At a glance
- At 85, Miriam Margolyes is showing no signs of slowing down with a film, a TV series, a 35-book tour and dreams of returning to the stage.
- The actor reveals she and partner Heather Sutherland have made the heartbreaking decision to leave their beloved Southern Highlands home.
- In this candid interview with Samantha Trenoweth, Miriam speaks about faith, politics and kindness.
- Holy Days is in cinemas from 6 August 2026. Miriam’s Full English is on sale 1 September.
The first time we met, lyrebirds were dancing under the rainforest canopy in Miriam Margolyes’ front yard. She was summering in her sometime home in Robertson on the eastern fringe of the NSW Southern Highlands. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee and oven-baked pastries drifted across the threshold, but Miriam had prepared none of these. She neither cooks nor cleans, and doesn’t garden if she can help it – but she does like to entertain.
Indeed, at 85, Miriam remains brimful of magnificent contradictions. She is as funny as a barrel of monkeys, but earnest about the state of the world. She gives the impression of being, well, a tiny bit self-absorbed, yet is deeply concerned about and fascinated by others. And she loves her airy Robertson home in the treetops, perched on an escarpment, looking out to the blue Pacific. Yet, The Weekly learns today, she and her partner of more than 50 years, Heather Sutherland, have made the wrenching decision to sell it. Heather no longer drives. Miriam’s driving nowadays is mostly confined to a mobility scooter. And that little patch of paradise is a long way from a transport hub.
“It’s breaking our hearts because we had planned to retire there,” Miriam says.
Although it’s not proving as attractive a real estate proposition as one might imagine, Miriam and Heather have dedicated the eucalypt rainforest on the property to the Nature Conservation Trust of NSW in perpetuity – which is good news for the lyrebirds, but not for developers.
Miriam became an Australian citizen in 2013, in part because she was awe-struck by the nature.
“When I came to live in Australia,” she says, “I realised how beautiful the landscape is. Born in Europe, we assume that the standard of beauty is the Renaissance. That’s where we get our ideas of beauty. I have a house in Tuscany, and I look at the Tuscan hills, and the little villages and the cypress trees, and it is beautiful. But Australia has a beauty and a grandeur which is not man-made.”
“Australia’s beauty is in the land; it’s in the hills, it’s in the mountains, in the great expanses of desert. It’s an amazing thing to see. And at night, it’s particularly gorgeous because you can see the Milky Way. When I was filming in the outback, and I looked up, I saw things that no European ever sees. I saw the sky as it’s meant to be seen, I think, and it’s a shatteringly wonderful, awesome beauty. That’s something that I don’t think the English quite understand about Australia – how gorgeous it is.”
And as for her own little patch of the continent: “I want to leave the place as I found it,” she says.
Australia is not the only place Miriam has set down roots. She has a London home and the aforementioned farmhouse in Tuscany (which might become the alternative retirement nest now Robertson is out of the equation). She also fell head-over-heels in love with New Zealand, back in 2024, while on set for the quirky Kiwi dramedy Holy Days. If she’d landed there prior to Australia, she suspects she might have settled somewhere in those bucolic southern hills.
“There is an otherworldliness, an old-worldliness, about it, and I love that,” she says. “I really relish it.”
Based on a novel by the award-winning NZ author Dame Joy Cowley, Holy Days tells the (by turns poignant and madcap) tale of three nuns who set out on a rollicking cross-country odyssey – with a small motherless boy in tow – to save their abbey. The little indie production attracted an extraordinary cast. Miriam came on board first as Sister Luke, followed by a formidable Aussie duo – Jacki Weaver (as gentle Sister Mary Clare) and Judy Davis (as canny, mischievous Mother Superior Agnes).
The quintessential British character actress, Miriam has a BAFTA under her belt for Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and turned in pitch-perfect performances as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter franchise, Nurse in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and piglet Babe in the Chris Noonan/George Miller classics. She was the original Madame Morrible in the London and Broadway productions of Wicked. Her one-person show, Dickens’ Women, has been a theatrical triumph. She has authored five books and created a string of successful documentaries. Yet even with these diverse professional chops, Miriam was, she admits, initially somewhat intimidated by Judy Davis.
“Judy, as an actress …” she begins. “I think she and Anjelica Huston are my idols, and I never thought I would ever be working with her. I was quite nervous about it because she’s incisive and very clear. But it was thrilling. It was really wonderful.
“Jacki I’d met before and I knew her, so I wasn’t scared of Jacki in the way that I was slightly scared of Judy. But I so respect her work. I think that’s the thing. Actors respect each other’s work, and if you don’t respect the other person, you can be nice to them, but it’s not quite so thrilling. So the whole experience was wonderful because they were wonderful.”
This was not Miriam’s first incarnation as a nun. She has also played the forthright Mother Mildred in the BBC series Call the Midwife. And while the two nuns are very different characters, Miriam feels that “what they have in common is a passionate and convinced faith” – which is an interesting trait for this Jewish atheist to explore.
“Faith can be a wonderful thing or a dangerous thing,” she tells The Weekly. “It depends who they are and what they do with it.
“I had the incredible pleasure of meeting [the late saint] Mother Teresa, and she was something! You couldn’t take your eyes off her, and she had that inner charisma and fire that was a burning force.
“Now, I don’t believe in God. I believe that Jesus happened and was an absolute smasher and a great socialist. Son of God? No, sorry, not with you there. But Mother Teresa believed. And she did things to help people and led an incredibly difficult life. She had such immediacy about her. When she looked at me, boy, she really looked at me, and I looked back, and I wanted to open my soul to her because she had that power.”
Miriam had only encountered one other nun before that, when she was a child living next door to a Carmelite convent.
“I met the Mother Superior,” she says. “I was nine, and I’ve never forgotten her. The matter-of-factness of her faith was superb, and it communicated itself to me.
“So I haven’t always thought religion was hooey. I do now think it’s a lot of nonsense because [life’s] not about God, it’s about us. It’s about men and women, and what we do and how we love and how we cause pain. That’s what life’s about. But she believed, and there was a sweetness and a directness to that.
“I think life for people who believe is uncomplicated because it’s all going to happen up there somewhere, and what we do is unimportant. They believe that the rewards and the hell are waiting. For me, no, the rewards and the hell are here. We make them.”
Sister Luke, however, has a full-bodied faith which sees her through some significant challenges in Holy Days, not least the amount of time she spends cramped in the back seat of a car with young Brian, played by 10-year-old Elijah Tamati.
“I don’t like children very much,” Miriam confides. “I’m not really attuned to children. I’ve not spent much time with kids. But he was very tender with me. He would be helpful, and I appreciated that because I’ve got spinal stenosis, so I can’t walk very well. I’m quite limited in my mobility … He humoured me. I think he liked me, and I think he thought I was funny. We made each other laugh, and that’s a great way of linking with people always.”
Another young actor who has impressed Miriam in recent years is Alistair Nwachukwu, whom she played opposite (along with Stephen Fry) in the 2022 Oscar-nominated short film A Friend of Dorothy.
“I just love him,” she says. “Didn’t you think he was wonderful? … And when he was doing the reading in the film, I was not so much crying as the tears just fell from my eyes. I thought the film was terrific, beautiful. They’re hoping to make a longer feature of it.”
Miriam finds forging connections with younger people very satisfying. A pair of lodgers, George and Emily, share her London home, and they’ve grown close.
“We’re an intergenerational family, really,” she says. “They’ve been here for three or four years, and I love it. I love hearing about what concerns them, what their anxieties are, what they think about, how they see the world. And they like having a kind of grandma figure, a kind of naughty grandma in a way. I’ve never stopped being naughty and slightly childish, and our personalities meld very well.
“I just love them, so much so that I think we might be having a comedy series based on our household. It is under consideration. Somebody is writing it, and I’m very interested. I’m going to play myself. George should play himself because he is an actor, but also a wonderful cook. My favourite cake is coffee and walnut, and he makes a fabulous [one].”
So Miriam has a possible sitcom to look forward to, and a 35-date book tour in the northern autumn. “How did I get so lucky that I’m paid to go travelling and talk to people?” she asks. She still harbours a simmering ambition to do more theatre.
“I wonder if I’ve got one more theatre performance in me. I’m not sure if I’m strong enough to do eight shows a week,” she muses. “I think I could do six. But I would like to play Mrs Malaprop [from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy, The Rivals]. I’d love to do that, though I don’t know that I ever will.
“Nothing gives me more joy than coming out on stage. I’m frightened before I do it. I get terrible stage fright. Sometimes I’m sick, and I have to vomit into a bucket … But then I go on, and I see all those people, and I just dance in my heart because they’re there, and I’m going to talk to them, and they’re going to listen.”
Today, there is just The Weekly listening, and Miriam is sitting in her London front room with a view that extends along a winding path to a leafy summer garden. She wears a blue sundress. The weather is hot and the political climate also stifling. In recent days, there has been another change of British prime ministers. And over the spring, 10 antisemitic attacks were recorded in London. As in other parts of the world, Miriam says, “it’s a very miserable time for Jewish people”.
Miriam might not be religious, but she says, “being Jewish is very much part of who I am. I think of it as a religion, of course, but it is also a cultural inheritance, and that’s the baggage I choose to carry. It’s wonderful baggage because it’s literature, food, jokes – it’s a way of looking at life. I relish it, and I love it.
“Jewish people, it has to be said, are like other people, only more. That is the usual description of Jewish people, which means I am an over-actress, and probably an over-Jew. I’m more Jewish than people really want. I think it’s wonderful to be Jewish, though I’m not a believer anymore… I think religion has caused more problems than almost anything else in the world, except men.” And Miriam chuckles – that wonderful, naughty laugh.
In these times, however, she admits that being Jewish comes with significant risks and moral challenges.
“Antisemitism has always been and always will be,” she says candidly. “People don’t like Jews. Some Jews deserve not to be liked. Others, like me, are adorable.”
Miriam has spoken publicly and forthrightly about Israel’s military activity, which has not won her friends in more conservative corners of the Jewish community. Recently she made headlines speaking about Gaza at Britain’s Hay Festival in June.
“I don’t want my people to be wicked,” she said at the festival. “We who suffered, we who were at the receiving end of nastiness and wickedness and destruction and death and cruelty. I don’t want that… Jews must hold themselves to higher standards, I’m afraid, and we are not doing that.”
She says now: “You speak as you find. Politically, I’m appalled at the killing, the cruelty, and the lies and propaganda Israel is responsible for… I am profoundly pro-Palestinian. I will put that straight out. That makes me unpopular with people who are pro-Israeli. But I care about people; that’s what drives me and always has.”
Her new book, Miriam’s Full English, undertakes an honest assessment of the state of the United Kingdom, in the same way her documentaries took Australia’s social pulse.
Was there anything that surprised her? And, in these challenging times, was there anything to give her hope? Thankfully – even for someone who has famously said the world’s state “has never been worse”, there was.
“Our political system, at the moment, has favoured the nasty,” she says. “The nasty are the people who don’t agree with me.” And she laughs again, a warm, self-deprecating chuckle. “Let’s be fair to them. They’re the people I don’t like.
“But I’ve learned that there are more kind people than I was expecting in England. There are always wonderful people who care about kindness, and if I have any sort of a message, it would be very simple. Be kind.”
Holy Days is in cinemas now. Miriam’s Full English (from $39.99, Hachette Australia) is on sale September 1.
This feature also appears in the September 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
