‘Baring my soul’

LYNDA Bellingham is a little surprised to discover that I’m keen to discuss her acting in the altogether at Newcastle, not because she’s one of the leading lights of Calendar Girls, but the fact she’d forgotten I was calling in the first place. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I do each morning. I just wait for the phone to ring,” she explains about juggling publicity for the play’s tour with the launch of her painfully honest book, Lost And Found, while trying to write her own column for Yours Magazine.

“Yes, it does get easier getting all your gear off for Caldendar Girls. I have no shame now. The response of the audience is so phenomenal.

“What appealed to me about the play is that it was for actresses of a certain age and appeals to women of a certain age who, historically are usually invisible,”

says the 61-year-old. She’s part of a cast of 12 recreating the famous 2003 film, which featured the true story of Yorkshire Dales’ Rylstone & District WI stripping off to raise money for leukemia research with a cheeky calendar. The idea has resounded around the charity fundraising world and given ITV’s Loose Women host Bellingham a West End run and, now, a six-month tour.

“We’ve got three younger actresses in this production to indicate that the WI takes women of any age and I think it’s been a wonderful change of image for the WI which has always been regarded as a dusty, old group hidden away in church halls with wrinkly stockings. And it isn’t like that. The combination of that plus what these women did for one woman’s husband, who dies of leukemia, just makes a brilliant story.”

Bellingham plays Chris (Miss October) who dreams up the Calendar idea and has wonderful lines like “we’ll need considerably bigger buns”.

“My character is very much the engine of the piece and Tricia Stewart, the real lady she’s based on who had all the get up and go, is the same in running a fine line between being buoyant and being pushy,”

she says.

Bellingham’s own life story is just as fascinating and her new book outlines her early days of stripping off in the Confessions films, two disastrous marriages and her embarrassment about playing the Oxo mum while being a battered wife.

Has she bared her soul as well as her body I ask. “Well, I have and there’s more.

When the highlights were cut and pasted together for a newspaper article it was heartbreaking for me. What I’ve tried to do in the book is write the story from A to B, which involves some not very nice things, and one of the things that I think has happened to the autobiographical world is that you get so many people who are ghost written. You don’t hear the voice of the person who is being written about and the person they’re writing about doesn’t commit to telling it all. When they read it back, stuff gets cut such as ‘I can’t put that in, it’ll make me look vain’. That’s a natural human thing, but I very much took the stance of writing it as a story. It was almost like it wasn’t me.

“I have been quite hard on myself in parts of the book and maybe I wouldn’t have been so hard if I hadn’t have had such a nice ending. In a sense there is a happy ending so I feel vindicated,” she says referring to her recent marriage to “Mr Spain” Michael Pattemore.

She feels the book was cathartic because it also outlined the background of her Canadian adoption having been born Meredith Lee Hughes in 1948 – reunions with her mother, Marjorie, were difficult because she had her troubled second husband, Nunzio, with her.

“I was very conscious that I didn’t want to be self-indulgent about this book and pouring out all my troubles. My life touched on a lot of things that people have to deal with and maybe that’s come from Loose Women, where a story shared is a story halved. Other people might benefit from it,” she says.

I ask how her sons, Michael and Robbie, have responded to private life being made public. “I told them I was doing the book. I was going to do it a few years ago and they were very unhappy about it because they were still at school. You do have to take into account your family. I’m not sure they will even read it and I wouldn’t ask them to read it until they are ready. That’s their choice, but I think they understand it’s my life and I do what I had to do,” she says.

Bellingham feels that lots of other women have more interesting and intense stories. “The terrible thing about being a celebrity, and I hate that word because I’m an actor first, is that I get my book printed because my name is known. So I hope I’ve used it responsibly,” she explains.

The actress also recently went public over her struggle to make an impact in BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing, at the end of last year, because she felt that the outfits required count against older female contestants. But wouldn’t she have preferred a few twirls on the tour of Strictly, which also went to Newcastle, rather than the comedic unclothing in Calendar Girls?

“They didn’t ask me to be honest. When they talked about the prospect of a tour of Strictly I’d already agreed to do Calendar Girls, so it wasn’t an option anyway. I would have done it if they’d asked me because I’d have been happier in a live show rather than TV. The thing about Strictly is that it was so much about being myself rather than a character.

“I take my clothes off in Calendar Girls as a character and you don’t see anything anyway. But when you’re at the top of the stairs on a Saturday in front of however million viewers it’s horrible because there’s nowhere to hide. It was more about not being thrilled about my physical appearance. Those dresses are not kind. I was quite good at remembering the steps, but I couldn’t get over feeling selfconscious,”

says the woman who is showing a considerable amount of bare flesh on the publicity poster for Caldendar Girls.

“Yes, you can say I look very good for my age. With Strictly, if you’re a size 14 and a woman in your late Fifties or early Sixties, logic tells you that you’re never going to compete in a showbiz world that is about perfection. But we’re doing the best we can. Things are so different to what they would have us believe in the bloody media,” she jokes.

“When the day comes in Caldendar Girls where we rehearse getting your clothes off there’s a photoshoot for the poster, in this case behind a piano.

Because I’d done it before I was telling people it wasn’t so bad. What’s weird is that everyone gets very giggly and stares defiantly into each other’s eyes… looking at anything else.

“On the stage it’s not about the person getting their clothes off but, more importantly, they have to be covered again when they get dressed. One of the hardest thing that transpires is that people tend to walk away after the undressing and the actress has to whisper ‘no, no, come back’.

You can almost feel the theatre holding it’s breath for each undressing and we have a buns trolley which goes for a bit of a wander and some knitting needles which can get caught in the blanket.”

■ Caldendar Girls, Newcastle Theatre Royal, March 29-April 10. Box Office: 08448-112-121 Lost And Found: My Story, by Lynda Bellingham, is published by Ebury Press, £17.99.