Bridgerton star Bessie – soon to play Nancy Mitford in a new TV drama – and her mum, acting royalty Imelda, talk Sondheim, sandwiches and taking the stage together in Shaw’s sex worker scandal Mrs Warren’s Profession
‘It’s amazing that I came from you,” says Bessie Carter to her mother, Imelda Staunton, during a break in rehearsals for the forthcoming revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, in which they’ll play a mother and daughter and share a stage for the first time. She has a point. Carter, 31, best known as Bridgerton’s Prudence Featherington, is 5ft 10 and aquiline, glamorous in a maroon leather coat and silver-studded shoes. Staunton, 69, is barely 5ft tall, quiet and unassuming in slacks and a blouse, short grey hair pinned back….
“She’s everything I could never be, this tall, elegant, confident, gorgeous woman,” Staunton says. “I just sit here and think: ‘In God’s name, how did that happen?’” “I’ve got your eyes and dad’s legs,” Bessie comments. (Both women do indeed have piercing blue eyes.) “Fortunately there’s a line in this play about how you can’t tell that the characters are mother and daughter, because you wouldn’t really pick us out in a crowd [as related]. But it’s always been a life dream of mine to work together.”
The dread term “nepo baby” hangs in the air for a moment before Staunton exorcises it. “Surgeons’ children become surgeons,” she says. “Should they be penalised because their parents have done the job before them?”…