine. They’re lovely. I love dungarees. Nothing like a dungaree.”

She used to get a bit of Botox done, but “oh, long gone. When you get to my age, you don’t wear dungarees and you don’t do that sort of thing any more. I’m afraid you let gravity take its course.”

But still, she has been acting for more than 70 years, so you’d think she might find it a bit irksome always being asked about a character she played half a century ago.

She was once in a greengrocer buying carrots and somebody said: “Why are you buying carrots? Why don’t you go and pick some?” She thought it was funny. It is impossible, almost, to imagine her getting irked. Lynn Barber, the former profile writer for The Observer, once described her as having a sugar coating and that is about right. But a sugar coating exists for a purpose. It protects what is within. It is a tough coating.

Acting in TV’s The Good Life (right, with costar Paul Eddington) was just a tiny part of Felicity Kendal’s 70-year acting career. Photos / Getty Images

She’s a bit like the late Queen, really: she doesn’t complain and she is not very keen on explaining. Her private life, she told Barber, was kept “behind the blinds”. She can be crisp. When I spoke to her, she was appearing at London’s Hampstead Theatre in a revival of Indian Ink, that the playwright Tom Stoppard wrote for her. She played the poet Flora 30 years ago when it premiered.

I stupidly call Stoppard “her” Tom. She – yes, as crisply as a Granny Smith apple – says, “Well, he’s not my Tom. He was happily married for 15 years.”

Oh. I was under the impression Stoppard was the love of her life. “You mustn’t believe what you read in the papers.” She was married to actor Drewe Henley from 1968 until 1979. She married Michael Rudman in 1983, they divorced in 1990, then reunited in 1998 but never bothered remarrying. He died in 2023, and he was the love of her life, she says. She has two grown-up sons, one with Henley and the other with Rudman. She seems to have been with Stoppard from 1991 until 1998. She has said she can’t talk about him and he can’t talk about her. They had a pact not to. Other than this blinds are firmly down so any attempt at unravelling her quite complicated love life would be futile. Stoppard died last year.

Anyway, the revival has had brilliant reviews and all performances were sold out. She hasn’t read the reviews. “I used to and now I just think I will tomorrow. So, I’ve just put it off in the end. You sort of get the gist of it. If they’re not good, people will tell you.” Aren’t people kind. “Oh yes, they are. Actually, you know, having lived a few years, I’ve realised that two of the most surprising things to me are, one, how incredibly kind people are and, two, how incredibly unkind they are. And you just, if you’re lucky, don’t stick around the unkind ones. Don’t stick around the unkind ones. That’s my advice to anyone.”

She is kind, we all know that. She has a kind face and calls people, including me, darling, although that might possibly be because she has forgotten my name. Also, Barbara was kind, so Felicity must be. “I’m definitely kind. I mean, I would say I think it’s a fundamental thing. I think you will reap what you sow, that’s for sure.”

Smelling the Roses

She was raised a Catholic, but converted to Judaism in her 30s. What it means to her daily life is “almost like saying, ‘What does it mean to have a head of hair?’ It’s part of who I am. It isn’t a separate part of me now.”

I wondered what her relationship with her public profile is because it must, at times, get a bit tedious being portrayed as that nice Felicity Kendal. And nobody is nice all of the time, surely. People, as in journalists, do tend to gush over her. She is not a gusher. She is certainly not an over-sharer.

She said, ‘Well, I don’t do social media at all. I never have and I never will, so I don’t have that kind of public profile, which a lot of people do. So it’s very much, I guess, my working self, which includes giving interviews and talking about my work. And then there’s me at home doing my thing and reading and being with family and going on holiday and taking the dog for a walk, and they’re both legitimate but they don’t cross over exactly. I don’t send things of me baking a cake or pictures of my wonderful family on Christmas Eve. It’s entirely my business. I have a work side, which I will share, and then I have another side, which I have no intention of sharing.”

Good lives (from left) with husband Michael Rudman, Julie Walters in 2013, Tom Stoppard in 2012 and son Jacob Rudman in 2015. Photos / Getty Images

She once said that her life, “apart from the tragedies, is fucking marvellous”. She says now: “That’s about right, yeah. Tragedies are things that are seriously, seriously, unavoidable painful. And I think they must be taken seriously. But I also think that being alive and having a choice is also to be cherished. And I think, as many, many wise people have said, you know, get up and smell the roses. Don’t get up and think how mean and nasty people are to you … And my bottle of vodka is always full. I am not a half-empty person.”

Her tragedies undoubtedly include the death of her sister, actor Jennifer Kendal, in 1984, aged 51, and the death of Rudman. But she doesn’t bang on about things. She’s too busy smelling those roses.

It would be tempting to paint her as an eternal optimist. But that would make her a Pollyanna, and nobody really likes Polly­annas, do they? They’re just cloyingly annoying. I would say what she actually is is a pragmatist, in that peculiarly old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip British way. She is of a generation whose parents told their progeny things are definitely not fair. “Don’t tell me that things are fair. They’re not fair. Get used to it. Make the most of things and get on. Don’t be negative if you can be positive, because there’s enough pain you can do nothing about.”

She sounds terribly posh. “No, not remotely. I think people maybe think I’m posh. I play posh people. But that’s a total misconception. I’m very working class. It’s pretending. You pretend to be somebody you’re not. And I guess the definition of success is the people believe you.”

She lives in London’s Chelsea in a very nice house. I saw a picture of her reclining on a couch, which looked a bit posh in a comfy and welcoming way. She manages to do sexy in a low-key sort of way, and somehow, I don’t know, Barbara-ishly. In the picture she is wearing sensible white sneakers, tightly laced. She is speaking to me from her dressing room that she shares with the other two actors in the Hampstead Theatre. She does two shows a day and in between shows, “we lie underneath the dressing table and have a nap on our yoga mats. It’s the very opposite of glamorous.”

She likes to walk her dog, Rufus, who barks at strangers, “which I have to attend to soon”. She would make a good dog trainer. She’d be firm but fair and would, if you were a dog, give you a treat if you behaved nicely.

She is nice. Like sugar and spice. Perhaps, actually, more spice than sugar. She’s good at swearing. She can be tart. All of which amounts to her charm, which is considerable. But one must not gush.

Small Town Scandal is screening now on SkyComedy and Neon.

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