Latest news with #MrsWarren'sProfession
Spectator
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Provocative, verbose and humourless: Mrs Warren's Profession reviewed
George Bernard Shaw's provocative play Mrs Warren's Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a brilliant young graduate, Vivie Warren, boasting about her dazzling achievements as a mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge. She explains her future plans to a pair of mild-mannered chaps who clearly adore her. Like most of Shaw's characters, Vivie is hard-nosed, emotionally cold, incapable of speaking concisely and boundlessly self-confident. Quite irritating, in other words. She plans to start a firm with another hyper-brainy female and to make a killing in the London insurance market. This occurs in 1902. Was it normal for two unmarried Edwardian women to enter the world of high finance straight out of university? Hard to say. But for Shaw it seems feasible, so we accept it. However, Vivie's life is about to be thrown into disarray. Enter Mrs Warren, her redoubtable mother, played by Imelda Staunton. Kitty Warren speaks and thinks exactly like her daughter but she affects a more luxurious personal style. Her ash-blonde hair is piled high on her head and she's magnificently robed in a costly ball gown accented with necklaces and other pieces of finery. She looks like the tsarina being led to her execution by the Bolsheviks. But her accent carries inflections of a rough past. We learn that Kitty rose from the gutter to become a wealthy businesswoman and the details of her past are slowly revealed during Act One. She began as a barmaid at Waterloo Station where she earned four shillings (£20 today) a week. Then she was spotted by a female relative who worked as a courtesan and recruited Kitty to the business.
New European
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Imelda Staunton and Jenny Seagrove, the great pretenders
George Bernard Shaw was born about the same time as Oscar Wilde in Dublin, but his plays have not worn as well as those of his flamboyant contemporary. What might have seemed shocking social commentary in Bernard Shaw's day now seems often rather twee, whereas the appeal of Wilde's work endures because really good humour transcends the generations. The director Dominic Cooke has, however, pulled out all the stops to try to make Mrs Warren's Profession – all about a woman who discovers her supposedly well-to-do family's wealth has been based on prostitution – as interesting as it possibly can be. The focus of this is the casting of Imelda Staunton in the title role with her real-life daughter Bessie Carter (by the Downton Abbey actor Jim Carter) playing her daughter on stage. Staunton is great – she is shaping up to be one of our great grand dame actresses in the manner of the late Maggie Smith – and her daughter Bessie is a proper actress in her own right and acquits herself well. There is a wonderful scene-stealing turn from Sid Sagar as a young beau and good old pros like Robert Glenister – playing a seedy older man who fancies his chances with Mrs Warren's daughter – do their stuff admirably. It's all played out on Chloe Lamford's set that delightfully evokes summer days and genteel living, but, for all their best efforts, there is a reason Mrs Warren's Profession is seldom revived in the West End. What might have seemed shocking at the turn of the last century – it was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain – can seem awfully boring in 2025. Jenny Seagrove and Simon Shepherd in The Anastasia File. Photo: Simon Vail Meanwhile, Jenny Seagrove has chosen wisely for her long-awaited return to the stage with Royce Ryton's The Anastasia File. She brings a wonderful mix of aristocratic hauteur and vulnerability to the part of Mrs Manahan, the woman who claimed to her dying day to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, supposed survivor of the massacre of his family by Bolshevik revolutionaries. It's a cleverly constructed piece with a fine ensemble that includes Simon Shepherd as a persistent police inspector inquiring into her story, Rosie Thomson as a possible in-law and Ashley D Gayle as her doctor. Roy Marsden recognises as director that the story is strong and intriguing enough to be told without any unnecessary flourishes and leaves it to his excellent cast to do their stuff. One of those plays where you're forever wondering what's going to happen next. In the case of the production itself, I hope a West End transfer.
Daily Mirror
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Fans of The Crown fans only just realising star's daughter is Bridgerton actress
Fans of Netflix series The Crown and Bridgerton have been left shocked as they've only just realised two of the huge stars have an extremely close relation The Crown and Bridgerton are two of Netflix's most popular shows, and fans have been left in shock as they've only just realised that two of the stars are mother and daughter. Dame Imelda Staunton, who plays Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and her daughter Bessie Carter, who plays Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton will be on The One Show tonight, revealing all about taking to the stage together for the first time. The mother and daughter duo are currently in rehearsals for a new production of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, playing Mrs Kitty Warren and Vivie Warren. Fans however, were left in shock when they discovered the two were related. Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, one penned: "DID YOU GUYS KNOW Bessie Carter who plays prudence featherington is THE DAUGHTER of Imelda Staunton who played Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter?!!!!!" Another shocked fan wrote: "I just learned Bessie Carter and Imelda Staunton mother and daughter!" A third shocked fan exclaimed: "Woah! Wait a sec! Did everyone else know that Prudence Featherington (aka. Bessie Carter) is Jim Carter & Imelda Staunton's daughter???" However, the duo even admit themselves that people "wouldn't pick them out" as mother and daughter. 'Fortunately there's a line in this play about how you can't tell that the characters are mother and daughter, because you wouldn't really pick us out in a crowd [as related]," they told The Guardian when speaking on their new project. "But it's always been a life dream of mine to work together," Bessie continued. Further gushing about her daughter, Harry Potter star Imelda said: "She's everything I could never be, this tall, elegant, confident, gorgeous woman. I just sit here and think: 'In God's name, how did that happen?'' Although many say the pair look nothing alike, Bessie told her mum: "I've got your eyes and dad's legs." Imelda isn't Bessie's only famous parent. Her father is Jim Carter, known for his role as Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey. Bessie is the only child of the couple, who tied the knot in 1983. The couple met on the first day of rehearsal when they were both performing in Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in London a year prior to their marriage.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘You wouldn't pick us out as mother and daughter!': Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter on acting together for the first time
'It's amazing that I came from you,' says Bessie Carter to her mother, Imelda Staunton, during a break in rehearsals for the forthcoming revival of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, in which they'll play a mother and daughter and share a stage for the first time. She has a point. Carter, 31, best known as Bridgerton's Prudence Featherington, is 5ft 10 and aquiline, glamorous in a maroon leather coat and silver-studded shoes. Staunton, 69, is barely 5ft tall, quiet and unassuming in slacks and a blouse, short grey hair pinned back. There's no hint of grandeur to this theatrical dame, who was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake in 2004, played Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter series from 2007 and was the last iteration of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix's The Crown. Staunton's stellar stage career in both straight plays and musicals also brought her a fifth Olivier award for her recent performance in Hello, Dolly! at the Palladium. If anything, she seems slightly in awe of her only child with her husband of 41 years, Jim Carter (AKA Downton Abbey's Mr Carson). 'She's everything I could never be, this tall, elegant, confident, gorgeous woman,' Staunton says. 'I just sit here and think: 'In God's name, how did that happen?'' 'I've got your eyes and dad's legs,' Bessie comments. (Both women do indeed have piercing blue eyes.) 'Fortunately there's a line in this play about how you can't tell that the characters are mother and daughter, because you wouldn't really pick us out in a crowd [as related]. But it's always been a life dream of mine to work together.' The dread term 'nepo baby' hangs in the air for a moment before Staunton exorcises it. 'Surgeons' children become surgeons,' she says. 'Should they be penalised because their parents have done the job before them?' Bessie says the acting profession was demystified for her as a child: their West Hampstead home was frequently visited by the likes of Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, with whom Staunton appeared in the 1992 comedy Peter's Friends. Also she observed her parents as jobbing actors before Vera Drake, and then Harry Potter and Downton, kicked them into a different league of celebrity. Acting, when she was at school, 'was all about fun and dressing up, and being able to carry that on as a grownup seemed like the biggest privilege. But I didn't want any handouts,' she says. 'One of my biggest things is that I got into the National Youth Theatre and then Guildhall [School of Music and Drama] without them knowing who my parents were. Of course, if this were my first gig out of drama school it'd be very different.' Staunton says that for her and Carter, it would only have been a difficult decision to let their daughter act if they didn't believe she could make a success of it: 'That would have been hard, because you've got to be honest in those situations. But she was fine, and she's had to make her own way. We didn't want her to be handed into the business by us because that wouldn't have shown any respect.' After parts in Cranford, Doc Martin, Howards End and Beecham House, Bessie landed the role of Prudence, the snooty and sexually unfulfilled older sister of Nicola Coughlan's Penelope Featherington, AKA Lady Whistledown, in Bridgerton in 2020. It's hard to recall now what a boon that show's blend of costume drama, ethnic inclusivity and unbridled rumpy-pumpy proved during lockdown. 'It gave everyone a hopeful escapism, which we needed so badly at the time,' recalls Bessie. 'And I got one of the few funny, awkward sex scenes in it, which I thought was really important, because not all sex is steamy and romantic.' Being in a long-running TV series was a great technical education, comparable in its way to the six years her mother spent in repertory theatre after leaving Rada in 1976 (though Bessie concedes she had a head start in TV, 'because I grew up visiting film sets and knew what a first AD did, what a runner and a dresser did'). She proved her stage acting ability in the pivotal role of Fenny in Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus at the National last year and will soon be seen in Outrageous, the forthcoming drama about the aristocratic Mitford sisters, who remain a source of perennial fascination to biographers and producers. She'll play writer Nancy alongside Joanna Vanderham as fascist sympathiser Diana, with Anna Chancellor as their mother, Sydney. 'I know a weird amount about Nancy Mitford,' Bessie says. 'I narrated the audiobook of her novel The Pursuit of Love a few years ago; she worked in St Mary's hospital in Paddington, where I was born, and she went to Francis Holland School, which I dipped my toes into for a few years. It's my first lead role. It's a brilliant script by Sarah Williams, and it's a story about six women, all of them totally unique and all of them raised under the same roof. I originally said quite vehemently to my agent that I didn't want to do another period drama, but he said: 'I don't think you're going to want to say no to this one … '' Similarly, Bessie characterises Mrs Warren's Profession as 'a play with two women at the helm in a masculine world – which unfortunately we still do live in – and them not wanting to play by the rules'. In Shaw's 1893 play, Mrs Warren's Cambridge-educated daughter Vivie discovers that her mother is a sex worker turned madame, setting up a debate where sex, marriage and commerce intersect. 'Basically it's about capitalism and it could have been written in the last two years,' Bessie adds. 'It asks how much longer can we all look away before we have to turn and face what's really going on in the underbelly of the world?' The genesis of the show came when Staunton was discussing potential projects with director Dominic Cooke, a trusted collaborator. They'd never worked on a play before but a musical wasn't an option because, as she says without vanity, 'I've done all the big ones'. She graduated from the chorus of Guys and Dolls in the National's groundbreaking production in 1982 – where she and Jim Carter met on the first day of rehearsals – to play Miss Adelaide in the 1996 revival. Thereafter, she steadily knocked off Stephen Sondheim's major works with Sweeney Todd (2012), Gypsy (2014) and Follies (2017). Cooke, who directed her in Follies, finally persuaded her to do Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart's light 1964 tale of a turn-of-the century matchmaker, Hello, Dolly!, which she initially dismissed as 'sugary'. Staunton had reservations about Mrs Warren's Profession, too, having played the role of Vivie during her rep days. 'I think at that time I didn't know what it was about,' she says. 'Dominic said read it again. I did and realised that the combination of Dominic – knowing the care he takes – and myself and Bessie might be something interesting.' Acting with her daughter will be another first: 'The Crown and Harry Potter, they're two firsts because there'd never been seven books made into eight films [with the same central cast]. And never on television had you had one long story with three casts playing the same characters.' The Crown was a particular challenge as – following on from Claire Foy and Olivia Colman – she was playing the version of the queen that contemporary viewers knew best. 'That body, that shape, that hair…' she says. 'Plus I think it was hard for audiences to accept a new queen if they'd been fond of the previous one.' Bessie chips in: 'I found that really exciting as an audience member, seeing the new version.' It was, we agree, like getting a new James Bond, except that the queen was allowed to age. Appearing in a straight play after Hello, Dolly! is something of a relief for Staunton. 'It's odd for me to be in a room where we're not choreographing, but it's great because I don't have to worry about my voice or all that technical side of it,' she says. She and her daughter ran lines together before rehearsals started, either in the family home or at Bessie's flat in Brixton. 'If we'd done that in the first day of rehearsal, looking into each other's eyes, pretending to be another person, that would have been weird,' she says. 'What we have no idea of is what it will be like for an audience watching a mother and daughter playing a mother and daughter. We will be doing things that we have no idea we're doing just because we are genetically connected.' Both Staunton and Jim Carter were in BBC One's Cranford when a teenage Bessie won a part in it as a maid in 2007-8, but none of them shared scenes together. And Staunton and her husband haven't acted opposite each other since that fateful meeting in Guys and Dolls. In the past she's said they avoided working together 'so you bring home different things'. They have also famously rarely spent more than two weeks apart for work. Couldn't she and Bessie have found a part for him in the Shaw play? 'Wouldn't happen,' grimaces Staunton. 'Try as you might, he's had it with theatre. He'd rather be in the garden.' Bessie adds: 'He'd better bloody come and see it, though.' At this point it's probably worth mentioning that Yorkshire-born Carter dropped out of a law degree at the University of Sussex to join a theatre group called the Brighton Combination in 1968, which put him in early plays by Howard Brenton, but also required him to learn circus skills. 'He doesn't unicycle any more, but he can still juggle and he's still got all his magic gear,' says Staunton. 'He still pulls out a card trick or a coin trick now and again,' Bessie adds. In the early years of their marriage, Carter was a more visible face on film and TV than Staunton. I tell her how fondly I remember his role as a French resistance fighter called Déjà Vu ('Haven't I seen you somewhere before, m'sieu?') opposite the late Val Kilmer in the Zucker brothers' 1984 war spoof Top Secret!. 'Jim's first screen kiss was with Val Kilmer,' she says with a rueful smile. Talk turns briefly to mortality. Alan Rickman, who died in 2016, was one of Staunton's contemporaries at Rada and preceded her in the Harry Potter franchise as Severus Snape. 'We weren't close friends but I miss his presence and his kindness,' she says. 'Once 15 of us went to see a show with him and we ended up at [theatre hangout] Joe Allen's. It was long before I was in Harry Potter but he must have started in it because at the end he just got the bill and said' – here she does a terrific impersonation of Rickman's bone-dry drawl – 'Harry Potter's paying.' Bessie, delighted, says that Anna Chancellor recounted a similar story about Rickman during the filming of Outrageous. A larger absence in Staunton's life is Stephen Sondheim, who died aged 91 in 2021. 'He was a great champion of me but he loved all his stars,' she recalls. 'The great thing about him is he would never say: 'When Patti [LuPone, his Broadway muse] did this part…' He would just be in the now and you were the best one on that day. After we did Sweeney Todd in 2012 he insisted I should play Mama Rose in Gypsy in London, but I wasn't famous enough then, and apparently neither was he, which seems inconceivable.' Gypsy did happen at Chichester in 2014 and duly became a smash hit in London. When he died, Bessie gave Staunton a framed photo of Sondheim sitting in their West Hampstead kitchen during rehearsals for Sweeney Todd. At the Olivier awards Staunton paid tribute to her late Irish Catholic mother while accepting the award for best actress in a musical for Hello, Dolly!. 'If I may say something to my late mum, whose name was Bridie McNicholas,' she said. 'Great name, must renew [my] Irish passport. Mum, I'm here at the Albert Hall, I've got a prize, but more importantly, I'm about to do a play with your granddaughter. I wish you were here.' Bridie, a talented singer and musician who ran a hairdressing salon, and her construction worker husband, Joe, emigrated to Archway in north London from County Mayo in the 1950s. Bridie and Joe split up when Staunton was in her late teens but got on well even when they found new partners. Bridie died in 2004, a week before Staunton received news of her Oscar nomination. Carter and Bessie accompanied Staunton to that Oscars ceremony, and they took ham salad sandwiches to eat in the limo on the way. 'We've got our packed lunches for rehearsal today,' says Staunton matter-of-factly. 'You've got to be sustained.' Joe died in 2010. I wonder how he and Bridie would have felt about their daughter being made a dame by King Charles in 2024. 'I don't think they'd have believed it but they'd have been extremely proud,' says Staunton. Bessie says: 'We toasted them on the day.' Has ennoblement changed her mother, I ask Bessie. 'Yeah, dad and I have to bow to her now,' she grins. What's the secret of a long marriage? I ask Staunton. 'I don't think there's one secret but respect, kindness and humour are the secret to ours,' she says. Bessie is now single, having split with her Bridgerton co-star Sam Phillips. 'Everyone always goes, 'Oh, God, you don't want to date an actor.' And I say, but my parents are totally happy and they're both working actors.' They've given her a romantic and a professional pattern for life, proving it's possible to move between film, TV, stage drama and musicals. Bessie lets slip she's been having singing lessons: 'I'd love to be in Guys and Dolls, genuinely.' Would she want to play Miss Adelaide, her mum's old role and the more comic part, or Sarah Brown, the missionary who gets the romantic songs? 'Adelaide, because I like the funny,' she says. 'Do both,' says Staunton. Mrs Warren's Profession is at the Garrick theatre, London, 10 May to 16 August
The Independent
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Imelda Staunton's daughter says growing up with actors ‘removed inaccessibility'
Actress Bessie Carter has said that growing up in the theatre world alongside her parents Dame Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter 'removed the inaccessibility' of the industry for her. She is about to star alongside her mother in a revival of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, about a woman who learns her mother Kitty (played by Dame Imelda) has earned her fortune from running brothels, at the Garrick Theatre later this year. Carter is best known for playing Prudence Featherington in the hit Netflix Regency-inspired drama Bridgerton, along with her theatre work. As she featured on the cover of Tatler's May issue, Carter discussed her parents' acting lives, and connections with Dame Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and Sir Stephen Fry. 'It all felt very normal and removed the inaccessibility thing,' Carter told the magazine. While speaking about her family and actors, she added that they were 'good people, they know the influence they can have, they are so kind and generous'. Carter also spoke about promoting free therapy service Self Space, and her own 'passion' for the mental health treatment. She said that therapy had helped her with 'believing in your work, especially as a woman; believing your voice has value, that your ideas count and matter and could change the world in a positive way'. 'I think it's about time that women genuinely started to change the world rather than leaving it to the men,' she said. 'I just think if everyone could have therapy, we would be in a different world. I'm very big on making those sorts of things accessible.' Carter is next going to star in UKTV show Outrageous, where she plays Love In A Cold Climate author Nancy Mitford with The Paradise star Joanna Vanderham among those playing the other Mitford sisters. Carter's mother Dame Imelda played the late Queen in series five and six of The Crown and the cruel bureaucrat Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter films. The full feature is in the May issue of Tatler available at and on newsstands from Thursday April 3.
