Miriam Margolyes OBE (born May 18, 1941) is a BAFTA Award-winning British and character actress and voice artist. She is one of Britain's most sought after supporting players, and has appeared in a number of successful feature films.
Margolyes was born in Oxford, England, the daughter of Ruth (née Walters), a real estate investor, and Joseph Margolyes, a physician. She grew up in a Jewish family, a descendant of immigrants from Belarus. She attended the local Oxford High School and later Newnham College, Cambridge. There, she began acting in her 20s, and also appeared in productions of the Cambridge Footlights (a comedy troup).
Originally, it was her work as a voice artist that brought her into the public consciousness. She voiced the female rabbit character in the animated commercials for Cadbury's Caramel, and performed most of the supporting female characters in the dubbed Japanese action TV series, Monkey. She also worked with the theatre company Gay Sweatshop.
Margolyes' first major role in a film was as a character called Elephant Ethel, and she has since become a familiar face in the world of film and television. Margolyes received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Flora Finching in the 1988 movie Little Dorrit. On American television, she headlined the short-lived 1992 CBS sitcom Frannie's Turn. In 1993 she won a Best Supporting Actress, BAFTA for her role as Mrs Mingott, the only comic relief in Martin Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence, a performance that jump-started her career. Margolyes then began to be noticed by a much younger audience when she starred as Aunt Sponge in James And The Giant Peach; she also did the voice of the Glow Worm in the same movie. Then she starred as another well-known character from a book: Professor Sprout in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets.
Margolyes was recently seen alongside Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and (as Dolly de Vries) with Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon in Being Julia. Margolyes also featured as Dorcas the housekeeper in Ladies in Lavender with Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, and cropped up in a guest role in ITV mystery drama Marple, a new series transmitted in the UK in 2004, which featured Geraldine McEwan in the title role.
She is also known for iconic comedic roles, such as playing the Spanish Infanta alongside Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder, as Lady Whiteadder in Blackadder II and also for portraying Queen Victoria in Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
In 2007 she toured Australia in her one woman show Dickens' Women beginning in September. Margolyes also featured in the British comedy Jam and Jerusalem, which stars Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Joanna Lumley.
She recently starred in the original cast of the London production of Wicked as Madame Morrible opposite Idina Menzel, a role she reprised on Broadway, taking over from Carole Shelley on January 22, 2008. She left the Broadway Company on June 1, 2008 and she was replaced by understudy Kathy Santen.
Margolyes keeps her personal life private, but she has not seen any reason to keep it a secret that she is a lesbian, or as she playfully says "deliberately never been married or had children". She took time out of her career to look after her ill mother, and spent a quarter of a million pounds on full time care for her father. She is a campaigner for a respite care charity, Crossroads. She also supports Sense, a charity for deafblind people.
She appeared on British Television show University Challenge, whilst at Cambridge University. As part of a BBC documentary University Challenge: The Story so Far she claimed that during her appearance, she swore live on air after getting a question wrong, becoming the first person to say the word "fuck" on British Television (but that no recording of the incident survives to confirm this).
She intends to become an Australian citizen.
