The mother and daughter make a marvellous pair on stage in ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’. Claire Allfree sits down with the duo to talk Academy Awards, the Harry Potter reboot, and what younger actors can learn from the late Queen’s work ethic
When her daughter Bessie was small, Imelda Staunton would read her bedtime stories. “I’d say something like, ‘And then the witch came in,’” says Staunton, cackling away like a wrinkled old woman. “And she’d say, ‘Oh, don’t do the voices, Mum!’” The 69-year-old actor adopts the world-weary sigh of a precocious six-year-old. “I think you thought you could do them better than me,” she says to her daughter, now 31. “Oh God, I remember that,” says Bessie, who takes the surname of her father, Downton Abbey star Jim Carter. “Or maybe I was thinking you needed a bit of direction.”…
“Every actor likes to say their play is relevant,” says Staunton, who has no truck with her industry’s more high-falutin claims about itself. “But 130 years ago [the play was written in 1893], Shaw was saying that it’s not right that there aren’t better opportunities for women, so it feels important to be saying those words today. I mean, look at the still male-dominated TV industry.” She rolls her eyes. “Because we need more stories about guns, don’t we? We need more stories about men who go to war.”…