The fifth edition in the Harry Potter movie franchise, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, opens in UK cinemas today, and I can’t wait to see it. Not because I’m a Harry Potter fan, but because I’m an Imelda Staunton fan (and, to declare an interest, a friend, too).
I’d been following her stage career, of course, for years and years, ever since she was promoted from being a Hotbox Girl to Miss Adelaide in the National’s original 1982 production of Guys and Dolls, when she came to Cambridge in a touring production of She Stoops to Conquer, and I was producing a student production of Guys and Dolls at the time. I sent an invitation to her to come to our rehearsals, and got her photographed with our Miss Adelaide. More than a decade later, I ran into her in Dress Circle in Covent Garden and reminded her of the meeting. She was at the shop looking for pointers about how to get a big band show promoted that she was about to do at the Talk of London nightclub, then part of the New London Theatre. I was on my way to a meeting at the Donmar Warehouse to discuss what would become the inaugural Divas at the Donmar season. Without skipping a beat, I asked Imelda if she’d like to be one of our divas. And thus it came to pass that she became part of the opening season. As she said in a programme note, “And it all happened because I met a man in a shop!”
In 2005, of course, Imelda was in the running for Best Actress in the Oscars, thanks to her performance in the title role of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake; and now she’s winning fresh plaudits for her role as the latest baddie, Dolores Umbridge, in the new Harry Potter film. As David Edelstein writes in his New York magazine review, “Above all, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is dominated – nearly subsumed – by Imelda Staunton…. Plump and pink, a tea-cozy Fascist, Staunton’s Umbridge is the distillation of every twisted, reactionary instructor you’ve ever had.” And in the New York Times, AO Scott concurs, “Devotees of fine British acting can savor the addition of Imelda Staunton to the roster of first-rate thespians moonlighting as Hogwarts faculty.”
That roster is, as Edelstein enumerates, “the usual embarrassment of British riches: Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Julie Walters, Jason Isaacs.” He leaves out another of my favourite actors, David Bradley, but asks, “Where is Bill Nighy? Vanessa Redgrave?”, before commenting, “After collecting their Hollywood paychecks, these actors now have no excuse not to do more plays for scale.”
And that is, of course, the wonderful thing about the London stage: that so many of these actors will do just that. Imelda herself was onstage earlier this year at the Almeida in There Came a Gypsy Riding, and (though hardly working for “scale”) Maggie Smith has just finished a run in the West End in The Lady from Dubuque. And, course, let us not forget (as if we could!) that Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, recently made his West End stage debut in Equus, too. We are privileged indeed.
