Joanna Lumley on the benefits of smiling, her upcoming trip Down Under, playing Ab Fab’s Patsy and her fears for the future
WORDS: ALISON JAMES IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK
There are many things to love about Dame Joanna Lumley. She’s stunningly beautiful yet wonderfully self-deprecating, funny, clever, talented, kind and she has one of most melodious voices on TV. But one of the most special features about her is her smile.
Apart from when she’s playing Patsy in Ab Fab, that radiant beam is pretty much her resting face.
“Yes, I do smile a lot,” she admits. “I love smiling and think it’s the loveliest thing in the world to see a face smiling back at you. It makes people look so beautiful. So, I go around grinning all the time. People where I live in south London must think, ‘Oh here she comes – grinning again!’
“Smiling also makes you feel better. Like the song in The King And I, whistling a happy tune is good advice. Smile a lot and you can’t help but be positive.
“Smiling is a wonderful ice-breaker, too. When I’m working overseas and haven’t a clue how to speak the language of where I happen to be, smiling at people builds an immediate rapport. They can tell that you’re not threatening, that you’re a friend and interested in what they have to say.”
Joanna’s next trip overseas is to Australia in October where she’ll be entertaining audiences with stories about her travels and her life in general.
“The thought of this tour travelling across Australia, has completely taken over my waking hours,” she says.
“It’s utterly thrilling to start planning the stories I can tell, and the rapture – and gratitude, to be fair – with which I shall greet the audiences.
“Nothing like this has come my way before, and I may have to be dragged off with a hook at the end of each show. I think it will be fabulous.”
Speaking of fabulous, Joanna is bound to be asked about Patsy Stone! There are rumours that Ab Fab creator Jennifer Saunders is planning a spin-off of the iconic sitcom. Patsy and Edina run riot in a care home, for instance?
“I loved it when we saw them as very old people in one episode.” Joanna laughs. “We had all kinds of prosthetics made to make us look really old. Scraggly necks and bald caps under very thinning hair, awful hands, badly fitting false teeth, little humps on our backs and our bosoms looked like empty sandbags! We could hardly walk because we wer
