Dame Imelda Staunton on Hard Work, Her Return to the West End, and the Secrets to a Successful Marriage (2024)

In a dressing room backstage at the London Palladium, Imelda Staunton is scrutinizing a blown-up black and white portrait of Marilyn Monroe that’s hanging on the wall.

“Do you think she enjoyed any of it?” Staunton asks, eyes trained on the photograph. She sounds genuinely curious, wistful—puzzled, even. For Staunton, it is clear that being on stage and screen, as she has been for the past five decades, brings her straightforward, unbridled joy—that acting is, she tells me, “the most privileged job in the world.”

We’re here in one of the West End’s most legendary theaters to talk about what is, very possibly, Staunton’s most joyous ride yet: the irrepressible Dolly Levi in a revival of Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s mood-lifting, life-giving musical Hello, Dolly! Staunton has wrapped a British Vogue shoot and we find a space among the debris of her dressing room for our interview. There is no fuss, no break for refreshment, just a bright “let’s get on with it” attitude that has epitomized her approach to her career and made her one of the most pre-eminent actors working—anywhere—today. And yet, for all the lack of fanfare, there is an undeniable stateliness to Staunton; a quiet, electric aura of greatness. She has the gravitas of someone who is an expert in their field, one who has earned their place through graft and grit.

“Imelda can do infinite subtlety in the closest of close-ups—and then with one twist of the dial she’ll lower the walls of Jericho,” her longtime friend and occasional costar Hugh Laurie tells me. “She’s just incapable of sounding a false note, emotionally or musically. Maybe the only way to trip her up would be to ask her to play a bad actor. That might fry her circuits.”

And now, here she is, at 68, as energized as ever and ready to command the vast 2,300-seat auditorium; to bring the outsized power of her five-foot frame to one of the most well-known characters in musical theater. Based on the 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers by Thornton Wilder (a writer who, says Staunton, “took his comedy extremely seriously”), the show follows the widowed Dolly in 1890s New York, a matchmaker to her friends and acquaintances who, ready for another marriage and a second act of her own, sets her sights on one of her wealthy clients, Horace Vandergelder. It had its Broadway premiere in 1964 and was most recently performed by Bette Midler in 2017, but it’s the 1969 movie you’ve probably seen, starring a preposterously, laughably young—25!—Barbra Streisand, which was critically panned at the time, but is beloved today. (Staunton’s verdict? “She’s completely wrong and completely brilliant.”)

Dolly’s a departure of sorts for Staunton, an actor who has rarely opted for cozy. Whether it’s playing Edith Piaf or Joan of Arc—two of the parts on which she cut her teeth during her repertory years in her 20s—or the titular backstreet abortionist in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (for which she was nominated for the best actress Oscar, aged 49, in 2005), or even Harry Potter’s unhinged villain Dolores Umbridge, which made her a global name, Staunton has always been drawn to “women who are a bit mad and a bit tortured,” she admits.

But this summer, after a five-year pandemic-induced delay, she is finally ready to inject a little levity into her Olivier and BAFTA-laden CV. What was it that first appealed? “Well it didn’t,” she replies, in her brusque, fabulously no-nonsense but upbeat way, only slightly less queen-like than it was when she played the late monarch in the final two seasons of The Crown. “I thought, is it too, I don’t know,” she continues, her dazzlingly blue eyes narrowing, lips curling, “sugary for me?”

Not likely in the hands of director Dominic Cooke, with whom Staunton worked on 2018’s five-star, heart-wrenching production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the National Theatre, her last major stage outing. Cooke is keen to show another side to Dolly, to add some “texture” to a show which he has previously described as “camp and delightful,” but lacking, perhaps, in “depth.”

“There’s two widows, and that’s not to be ignored,” says Staunton of Dolly and Horace; two people coming alive again after grief. She quotes a lyric from the title song—“I went away into a personal haze”—to illustrate the melancholy that might sometimes be overshadowed by the jazz hands of it all. “I think it’s very moving,” she says. “She’s been away, and now she’s coming back to life. She’s had to scratch a living. She’s put everyone else’s needs first. She’s tired.” Now, “she’s realizing what she needs.”

There is still something revelatory about an older woman being the center of the action—the center of a love story, no less—without, say, facing ridicule or humiliation. Staunton agrees. “Giving that woman, that age of woman, her voice, giving her feelings, giving her needs, giving her strengths,” is undoubtedly important to her. So, too, is highlighting Dolly’s Irish roots—Staunton’s parents were from County Mayo and immigrated to Archway, north London, where she was born. “What I quite like is that, yes, her name is Dolly Levi, but she was born Dolly Gallagher. And so you’ve got the gift of the gab, you’ve got the wheeling and the dealing and a woman who’s been left to fend for herself financially and emotionally.”

Theater producer Michael Harrison, who last worked with Staunton on Gypsy, for which she was awarded an Olivier, wanted her for the role of Dolly not only because “she will deliver Jerry Herman’s wonderful songs with a panache and force that fills the Palladium,” but because “she is one of this country’s finest actors, who brings out the humanity and heart in every character she plays.”

Indeed, it was those qualities, her “vulnerability and strength,” that drew Peter Morgan to casting Staunton for The Crown. Today, even with all the sartorial trappings removed—the pearls, prim twinset, and low, sturdy heels swapped for sculptural silver earrings, oversized cream shirt, slim black trousers, and combat boots—the resemblance between Staunton and the late monarch is striking enough to elicit a double take. The series topped British streaming charts when it was released, but she’s adamant the role hasn’t changed anything for her.

I wonder, though, if she feels a greater empathy with the royals. After all, they have figured in her life more than most: she’s played the Queen Mother in Peter Moffat’s 2003 limited series Cambridge Spies; sung for the queen at her 90th birthday pageant in the grounds of Windsor Castle in 2016; and has been to the Palace on at least two occasions to receive her OBE and CBE. She was still filming when the queen died in September 2022 and was “inconsolable” at the news.

“What I admire,” says Staunton, “[is how she] was the last bastion of, ‘I’ve said I would do this.’ That’s over now, that’s gone. Someone who would turn up, come rain or come shine—people don’t do that in any walk of life now. I do believe that being anointed queen was [for her] like becoming a nun, the degree of responsibility she felt was enormous.”

She can certainly relate to that sense of responsibility. “Not in any way comparing,” she says, “but if you agree to do eight shows a week, you do eight shows a week. I don’t care if you’re tired. If you don’t want to do eight shows a week, then don’t do a show.”

When it comes to giving advice, Staunton is not one “to sugarcoat it.” “I go and talk to drama students. I say, ‘Listen, I’m telling you this now. You have to deal with rejection all the time. Now, remember: the day you don’t get that job, someone else gets it. It’s their turn that day.’ You have to look at it like that because it’ll eat you up otherwise.”

Although Staunton has, undeniably, had a glittering career, it was only post-Oscars nod, when she was almost 50, with nearly 30 years of work behind her, that leading roles in film became available to her. She recalls meeting the Harry Potter team “very early on,” pre-Vera Drake. “I went in to see them and they said, ‘Would you play this part?’ What, for a page? No. And I wasn’t being grand, I just thought, No, I don’t want to do that.” Once she’d bagged an Oscar nom and won a film BAFTA, she was far enough “up the ladder” to be offered Dolores Umbridge.

For Staunton, “Success means working,” though. “Success is a really tricky word,” she continues. “And it should be spelled with a very small S. I think it poisons people. I feel Jim [Carter, her husband] and I have made our lives work as a marriage within this business, and we take our life more seriously than our jobs. Of course, we both take [the job] very seriously. But you go, what’s the most important thing here? That I play another part? Or that we go on a very nice holiday, or that we have that time in the garden, that we have our life? But we can afford to say that—I don’t mean financially, but with the work we’ve done and are lucky enough to still be doing. I think we know how fortunate we are.”

Carter, 75 (best known for his role as Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey), and Staunton first met in a rehearsal room at the National—“on January 4, 1982,” she recites—on a production of Guys & Dolls. It’s clearly a date that has entered family lore: this past January 4, their daughter, 29-year-old Bessie, also an actor, was rehearsing in the very same room and FaceTimed her parents to mark the occasion. “So that was just great,” Staunton smiles.

Over their 40 years together, the longest stretch the pair have spent apart was three weeks, when Staunton had to film Taking Woodstock with Ang Lee in New York; it was so awful they’ve made sure never to do it again. “Oh! Terrible,” she says, bristling at the memory. “It was over three weeks and they promised me I could go home, and then something happened with the schedule. I thought I just couldn’t. It was very weird.”

So what’s their secret? “I think when we got married, we did say, look, there’s no point if we’re going to be apart. Early on, Jim did a lot more telly and films than I was doing in the ’80s. If he was going to go to an exotic location, we’d go, ‘Right, well, I can come out that weekend.’ So we made that work. Or there’s two jobs,” she mimes looking at a diary, “I can go and do that. Do you need to do that? OK? Lovely.”

It’s theater that proves as, if not more, taxing on their relationship. Doing Gypsy “was tough on him,” she says. When she takes on a big role, for the entire run—and Gypsy was eight months—“I don’t see anyone, I don’t do anything. I don’t socialize. I don’t do anything. And that’s fine because my job is to do this. I would be so embarrassed if I couldn’t do my job because I had some drinks.”

Which isn’t to say she doesn’t have any fun. In his diaries, published in 2022, her late friend and former costar Alan Rickman includes in an entry written during the filming of 1995’s Sense and Sensibility that “Imelda makes us weep with laughter at the stories of dope scones.” Indeed, in the foreword to said book, Emma Thompson remembers Staunton “nearly killing him” with the anecdote. “I’ve never seen him laugh more, before or since,” Thompson writes. “It was a bit like watching someone tickling the Sphinx.” Please, I ask—beg—could Staunton retell it? “Hahaha! Very funny. No.”

If, she elaborates, she has “hardly anything to do,” she is happy to have a laugh. She recounts a frankly heavenly sounding time shooting Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing in the Tuscan hills back in 1992, where, for seven weeks, she, Keanu Reeves, Phyllida Law, Robert Sean Leonard, and Kate Beckinsale all shared a villa, with Jim coming out on weekends. In between shots she was booking restaurants and “trying to get kitty money out of all of them to try and do the shopping.” Did they all cough up? “We had a bit of a problem with Keanu.” (“Gorgeous man,” she adds.)

There will be no time for any high jinks in Hello, Dolly!, however jolly the show. I wonder if, performing at the Palladium for the first time, following in the footsteps of Judy Garland, Josephine Baker, and Bing Crosby, holds a special weight. “No, not really,” she says, almost guiltily, ever the realist. Like every role she has done—be it at the Nottingham Playhouse or the National—this is, quite simply, her job. There is only one thing on her wishlist: “a play with my daughter.” In the meantime, with Dolly, “You’ve got a good, funny play with some great tunes in it,” she says, matter-of-factly. “That’s what this is. And it’s a very nice world for me to be in for a change.”

Hello, Dolly! is at the London Palladium from July 6.