Actress Alison Steadman Tells Graham Keal Why She Relished Living The High Life In Her Latest Role., Daily Post
ALISON Steadman's career has never been driven by the pursuit of big bucks, but she admits she has rather taken to wafting around a commodious country house in expensive clothes as the mother of the bride in BBC1's brilliantly manic new sitcom, The Worst Week of My Life.
The Liverpool-born actress is sitting by the indoor pool of this des res in the bijou Buckinghamshire village of Denham, holding court to a small gathering of visiting journalists, many of whom weren't born when Alison gripped the nation with the TV premiere of Abigail's Party back in 1977.
Having more recently starred in three series of Fat Friends, Alison's proportions are a little more generous than they were in the 70s, but the eyes are very blue, the golden hair is very blonde and she makes 57 look a very attractive place to be, especially in her low-cut purple blouse and expensively exotic blue and red chiffon jacket.
"You can tell from the house that these people are stinking rich," says Alison.
"It's actually fun for me to be able to go shopping for clothes for a role and to have a lot of money spent on me, because this woman would have a lot of money.
"I would say that probably 70pc of the characters I've ever played are poor, or they're quirky or something, so it's been really nice just to be able to float around Liberty's and have exotic clothes like antique kimonos bought for me."
Alison plays Angela, the wife of a high-ranking judge (Geoffrey Whitehead) and the series follows her increasingly fraught seven-day build-up to the high-falutin' wedding of their daughter (Sarah Alexander) and her accident-prone intended (Ben Miller).
"She's organised this huge, expensive wedding that has to have exactly the right this and exactly the right that but things keep going wrong until it all spirals out of control."
Angela, says Alison: "Is like a lot of middle-class women married to successful professional men who remain very much in the shadow of their husbands." But this is not a description that could ever have been applied to Alison, not even during her 23-year marriage to genius film-maker Mike Leigh.
