Warm, wise and wickedly funny, this summer Imelda Staunton – who this month was given a damehood in the King’s Birthday Honours List – replaces one crown with another: as queen of the West End. She grants an audience to Olivia Marks.
In a dressing room backstage at the London Palladium, Imelda Staunton is scrutinising 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 theatres 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 her Vogue shoot and we find a space among the debris of her dressing room for our interview….