Penelope Wilton: ‘The Queen Mother was an extremely clever woman’

Penelope Wilton can still travel incognito. It’s curious that half a century of exposure on stage and screen, packed with glorious parts, awards and a damehood, has not spoiled her secret satisfaction in being able to merge with the crowd. Yet the moment she opens her mouth her cover is blown. That voice! Classy, correct, crystalline and absolutely unmistakable. It could launch a thousand ships.

It gives emotional heft to the graveyard-bench confidences of Anne, the empathetic widow in Ricky Gervais’s comedy-drama After Life. It’s integral to the brittle dignity of Isobel Crawley in Downton Abbey and it vibrates with controlled passion in the 2014 play Taken at Midnight for which she won an Olivier as Irmgard, the Jewish mother confronting the Gestapo over the incarceration of her son.

Soon it will be trained on Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, and in case you might imagine that she’ll be wafting gently along on a wave of public adoration she issues a prompt corrective. 

“There’s nothing sentimental about this. The Queen Mother was an extremely clever woman – very, very quick. She could be acerbic.” 

When she refused to leave London during the Second World War, “Hitler said she was the most dangerous woman in Europe. I think she was marvellous and I hope this play makes her more Technicolor and sharp so she’s not just a pale lady in chiffon. There was nothing she didn’t find interesting.”

Backstairs Billy, by the British-Brazilian-Australian playwright Marcelo Dos Santos, is about the unconventional relationship between the Queen Mother and her loyal but wayward servant, William Tallon, who more or less ran her life for 50 years until she died in 2002 at the age of 101.

“Although we are attempting to make me look like her physically,” says Wilton, “I’m not going to be doing an impersonation of her. It’s fiction. A made-up fantasy about what their lives were like at Clarence House. We don’t know how they talk. Biographers who put thoughts into words [spoken by their subjects] are rather annoying, actually, because how would they know?”

Still, by way of research she has immersed herself in the biographies so that no detail of the Queen Mother’s dress, mannerisms, heel-height, handbag size, salmon-fishing expertise or courtly extravagance escapes her. And, being Wilton, she absorbs the central truth that the party-loving ex-queen was probably, deep down, a lonely woman, widowed at 51 and needing to find a new way of living. There are poignant scenes as well as funny ones.

“She was of her time,” says Wilton, “an Edwardian lady. She was politically incorrect. She had served her country well and went on living the life that she wanted to live.”

More than anyone else (except perhaps Queen Elizabeth II, who bailed her mother out when she overspent) “Backstairs Billy” made that possible. Tallon was the ultimate devotee, anticipating her every need, getting her breakfast, ordering the flowers, looking after the corgis, organising guests at luncheons and receptions and always over-diligently topping up the champagne. 

Above all, he was amusing. She enjoyed his gentle mockery of some of the people she met and overlooked his sexual forays. “He made her life much more entertaining,” says Wilton. “She trusted him. She enjoyed his company. He didn’t have a family because he was gay and she adored him.”

The year is 1979. Britain is crippled by strikes and riots. The action takes place in her apartment at Clarence House which has caught some of the febrile atmosphere outside the palace gates. “The country was having a sort of nervous breakdown, as indeed it is now,” says Wilton.

The play’s comic potential lies in the Queen Mother’s relationships with her friends and the behaviour of people in her presence. “People about to meet the Royal family say, ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ but actually they do,” says Wilton. “They find themselves tongue-tied. They forget to curtsy. The Queen Mother was very good at putting them at ease.”

The play was commissioned by its director Michael Grandage, whose friend the late Una Stubbs had often told him, from first-hand stories of the Clarence House court, that Tallon would be a brilliant subject for a play.

The part lured the Welsh actor Luke Evans, 44, back to the stage after 16 years in film and television (including Beauty and the Beast and the Fast & Furious films) and Wilton, 77, is coquettishly pleased to be his Queen. “In fact, I’m thinking of taking him home,” she told the BBC’s The One Show. “We all need a Billy.”

Side by side on the television sofa, they presented a delightful, teasing twosome. Wilton’s fine hair is silver these days, swept up in a large comb at the back. She has a lovely smile and a slightly challenging air of expectation.

She is still fondly remembered for the 1980s BBC sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles. She was Regan to Michael Hordern’s Lear.

Theatre is her first love. “It is the last place where language is really, really important,” she said.

“I like doing new plays because that’s the future. I like the difficulty of it. I like solving the problems. 

“My job is to put onto the stage what the writer has written, not what the director feels on Monday about the play. Somebody has bothered to write this play, use this language.”

She’s fascinated by where a character will take her. “In the theatre you go on a journey every night.” In one of her favourite Shakespeare plays, Much Ado About Nothing (in which she was an award-winning Beatrice to Michael Gambon’s Benedick in 1981), “Beatrice starts the play very scornful of Benedick and he of her. By the end they are madly in love; they have gone on a journey of self-discovery. And you take the audience with you.”

This is certainly true of Wilton and Gervais, whose characters are both bereaved, in After Life. The series had such an immediate and grateful response from the public that she was asked to become patron of The Good Grief Trust, a charity for those who have suffered loss. Wilton’s eldest sister Rosemary died of a Covid-related illness in 2021. She has much to draw on.

Wilton was born in Scarborough, the middle of three girls. Her mother Alice Travers was an actress, as was her uncle the late Bill Travers. She married two actors – first Daniel Massey who died in 1998 and then, in 1991, Ian Holm with whom she starred in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight. Holm died in 2020. Though both marriages ended in divorce, a warm connection was never broken.

With Massey, after the loss of a premature son, she had a daughter, Alice, a theatre producer. Alice, 46, and her family live close by in west London and Wilton enjoys being a big part of the lives of her grandchildren, Daniel, 11, and Ella, seven. 

She likes the freedom of living by herself in a house ever-open to family and friends. “I can do what I like. I can go to bed at half-past eight if I want and I can eat what I want, when I want.” 

After a well-paid film, such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or Downton, she will buy herself a painting.

Wilton’s trend-averse way of thinking as well as of being is refreshing.

She’s vehement about social media. “I’m not interested in people knowing where I am and what I’m doing. It’s terrible that people are chosen to be in plays or films because they have a following. If you’re a wonderful actor but a rather shy person you might not have a following.

“I wouldn’t say I was shy but I’m not a great extrovert either. I’m just sort of middling.”

Predictably, the pursuit of celebrity is not on her radar either. “It’s not a world I’m interested in so I don’t know much about it. I have absolutely nothing against people doing whatever they want to do but I don’t have to be part of it.” She cherishes her privacy in the same measured way. “I don’t make a great thing of it. I just go along, you know.”

Wilton tries not to think of roles she’d like to play. “Because it’s always a disappointment. It’s a bit like wallpaper. If you try and find that something in your mind you’re never going to find it.

“So it’s best to have a look and see what’s out there. This came as a tremendous surprise: to do a new play by a new writer who is really clever. I hope we do him service.”

Grandage has no doubt. “In everything Penelope Wilton does,” he says, “she avoids sentimentality. You know you’ll get something many layers deeper than that. With the Queen Mother, she offers an insight into someone we thought we knew.”

Backstairs Billy is at Duke of York’s Theatre, London WC2 (backstairsbilly.com) from Nov 7 to Jan 27