Lara Pulver is back on stage in the stupendous Fiddler on the Roof and back on our screens in the utterly bonkers Mobland, and back living in London… she tells us life’s getting better since she learned to stop seeking acclaim and started enjoying the ride
“My mum was a single parent in Dartford, and saw a notice in our local library for a production of Annie… I wasn’t interested, I was a sporty girl but she walked me down to the village hall… I was just in my PE kit when all the other girls were stage kids in their glitzy outfit outfits, I looked like such a misfit, a skinny little runt, but the director took one look at me and her eyes lit up… she said, ‘there’s our Annie.’”
Lara Pulver is in her dressing room in the depths of the Barbican, with the new run of Fiddler on the Roof under way and scoring another round of 5 stars and ticket mayhem, and she’s recounting where it all started. She’s thinking about mums a lot, having two young children of her own and because she is playing Golde in the musical, the mum of five girls and arguably her husband too, the exuberant and chaotic Tevye (played by Adam Dannheisser).
Pulver immediately strikes you as very alive, if that’s not a silly thing to say, but it’s just the way her eyes take up most of the room as she seeks to accommodate you – “I’m a Jewish mother, a feeder, you can’t come to my house without someone trying to put food in your mouth,” she’ll say later – and how you can just imagine how she grabbed the attention back in that village hall, and has continued to do throughout her stellar career on stage – Olivier award-winning for Gypsy in 2016 – and starring in nation TV treasures like Spooks and Sherlock….