Out actress Miriam Margolyes is best known for her role as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter series, but her homophobic parents didn’t need magic to try to “pray the gay away.”
In a new interview with Audioboom, the 74-year-old actress opens up about the extreme lengths her parents took to deal with her burgeoning sexuality and how they took “Bible-thumping” to a new level:
“People who were gay were pitied and ridiculed by my parents – they had no modern sense of people being allowed to be who they were. And I didn’t tell my parents, in fact, until I was something like 27. My mother was utterly appalled and disgusted… and she told my father, although I didn’t want her to.
She told him, because they shared everything, and they made me swear on the Bible in the drawing room, in the most formal way, that I would never sleep with a woman again. Extraordinary really, as my father was a doctor and in many ways he was an enlightened man especially around racism. But about homosexuality… never!”
Fortunately, she embraced her sexuality with, as she says, “as much joy and delight as I’ve embraced everything else in my life.” Good for her.
We’ve been fans since she played the nurse in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (and somehow knew there was no way a straight actress could’ve brought that level of camp to the role).
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Margolyes has been with her partner for nearly 50 years (!), and if her IMDB page is any indication, this septuagenarian lesbian isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
Listen to the full interview below, and hope you’ve got half as much passion and love to spare when you’re in your 70s.
John Malin
Miriam, hope you kept your fingers crossed! Oaths don’t matter if your forced to make them and your fingers are crossed, ask Harry!
JJinAus
Strange. SHE has said in interviews that she is Jewish.
kevininbuffalo
@JJinAus: The Bible is a Jewish book, she could be Jewish and be forced to swear on a Bible.
Masc Pride
@JJinAus: Be nice. She was being creative. At least she left out her suicide attempt tally.
@kevininbuffalo: Thought The Torah was the Jewish book. I’m not a Jew, but I had Jewish friends that went to Hebrew school when I was little, and they didn’t use The Bible or claim it as a “Jewish book”.
Stached1
I doubt they owned a Bible as they were Jewish and even pretty much all Jewish people had that mentality decades ago about people who were lesbian/gay/bi/trans.
tricky ricky
I’ve always enjoyed her as an actress.
Pistolo
I agree with her stance on Israel and I appreciate her eloquence and bravery in expressing this. People really need to separate religion from politics, nothing rational or objective can prevail in theocratic ideals or thoughtless adherence to tradition. One can still be a person of observation and appreciation without religiosity, one does not become some modern day infidel for speaking one’s mind to the tune of a universal, human sense of morality. It’s important this be understood.
rikki
She talks a lot of bollocks and I would have serious doubts about this story.