Dame Joanna Lumley loves that she’s 78. In peak health, the actor, activist, charity patron, adoring mum and grandmother says age is a blessing.
“I used to panic and feel rattled when I was young, but as I’ve got older, I’ve started literally to live day to day,” she says. “With age, you work out what matters.
“I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. When I was 18, I longed to be 30. When I was 30, I longed to be 50. We mustn’t be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good.”
But don’t be fooled into thinking the Absolutely Fabulous icon did a lot of soul-searching to reach this point. “I’m as shallow as a puddle,” she declares. “When people ask, ‘What have you discovered about yourself,’ I think, ‘Nothing’ because I’ve just been me.
“If you spend all your time trying to find out who you are and thinking about yourself, you’re a crashing bore!”
It’s clear Joanna knows herself – and with audiences still keen to lap up everything she does, she’s not short of work. She recently finished filming new sitcom Amandaland, in which she plays Felicity, a social-climbing grandmother with a talent for cutting one-liners. It was, she admits, right up her alley.
In the show, which has yet to be picked up for New Zealand release, Felicity’s daughter Amanda is newly divorced and struggling to manage her teenage children.
If it was down to her, Joanna says she’d have no problem whipping her fictional grandchildren into shape.
“I’d teach them the basics – be prompt, honest, courteous and grateful. Always say please and thank you. And get them off their phones.
“I know it sounds harsh because we created this phone generation, but they’ve become semi-addicted. They’ll feel better without them.”
After a long career with myriad highs, including The New Avengers, Sapphire and Steel, and a string of well-received travel documentaries, it’s not surprising Joanna has millions of fans around the world. Not that she makes use of them in the modern celebrity way – she doesn’t do social media.
“I can’t understand it,” she reflects. “How can anybody have 17 million followers on social media? There’s something not right about that. Almost no messiah in history has had those many followers.
“So we’re just training followers? People who just go ‘like, not like’. And with that comes docility. Docility and indifference.”
She also admits she hardly watches any television. Living in South London with her conductor husband Stephen Barlow, 70, she spends her time either outside in the garden or inside doing her various craft projects, including decoupage, where you paste paper onto objects.
Her son, Jamie, 57 – who she raised as a single mother after giving birth to him at the age of 21 – is a psychotherapist living in Scotland. He and his wife, a writer, have two daughters, Alice, 22, and Emily, 21.
In keeping with her attitude to navel gazing, Joanna gives scant thought to how old that might make her feel.
When she looks in the mirror, she thinks, “I’m not the person I thought I was.” Then she’ll “put on tons of slap [make-up] and wonder whether to cut the hair a bit more or dye it a different colour again. But once you’ve reached a kind of tipping point in your life, you realise how little any of it matters”.
Getting older, she says, means she draws less attention – but that’s fine with her as she can’t always identify other people either!
The actor lives with face blindness, known as prosopagnosia, which means she doesn’t recognise people she’s seen before, including friends and family.
“I’ve got this weird thing, which means I can’t tell people from faces,” she explains. “So unless I know who they are, I don’t know who they are. That’s why I kiss everybody.
“Sometimes I don’t know whether I’ve seen that person that day or whether I should have seen them.”
She even admits to kissing strangers if she’s unsure of who they are. “Do I know you? Did I marry you? I just don’t know!”
A vegetarian and an outspoken critic of “cruelty to creatures”, Joanna takes any opportunity she can to raise awareness of the plight of animals, but you’ll never see her at a protest.
“I would rather go right to the top and get hold of that person who is doing that to animals, put them in an arm lock against the wall and say, ‘Stop it, please.’”
Now that her new sitcom is in the bag, Joanna is setting her sights on a new travel documentary and there’s one continent she’s chomping at the bit to visit.
“The whole of South America!” she enthuses. “I’ve never been.”
\Watch Joanna in Absolutely Fabulous now on Apple TV+.
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