ABSOLUTELY: A MEMOIR
BY JOANNA LUMLEY
(WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON)
A full-page photograph at the beginning of Joanna Lumley’s glossy memoir shows the nation’s darling in full evening dress, wearing a glittering tiara and the crimson sash and gold star of some Ruritanian order.
She looks decidedly royal - which is not surprising, for this is Joanna as she appeared in the Privilege Insurance advert, during which her picture, hanging on the wall of a transport caff, came to life and began flogging insurance in cut-glass tones.
The portrait captures perfectly the mixture of poshness and larkiness that has captivated Joanna Lumley’s audiences throughout her long career as an actress, model, former Bond Girl - and latterly author, presenter of travel documentaries and human rights campaigner. She opens her book with a confession: ÔI have hoarded things all my life. I can’t help it and I can’t stop. I have in some way hoarded my very life.”
This makes house-keeping problematic. But it is a handy trait when it comes to assembling a life in pictures.
The story begins before its author was born, with a remarkable collection of family pictures from India, where Joanna’s maternal grandfather, Leslie Weir was born in 1883.
There was an Indian connection on her father’s side as well. Her father, Charles, served with the Gurkhas and that connection, too, would later resurface in Joanna’s life.
She was born in Srinagar in 1946, and at the age of eight was sent “home” to England, to board at a prep school in Kent.
The pictures from this period show a sweet, toothy child in stout corduroy trousers and a lumpy, handknitted jumper. There is little sign of the leggy beauty into whom she would blossom - though the knitwear connection persists, in some hilarious early modelling pictures for knitting patterns.
One, of Joanna at a bowling alley, clad in knee socks and an orange sweater of eye-watering hideousness, bears the legend, “Young and gay, simple to knit”.
Moving on, we whizz through the birth of her son, Jamie (“My life had changed for ever and for the better”), her brief marriage to Jeremy Lloyd (“Maybe we just shouldn’t have got married - but I don’t regret it for a second”) and her breakthrough role as Purdey in the Avengers (“Fight days were my favourites”). There is a chapter on Ab Fab, packed with marvellously louche images of Joanna and Jennifer Saunders (“inscrutable as the Sphinx”) as Patsy and Edina, pictures from her travels, a sweet chapter on her family life with her husband of nearly 25 years, the composer Stephen Barlow, her son Jamie, and granddaughters Alice and Emily - and a final, triumphant chapter of pictures of Joanna with the Gurkhas of her father’s regiment, for whose right to live in Britain she successfully campaigned.
Tempting as it is to concentrate on the wealth of photographs, it would be a pity to ignore the linking text. Joanna writes beautifully, managing to be both thoughtful and amusing.
“Looking back through a photograph collection is frankly awe-inspiring,” she reflects. “But the truth is I can remember all of these things with clarity as though it were yesterday. Time rolls on: and just as we begin to get the gist of the riddle, the train blows its whistle and it’s all aboard.”
But what a trip it has turned out to be. - Daily Mail