Bridget Jones actress Gemma Jones:
Pamela is still being irritating, loveable and ghastly
Simon Button | The Sunday Express – November 29, 2015
With a 50-year acting career behind her, life never seems to slow down for
leading lady Gemma Jones.
Gemma Jones seems to be everywhere these days with the TV drama
Unforgotten, a new film Radiator and
a new TV drama Capital – as
well as finishing filming on the third Bridget Jones movie. She agrees.
“But it’s not by design. It’s just the way it’s fallen.”
She can’t say much about Bridget Jones’s Baby. “Otherwise I’ll be dismembered,”
chuckles the actress who plays Bridget’s scatty mum Pamela. “But
Pamela is still being irritating, entertaining, loveable and ghastly in
equal measures.”
In Radiator, Gemma plays Maria,
a woman caring for her ailing husband in their cluttered Cumbrian home.
The shoot took place in the wild remote location of Mosedale. “We stayed
nearby so I could walk to work and we had lovely caterers in the church
hall.
It was such a lovely script and it seemed very real and touching. It’s
about handing on the baton to the next generation and I’m at an age now
where I should be thinking about all that, but I just put my head in my
hands and pretend it’s not happening.”
Gemma, 72, needn’t worry about that just yet. She describes herself as
fighting fit, saying, “Walking is my hobby and I’m lucky that I live
right on the edge of Hampstead Heath.”
She’s also a volunteer gardener, aka a Heath Hand, and tends her
allotment. “I live a strangely double life. I’m happiest in the open,
pottering around and walking, but then there’s the other side of my life
where I have to occasionally smarten myself up.”
In Radiator, we see the actress
playing the piano but that’s filming trickery, as Gemma explains.
“I had lessons as a young girl but I didn’t practise enough. My father
would play pieces for me and I’d pick them up by ear, then when I went
back to the teacher, she’d undo all the fingering and I was too lazy to
learn it properly.” She regrets that now.
“But maybe there’ll be time when the work dries up.”
There’s not much likelihood of that happening. The current raft of work
(she recently popped up on Doc Martin, too) shows she’s still very much
in demand and she’s thrilled with all the great feedback about Radiator
but saddened by the loss of her co-star Richard Johnson, who died from
cancer. “Richard was fighting fit when we made it,” Gemma says, her
eyes misting over.
“He was playing decrepit but he wasn’t decrepit at all. His death was
a great shock but he’d seen the film and he was so proud of it.”
Gemma herself is proud of her work in Capital,
the new BBC drama starring Toby Jones and Lesley Sharp about residents of
a gentrified London street who find themselves the target of a hate
campaign. She plays a pensioner named Petunia, who is suffering from a
brain tumour, but she was reluctant to say yes to it at first. “I’d
said to my agent, ‘Please, no more old ladies,’” she laughs, “but
it was so well written.”
Playing Petunia was great fun because “she’s feisty and gritty and
funny and determined not to be downtrodden”, and Jones has an amusing
take on why she’s often asked to play older, dottier women. “I think
it’s partly because I haven’t been too vain about playing older than
my actual age. I don’t colour my hair and I look like the back end
of a bus so I get asked to play old people.”
Stepping into the expensive shoes of Bridget’s posh mum Pamela is
therefore a treat for the actress. “They glammed me up the other day and
made me look really good, which I was pleased about. I love playing her
because she’s game and sassy and slightly batty and lighthearted.”
And why does she think audiences are so enamoured of Bridget herself? “I
think it’s for all the non-PC reasons. Young women are still looking for
a prince on a white charger to come over the hill or for Mr Rochester to
appear. We all pretend we’re right-on feminists but underneath that
there’s still the bedrock of romance.”
She’s a big fan of Texan Renée Zellweger and her flawless Sloane Ranger
enunciations. “She’s absolutely delightful and she does this amazing
accent, both on and off set. Very occasionally I hear her speaking in her
own Texan accent and it always surprises me.” As for the 46 year old’s
somewhat altered appearance, all Gemma has to say is: “She’s 10 years
older than when we did the first film and I think she’s looking
lovely.”
Pamela Jones is the role Gemma is most recognised for – that and the
strict Madam Poppy Pomfrey in the Harry Potter franchise. “I didn’t have a huge role,” she says
of her three-film tenure, “but it was so popular and I still get lots of
nice fan mail from kids about it.”
As for working on such huge productions, she adds, “There was an awful
lot of hanging about because the children had to be schooled but there was
a lovely camaraderie amongst the actors. We’d all congregate in each
other’s caravans in between takes.”
Pamela and Poppy aside, she doesn’t feel she’s been too pigeonholed
during a 50-year career that started with The Cherry Orchard on stage in 1965 and has since taken in
Shakespeare and Austen, The Duchess
Of Duke Street, Last Tango In
Halifax and even the Jackie Chan action comedy Shanghai Knights.
“I’m lucky because I haven’t been too typecast. I’ve played such a
variety of roles.”
Her mother Irene was a housewife and her father was the actor Griffith
Jones. “So it didn’t seem like an unusual way of earning a living,”
says Gemma, whose brother Nicholas is also in the business. “Also I
wasn’t remotely academic. I was very good at showing off in the
playground and apparently I did a very good Elvis Presley imitation.”
Did she consider other careers? “Only an air hostess or a nun,” she
laughs, adding that the first time she got on a plane was when she went to
France to work as an au pair for a year. “I got on the plane at age 17
having never flown before and gosh, it was a bit scary,” she recalls.
After returning to England she enrolled at RADA. “And I felt like I’d
come home,” says the actress. She holds the distinction of being the
first person ever to die on Inspector Morse. “I think I saw it not so
long ago and I didn’t understand it,” she says of the episode first
broadcast in 1987. “I played a slightly enigmatic love interest for
Morse and I hanged myself. I think you saw my feet dangling at some point
but why I hanged myself I couldn’t quite figure out.”
She also tested for the lead role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman but
the part eventually went to Meryl Streep. But there were no sour grapes.
“I’d have loved to have done that, but I thought it was a lovely film
and I’m a huge fan of Meryl’s.”
What are her career highlights? “They’re not necessarily the jobs that
have attracted the most attention,” Gemma says, citing a turn as Sally
Bowles in Cabaret in Sheffield
and a play called The Mystery Of The
Rose Bouquet at the Donmar Warehouse. “I’ve enjoyed doing anything
that’s pushed my boundaries.”
She has a best supporting actress BAFTA for the 2014 TV film Marvellous
and fond memories of touring in Richard
III with Kevin Spacey in 2011. The tour took her everywhere from
Epidaurus to New York via Naples and Sydney.
“We were a jolly troop and it was a big success,” Gemma recalls,
although she was in a minor accident in a taxi in Hong Kong. When the taxi
bumped into another vehicle she put her hand out to brace herself and tore
a ligament. She missed a week then came back with her hand in plaster.
“But fortunately I was playing an old hag who was wearing gloves.”
Playing old hags is, she laughs, probably the natural order of things.
“You stop being the girlfriend, you stop being whistled at in the
street, you stop being chatted up…” Is she talking about the career or
real life? “Well, both,” she laughs again.
Her greatest pleasure is getting out and about in the countryside. That
and being a grandmother to her son Luke’s one-year-old toddler. Luke,
40, is Gemma’s son from a long-term relationship with the late director
Sebastian Graham-Jones, and he’s an LA-based film producer.
“I’m going over there for Christmas, which I’m really looking
forward to,” says Gemma, who doesn’t see her son and grandson as much
as she’d like. “But I’m in contact with them all the time on
FaceTime, which is a godsend. I’m a complete technophobe but I’ve
managed to work it out and it’s made such a difference that I can see
them and talk to them at the click of a button.”