Felicity Kendal, a star now since the mid-Seventies for her wonderful performance in TV’s The Good Life, has just opened in a fabulous new production of the evergreen Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes, at London’s Barbican theatre. She’s appearing alongside Robert Lindsay, Gary Wilmot and Broadway star, Sutton Foster.
And yet, by her own admission, she can’t sing – well, not to a professional standard – and, until recently, she certainly couldn’t tap dance. What on earth persuaded her to take on something so out of her comfort zone?
“After this awful year, I just wanted to be part of something that’s joyful and uplifting,” she says. “On top of that, being surrounded by an amazing cast made it a very easy decision. I just wanted to be a part of this voyage.”
Initially, Felicity thought her role wouldn’t involve dancing but as it turned out, there was a little bit more than she’d realised. “I’d had a couple of tap dancing lessons when I was 20 and decided it was far too hard. It seemed rude, though, not to try to crack it for this show, so I had a series of lessons with a professional – and loved it. It’s the most difficult dance in the world, but I can honestly say it was the most fun I’d had in two years.”
Felicity is a trouper and for that you need look no further than her father, Geoffrey Kendal. He moved the family from Warwickshire at the end of the Forties to India where he headed a touring band of actors putting on plays everywhere from the palaces of maharajahs to humble village halls.
“My father had an incredibly strong personality and we clashed often but he gave me my ambition and also my approach to my work. He taught me to make my choices based on the whole play, not just the particular role. However much it may be a big part, he’d say, there’s no point doing it if the play’s no good”
She certainly won’t easily forget his reaction when, years later, she failed to get a role in a Bond movie. “He was thrilled. For him, real acting was to be found in the theatre and I think that must have influenced my choices,” she says.
Felicity moved back to England when she was 18, against her father’s advice, and soon began winning TV roles. By the time The Good Life came along in 1975, her first marriage to actor Drewe Henley was in trouble and she had a young son, Charley, who is now 47 and works on film visual effects.
Of course, The Good Life went on to become one of the small screen’s most iconic sitcoms.
“But it was only a modest success at first,” says Felicity. “Then there was some sort of strike and a couple of episodes were re-shown. And suddenly, it went whoosh! I hadn’t been convinced it would appeal to a large audience. Also, it was a comedy so how could it be really important? The surprise was to discover that young people liked it, too, so that whole families would watch it together – and that’s quite unusual.”
And it not only made a star of Felicity before her 30th birthday; it made her an institution. “Well, if that’s true,” she allows, “it’s because my character Barbara somehow plugged into the national psyche. She embodied all the ingredients of a perfect wife: loyal, sexy, perennially cheerful, plucky, no threat.”
In 1978, her first marriage over, Felicity met the Texan-born director, Michael Rudman, whom she married five years later and by whom she has a second son, Jacob, now 33 and a barrister. This second marriage also ended in divorce after Felicity fell in love with playwright Tom Stoppard who had created a succession of leading roles for her in acclaimed plays.
The affair fizzled out after seven years but by the end of the Nineties, Michael had moved back into Felicity’s Chelsea home. “There wasn’t really a moment when we decided that we were getting back together for good. We just sort of slid into it,” she says.
She’s equally relaxed about the march of time. “When you’re a young actor the competition is much greater. That’s quite stressful. As you get to my age you’ve passed from ingénue to leading lady and beyond. If you can be working at 17 and still working at 70-something, you’ve made it through. You’re on the other side of the finishing line,” she laughs.
And she’s ambivalent about plastic surgery. “My attitude is to do what makes you happy. Whether it be botox or workouts or having your hair dyed, do it for positive rather than negative reasons. It’s got really bad in America where actresses simply don’t work if they look a certain age. But we have Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren, all of whom have always looked like real people. So you have to wonder about someone younger having cosmetic surgery on her eyes. I think it’s a shame, although I have no wish to pontificate.”
All her energies now are directed at making Anything Goes the tonic we all need. How on earth did she fill her time over the lockdowns?
“By decluttering – or, at least, trying to. It was heaven. After I’d sorted out the drawers and the surplus shoes, I started on the photo albums. But it was hopeless. Every ten minutes, I’d find an old photograph and then have to show it to someone. The upshot was that I’ve got all these new albums alongside all the old ones but I still haven’t transferred the best photographs from one to the other,” she laughs.
But then, Felicity has a long life of happy memories.
Anything Goes runs until October 17. For tickets go to AnythingGoesMusical.co.uk