Felicity Kendal promises that one day she will write a book about her sex life. This will be terribly exciting news for the millions who have fancied her since she played the green-wellied, pert-jeaned Barbara Good in The Good Life. But if the book is even half as good as White Cargo, her first volume of memoirs published ten years ago, it will be worth reading even if you were among the weird minority who preferred her co-star, Penelope Keith – or Richard Briers, for that matter. We need not, however, hold our breath.
“I’d have to be 90,” she says. “Or 85. Let’s say 80. Then I could spill all the beans. What I wouldn’t want to write is a sort of luvvie diary of good reviews and funny stories that happened at the end of the play I was in. It’s not interesting. But I guess if I got to be – and I would really like to be 90 – then it would be nice to look back and write about sex, 30 years of it. That would be good, but it wouldn’t be good now.” I’m sure it would be good, but it might cause collateral damage to the living. Her first marriage to an actor who suffered from a depressive illness and by whom she had a son ended in the 1970s. She then, according to White Cargo, entered her own version of “the raving 1960s” and for a decade was never without a lover. In 1983, after an affair with the screenwriter Robert Bolt, she married the theatre producer Michael Rudman and had another boy by him. She left Rudman for Tom Stoppard, who, scandalously at the time, deserted his wife, Miriam. For the past decade she has been back with Rudman. We now face an agonising two-decade wait for further particulars: Miss Kendal is still only a spry 61.
The urge to draw comparisons between the glamorous grandmother sitting in front of me and Florence Lancaster, the ageing socialite beauty she plays in the coming West End revival of Noel Coward’s The Vortexis pretty well irresistible and, naturally, my ears prick up when she calls Florence, who takes a lover as young as her son, a sex addict.
“When I say that she’s a sex addict, I mean she’s a life addict. On the surface she doesn’t want to grow old, but it’s not as simple as that. It’s not wanting to give up on life. She wants to continue with that adrenalin rush, I guess because she was very beautiful, very successful, very in the middle of everything.”
As she herself was? “Oh yes, but I don’t know about ‘beautiful’ because that’s not the way I’ve ever seen myself. Attractive, I would say, very comfortably attractive. I’m more of a character actress than the beautiful leading lady. I haven’t fallen off that pedestal because I haven’t been on it, if that makes sense.”
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But she said in her memoirs that she was able to flirt her way into any male arms she fancied. “I think I was not writing as I now think of myself, but writing as how I thought of myself then. When I look back, I was obviously very lucky in that I was attractive to people whom I was attracted to. Now, I could have been unlucky like many people and fallen for the ones that couldn’t give a damn.”
She has arrived at the canal-side office of Bill Kenwright, who is producing The Vortex, clutching a bottle of cough mixture for the still-lingering cold that blighted her Christmas. (She did not, incidentally, see the revival of Penelope Keith’s To the Manor Born on Christmas Day and thinks a similar resurrection of The Good Life would be unthinkable without the late Paul Eddington.) Despite her health, she shows plenty of enthusiasm for The Vortex, an early Coward that, she promises, is all “sex and drugs and rock’n’roll”. Because of the cocaine references and the subtext that Florence’s son is gay, it was controversial when he wrote it in 1924 and he was asked to tone it down. Kendal is not surprised he then decided pure comedies would be easier: “All right, I’ll give you the other side of me, which is all on the surface.”
She met him once. It was 1967 and she was new in London, looking for work and pleased to be invited to a cocktail party thrown by the makers of a film called Pretty Polly. Coward had co-written it and there had been a part for Shashi Kapoor, her older sister’s husband.
“He came in half an hour late, holding his finger in the air with a bandage round it in a bow. I can’t remember how, but he’d got his finger trapped and that’s why he was late and he entertained 30 people for 30 minutes and then went away. It was a star act. It was as if a spotlight had come on.”
She has successfully played Coward before in Fallen Angels in 2000, and believes her father, an actor manager who led a troupe of Shakespeareans round India after the war (a life recreated in Kendal’s film debut, Shakespeare Wallah), would approve. “He would be pleased about anything that was well written. He was very snobbish about commercial things that weren’t. And I suppose that’s held me back an awful lot.” She laughs.
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Twenty-one years ago, at the height of her fame, she spent a glamorous Christmas on a beach in Barbados, but it was just the one. This year it was brandy in Chelsea with the family, walking the dog in Battersea Park, and then back to the provinces with The Vortex. The life of a working actor, not a star.
So she still tries to please her father, even ten years after his death? “I’m sure there’s an imprint,” she says although she also rebelled against it, first by leaving India at 18 and, second, by starring in a sitcom. Running for 30 episodes from 1975, The Good Life was a prescient comedy about ethical living. The cast got on famously and the dissimilarity between Felicity and Barbara Good was one of its best shared jokes. Barbara Good became an inadvertent template for the perfect wife, capable in the garden, fun in bed, utterly loyal. Kendal, whose own life at the time was far from girl-next-door innocent, was quite aware the true feminist was Barbara’s bossy neighbour, Margo as played by Keith.
“If I’d met Barbara I think I’d have hit her with a stick. It was a very much three steps forward four steps back for women. I can’t imagine certain women of a liberal persuasion having any time for her at all. There was this super sweet creature who never got anything wrong and was always adorable and giggled at everything and saved pigs. Her redeeming feature was that she was actually politically correct, but that was sort of a pseudo, you know.”
Although other sitcoms followed and she has received the ultimate accolade of a cameo this spring in Dr Who, The Good Lifemarked Kendal’s television high tide. Her last regular outing, as the crime-solving gardener Rosemary Boxer, ended two years ago when ITV’s new broom brushed Rosemary and Thyme from the schedule. She was a little sad since she felt it had potential. “I don’t think the scripts were good enough and I think they should have been better.”
Her real triumphs have been on stage, particularly in a string of Stoppards: Hapgood in 1988 (when their affair started), Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Real Thing. I suppose, I say, given that she eventually went back to – although did not remarry – her husband, she is unlikely to be starring in any more Stoppards.
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“Oh I imagine I could. I’m waiting to do Indian Ink again because there are the two sisters and when I played the younger one I thought this was perfect because later I can play the other one. But he hasn’t written many parts [for older actresses] – he’d have to do one for my age.”
A general problem, I suggest. “I know people say, ‘Oh there’s no parts for older women?’ Well, bollocks is what I say. There are an awful lot of parts for older women. You just haven’t been offered them. That’s the truth. You don’t have Judi Dench saying there’s no parts: ‘They throw these Oscars at me, but I’ve nothing to play.’”
She has played most of the modern greats – from Beckett to Hare – although Pinter has so far eluded her. But, I say, given her childhood in India, Indian Ink, must have been a particularly happy experience. “A difficult play funnily enough. I think it was supposed to be more emotional than it was and I don’t know that we did it justice. There was something about it that needed to be rejigged because the emotion was right at the end, but the emotion of the relationship was not actually quite there.”
But, anyway, there is no barrier between her and Stoppard? “No. No.”
Nobody ever says a bad word about that man! “He’s lovely. He’s lovely. Nobody would say a bad word about him. There’s nothing to say a bad word about. He’s one of the benign people, an incredibly generous creature, and I think that comes across in the plays. I think that is probably what Indian Ink needed: a little more cruelty somewhere in the mixture. It was a little bit too romantic.”
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Maybe it is his romantic optimism that makes women fall for him? “I don’t think it’s anything to do with optimism. Optimism can be really boring. You can get that in the local Post Office. I think it’s intelligence you fall for. It’s as simple as that. It is probably because of my father, you see – even though I don’t blame him for a thing – that the writing of a play is much more important to me than the part, or the stardom, or the commercial success. The thing that’s fascinating is what makes somebody write, how by putting that comma in a different place or just extending that sentence a little bit further, it becomes magical.”
The nation has obsessed about Felicity Kendal’s award-winning derriere for years, but it is, of course, her intelligence that is sexy. It is just annoying we have this long to wait before we see it displayed again in her next volume of autobiography. At least, by then, I suggest, her somewhat volatile life might make sense. “Oh I doubt it. I hope not,” she says and we solemnly agree to repeat this slightly bracing encounter in 2028.
The Vortex, Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (www.apollo-theatre.co.uk ), from Feb 20