Dame Joanna Lumley is now synonymous with her role in hilarious 90s sitcom, Absolutely Fabulous - where she played the iconic, chain-smoking boozehound, Patsy Stone. Yet as she revealed recently during a theatre Q&A in Horsham, the star initially wondered whether the comedy would ever get off the ground - following a rather frosty encounter with fellow funny woman, Jennifer Saunders.
The comedy icon - also an acclaimed actress in gritty dramas such as Fool Me Once and Finding Alice as well as a respected travel presenter, opened up about first meeting Jennifer, who of course became a good friend, at the BBC. Joanna remembers the star being “very shy”, joking that she has “warmed her up a bit” in the intervening years.
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PA)She recalled, “There she was sitting on this chair. I said, ‘Can I call you Jen?’ and she said, ‘No.’ It was quite a bad beginning. When I was offered the part, I turned to my agent and said, ‘Can you get me out of this, because Jennifer is too polite or too shy to say that it’s going to be a complete nightmare.’” Thankfully, Joanna says the first thing she did was to make Jennifer laugh — and the rest is history.
Sharing how she got her pivotal role in Ab Fab, Joanna claims it was all down to comedian Ruby Wax. “Ruby came to see me in a play in London and said, ‘I think you are very funny. I would like you in my show.’ Ab Fab was, amazingly, a huge success. Who thought awful women in Harvey Nicks would be a success? Who really cares about that?!” But care audiences most certainly did, and the series was even made into a film in 2016.
Describing hilariously how she envisaged her now beloved character, she explains, “I thought Patsy might have had a lot of organs removed… I didn’t think she had eaten much, and she had a deep voice from hanging out with the Rolling Stones. Patsy claims she was once in a cupboard with Paul McCartney, but I don’t think Paul would have agreed to that.”
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