{"id":599978,"date":"2026-05-23T15:28:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T15:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/599978\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T15:28:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T15:28:19","slug":"felicity-kendal-interview-youre-no-longer-allowed-to-tell-someone-they-look-yummy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/599978\/","title":{"rendered":"Felicity Kendal interview: \u2018You\u2019re no longer allowed to tell someone they look yummy\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a stroke, playing Barbara Good \u2013 an apple-cheeked innocent in wellies \u2013 she won the hearts of a generation of British viewers, though Kendal says that, back then, she was unaware of her impact. \u201cIt didn\u2019t register. Before that point, most pinups were incredibly gorgeous, and very obviously sexy: people like Julie Christie. That wasn\u2019t me at all. So I didn\u2019t take it seriously.\u201d She remains convinced that the nation\u2019s obsession with Barbara was fundamentally conservative. \u201cI think people were actually responding to the strong marital love between Barbara and Tom,\u201d she says. \u201cAlthough, of course, at the same time, the two of them obviously fancied the pants off each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

She had never considered herself attractive. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much so that, during the 1980s, when she played, respectively, a sexually independent woman and a mistress in Solo and Mistress \u2013 two more daring sitcoms written for her by Carla Lane \u2013 the country was horrified. \u201cI got so much flak. The reaction was, \u2018Oh, my goodness, Barbara can\u2019t be a mistress, you\u2019re not that kind of person.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s not waging war on the ageing process. She expresses horror at the celebrities<\/a>, including older actresses, flaunting some rather extreme looks on the red carpet at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh my God, it was ghastly,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s so anti-everything [I\u2019d] 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,\u201d she continues, \u201cwhat with their dependence on selfies and long lashes and filters. But if that\u2019s your image now, then what are you going to do when you get older? Of course, it\u2019s important that one likes the way you put yourself together in the morning, but it\u2019s not a serious business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps this healthy reluctance to engage with her \u201cimage\u201d is one of the reasons Kendal, a self-confessed \u201ctheatre snob\u201d, never had much of a Hollywood career. \u201cI was aware I didn\u2019t fit the bill for film,\u201d she says. \u201cI went up for a lot of things I didn\u2019t get. But I also didn\u2019t want to try America in those early years because, by that point, I was divorced and had a child.\u201d (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.)<\/p>\n

She did star on the big screen opposite Rudolf Nureyev in Valentino, directed in 1977 by the British maverick Ken Russell. \u201cKen 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, \u2018Go as fast as you can\u2019, 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\u2019t dare risk him. So he risked me instead.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a stroke, playing Barbara Good \u2013 an apple-cheeked innocent in wellies \u2013 she won the hearts of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[299,43822,50953,6491,5343,96,204812,204811,5438,1598,7448,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-599978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-anti-semitism","tag-assisted-dying","tag-barbican","tag-celebrities","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-hampstead-theatre","tag-harold-pinter","tag-standard","tag-strictly-come-dancing","tag-theatre","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}