How To Look Absolutely Fab At 71

Eat vegetables, climb stairs, try not to look fussy, and never wear shorts in the city, Joanna Lumley tells Brigid Keenan.

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Among men, Michael Palin holds the title. But I hereby nominate Joanna Lumley as the Nicest Woman in England.

Everyone agrees – even those (like me) who hate the Garden Bridge idea. She is modest, open and charming to all – witness her current travel series about India on ITV.

She owes this, she says, to her ‘rather kind and nice parents who were sticklers for courtesy and unexpected acts of kindness’. They were also ‘rock solid’ when, aged 20, in 1967 – an unforgiving era for young women ‘in trouble’ – she found herself six months pregnant. Her son is now aged fifty – ‘Fifty!’ she cries – and she is the proud and loving grandmother of his two young daughters.

Lumley, now 71, and I share an unusual number of things – apart from having grandchildren of the same age (and, I learned in the course of this interview, using the same lipstick, May be line Super Stay 510). We were both born in India, had soldier fathers, grew up overseas, returned to the UK on the same troopship, the SS Franconia (albeit in a different year), did not go to university, and embarked on careers in fashion in the Sixties.