At a stroke, playing Barbara Good – an apple-cheeked innocent in wellies – she won the hearts of a generation of British viewers, though Kendal says that, back then, she was unaware of her impact. “It didn’t register. Before that point, most pinups were incredibly gorgeous, and very obviously sexy: people like Julie Christie. That wasn’t me at all. So I didn’t take it seriously.” She remains convinced that the nation’s obsession with Barbara was fundamentally conservative. “I think people were actually responding to the strong marital love between Barbara and Tom,” she says. “Although, of course, at the same time, the two of them obviously fancied the pants off each other.”
She had never considered herself attractive. “When I started out, I was very conscious of not being gorgeous and of not being what I was expected to be. But then, having grown up in India, I always felt foreign anyway. It became a sort of joke to be cast as an English rose, because it was the complete opposite of what I was. But Barbara created this imprint of my personality.”
So much so that, during the 1980s, when she played, respectively, a sexually independent woman and a mistress in Solo and Mistress – two more daring sitcoms written for her by Carla Lane – the country was horrified. “I got so much flak. The reaction was, ‘Oh, my goodness, Barbara can’t be a mistress, you’re not that kind of person.’”
Except, rather like Barbara, Kendal has always been a carefully cultivated mixture of naughty and wholesome. While she takes great care over her appearance (and has admitted to using Botox in the past), she’s not waging war on the ageing process. She expresses horror at the celebrities, including older actresses, flaunting some rather extreme looks on the red carpet at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“Oh my God, it was ghastly,” she says. “It’s so anti-everything [I’d] want to be. But then, if you have built your career on the back of your image, what choice do you have? I fear for the younger generation today,” she continues, “what with their dependence on selfies and long lashes and filters. But if that’s your image now, then what are you going to do when you get older? Of course, it’s important that one likes the way you put yourself together in the morning, but it’s not a serious business.”
Perhaps this healthy reluctance to engage with her “image” is one of the reasons Kendal, a self-confessed “theatre snob”, never had much of a Hollywood career. “I was aware I didn’t fit the bill for film,” she says. “I went up for a lot of things I didn’t get. But I also didn’t want to try America in those early years because, by that point, I was divorced and had a child.” (She has one son with her first husband, Drewe Henley, whom she divorced in 1978; a second son with Rudman, and a number of grandchildren.)
She did star on the big screen opposite Rudolf Nureyev in Valentino, directed in 1977 by the British maverick Ken Russell. “Ken was completely off his nut. He had no idea about safety and I once nearly killed myself after falling off a horse. He had said, ‘Go as fast as you can’, and I was riding bareback while wearing barely anything, just a silky little thing. It was meant to be Nureyev on the horse, but Russell didn’t dare risk him. So he risked me instead.”