When her daughter Bessie was small, Imelda Staunton would read her bedtime stories. “I’d say something like, ‘And then the witch came in,’” says Staunton, cackling away like a wrinkled old woman. “And she’d say, ‘Oh, don’t do the voices, Mum!’” The 69-year-old actor adopts the world-weary sigh of a precocious six-year-old. “I think you thought you could do them better than me,” she says to her daughter, now 31. “Oh God, I remember that,” says Bessie, who takes the surname of her father, Downton Abbey star Jim Carter. “Or maybe I was thinking you needed a bit of direction.”
Twenty-five years later, mother and daughter are in the same dressing room at the Garrick Theatre, ahead of the evening’s performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. The production marks the first time they have worked together, and if Carter, best known for playing hoity-toity Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton, has indeed been giving her mother directing tips in the rehearsal room, then she is braver than most.
Staunton has a reputation for being both formidable and a bit intimidating. Yet the star of Harry Potter and The Crown is warm and emollient next to her statuesque daughter (Carter is a good 10 inches taller than her mother). The pair had wanted to work together for years. “But it was only last summer that we dared admit it to each other,” says Carter.
They’ve picked an excellent vehicle. Mrs Warren’s Profession, which reunites Staunton with the director Dominic Cooke, is Shaw at his most prescient: a biting social drama about capitalism, circumstance, and complicity. It feels as resonant today as it was considered radical in 1902: the original production had previously been banned by the lord chamberlain over its references to prostitution.
Staunton plays the eponymous Kitty, an impoverished sex worker turned successful owner of brothels. Carter is Vivie, her free-thinking, socially privileged, Cambridge graduate daughter, who has grown up blithely unaware of her mother’s past. The play pings back and forth ideas about female choice, moral hypocrisy, and the ethics of capitalism in ways that speak directly to the modern debates about the funding of institutions. Both actors in the show are marvellous.
“Every actor likes to say their play is relevant,” says Staunton, who has no truck with her industry’s more high-falutin claims about itself. “But 130 years ago [the play was written in 1893], Shaw was saying that it’s not right that there aren’t better opportunities for women, so it feels important to be saying those words today. I mean, look at the still male-dominated TV industry.” She rolls her eyes. “Because we need more stories about guns, don’t we? We need more stories about men who go to war.”
The declamatory, socially driven work of Bernard Shaw has fallen out of favour these days – in fact, Staunton initially didn’t want to do Mrs Warren’s Profession at all, dismissing it as old-fashioned. Yet she acknowledges now that Bernard Shaw was a pioneering advocate of women’s rights. He is also a rare example of a late-Victorian playwright who produced excellent parts for women. “I love the complexity [of their relationship]. It’s not necessarily solvable,” she says, “for both women are as strong as each other.”
You could say the same about Staunton and Carter. Staunton, born to working-class immigrant Irish parents in 1956, is the five-time Olivier-winning star of the British stage (her recent musical theatre triumphs include Follies and Hello Dolly, both directed by Cooke) and the Oscar-nominated star of Vera Drake. She is known to millions of children as the venomous Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter, and to their parents as the late Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown.
Carter, meanwhile, has already exerted admirable control over her own career: alongside TV roles in Howards End and Beecham House, she produced and starred in a short film based on Madeline Miller’s Circe, and will next be seen as Nancy Mitford in the forthcoming biopic about the Mitford sisters, Outrageous.
Physically, mother and daughter are chalk and cheese – Staunton diminutive and not remotely flashy; Carter all long lean lines and angles, like a 1920s Bloomsbury aesthete. But it’s clear they are cut from the same cloth. “Women today are told we have to play the game,” says Carter. “But if you just work hard, it will pay off. And if you enjoy wearing a lovely dress then that’s also fine, but know what it is.”
-Bessie-Carter-(Vivie-Warren)-2-credit-Johan-Persson.jpg)
There was never any question as to whether Carter, who is Staunton and her husband’s only child, would go into the family business. There was never any attempt to dissuade her, either: after all, she had grown up in a north London house frequented by Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, and Hugh Laurie. “How could you dissuade, when you are coming home from work each day with wonderful stories about this or that actor?” points out Staunton. “Who could refuse someone that?”
Carter graduated from Guildhall in 2016 and, perhaps determined not to be perceived to be riding on her parents’ coattails, took her career into her own hands from the start. “I have a lot of drive to make stuff happen myself, instead of waiting for the phone to ring,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of feminist rage in me about how things work. I want to be one of the [people who] make things different.” They both bat away the term “nepo baby”. “Some people might use that phrase, but I don’t really care,” says Carter. “I believe in myself and my trajectory being what it is, and I’ve never used my parents, ever, to get any work.”
Also, Staunton points out, “there seem to be about 22 million more actors now. During the time of Maggie [Smith] and Robert Stephens [the late parents of the actor Toby Stephens], you could count actors with that level of celebrity on one hand. Now it’s not unusual for children to have parents who are also actors, simply because there are so many of them.”
“And actually, it’s really nice when I’m in hair and makeup and the makeup artist says, ‘I worked with your mum,’” adds Carter. “Who wouldn’t like that?”
When did she first realise Staunton was both extremely good at what she does and also pretty famous? Carter turns to her mother. “I remember the first time I saw her on stage, in Guys and Dolls [at the National in 1996; incidentally, Staunton had met her husband years earlier in a 1982 production of the same musical]. I was tiny, and I saw Mum in a wedding dress marrying someone else [Staunton played Nathan Detroit’s long-suffering fiancée Miss Adelaide]. And I started to cry. They had to take me out of the theatre.”
She was much older when she realised her mother had become face-on-the-side-of-a-bus famous. “It was Harry Potter, of course. Like most children, I grew up reading them and going to the bookshops at midnight, so that was quite exciting.” A new TV remake of Harry Potter is in the works, but Staunton is amusingly sniffy when I ask her about it. “To be honest, I’m not sure why they are doing it,” she says. “But I suppose it will give a new generation of actors a lot of work, which can only be a good thing.”
She turns back to Bessie. “We had Vera Drake before Harry,” she reminds her. Staunton played the eponymous backstreet abortionist in Mike Leigh’s 2004 Oscar-nominated tour de force, a performance widely regarded as perhaps her very best. Carter was 11 at the time, and Staunton, anxious about how best to introduce her daughter to the difficult subject matter, watched the film with her at home. “I remember, at the end, you just turned to me and said, ‘But where are all the men?’ Because all the men [in the women’s lives] had scarpered.”
“Did I really say that?” replies Carter. “Gosh, a feminist at the age of 11.” What she most remembers about Vera Drake is her mother’s face in one pivotal scene as the police come in to arrest her character: an acting masterclass in doing very little to convey a huge amount. “Mike Leigh said, ‘Just think the thought, and the camera will find it. You don’t need to show it.’ It was so exemplified in that moment. So that was a pretty wow moment.”
She accompanied her parents to Los Angeles for the Oscars ceremony. Mostly, Carter’s memories of that trip are of being served hot chocolate with marshmallows for the first time. Staunton remembers the Oscars for a particularly frank exchange with a photographer. “People were screaming at me on the red carpet, going, ‘Is this the most important day of your life?’ And I was like, ‘Well, it’s obviously the most important day of your life.’ It wasn’t the most important day of my life. It was a good big party. But the most important thing was making that film.”
Staunton sounds almost regal when she says this. One can almost hear in her voice the steel-capped, no-nonsense tones of the late Queen. The two women have, on some level, almost merged together in the public imagination, so memorable was the actor’s performance in The Crown.
Staunton was still filming season six when she heard that the Queen’s death was imminent; it came on the afternoon of 8 September 2022. “I’ve got no claim to her at all, but I felt absolutely distraught. Helen Mirren [who played Elizabeth in 2006’s The Queen] emailed me to say, ‘I know how you’re feeling.’ So yes, it was very strange.”
“[The Queen] had this great ability to block everything out,” she adds. “I watched reams of old footage of her, and whenever she’d arrive somewhere in, ahem, the colonies, she’d be greeted by millions of people. Yet she would greet whoever she was there to meet straight on, like a horse with blinkers. She refused to be distracted. I thought, ‘I’ll hold on to that.’”
She feels that something significant died with the Queen that went beyond the end of her 70-year rule. “Whether you like it or not, this was a woman who got up every day and did that job, decade after decade, with such grace. In a titchy tiny weeny way, it’s like doing a theatre job for eight months: you just do it,” she says.
She compares the stamina of today’s generation of young actors unfavourably with that of the Queen. “Of course, it’s easier for my generation and the generation above me to say that, because we were brought up on theatre, and theatre gives you muscle; we did six years of rep with no understudy,” says Staunton. “So, when the younger generation of actors go, ‘Oh, I’m a little bit tired,’ I think, ‘That’s your loss.’ Resilience in all parts of life is necessary. The Queen also had no choice; nor did the royal family. They were very unlucky to be born into it, which is something The Crown showed very well.”
However blissful Carter’s childhood sounds – famous actors at the dinner table; trips to the Oscars; two successful actor parents who always made sure one of them was at home – perhaps her greatest privilege was to have a woman like Staunton for her mother. Staunton’s brand of plain-talking good sense ought to be made available on the NHS. “It’s hard, because acting is a business of comparisons,” she says. “Why am I not doing that job? Well, because you are not. You have to accept rejection, and if you can’t accept it then get out.”
Evidently Carter took that advice to heart. It’s a busy time for her: Outrageous, which is based on the Mary Lovell biography The Mitford Girls, is out next month. “Our show makes clear that if you don’t listen to women, and give them a valuable place in society, a job that’s valued and heard, then they scream louder. And that is what happened with some of the Mitfords,” she says. “It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s the same story as this play. If you don’t listen to women and make them feel equal, they will go to extreme places.”
You can see why Staunton never tried to dissuade her daughter from becoming an actor.
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ is on at the Garrick Theatre, London, until 16 August
