Big is beautiful for comedy actress Miriam Margolyes. Failure certainly does not frighten her and success means having another helping of smoked salmon

SUCCESS means never having to say you’re hungry, according to Miriam Margolyes. ‘I get nervous when food is taken away from from me,’ she says, firmly preventing the waiter from clearing the table. The 51-year-old comedy actress has risen in the last few years via voice-overs and BT commercials, her one-woman show Dickens’ Women and a truckful of character roles in films and television to become one of the most sought-after character thespians in the business.

She has just finished filming with Martin Scorsese (‘I was terrified because I admire him so much’) and worked with Jonathan Kaplan playing the mother in Ed and his Dead Mother, in which she plays a resurrected corpse who runs around killing people with a chainsaw. All of which means she has spent most of her time in Los Angeles, where she also recorded the BBC radio version of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I. Just released on cassette, it has proved a stunning success.

‘I’m absolutely gobsmacked – it’s between Elton John and Patsy Cline in the pop charts. The royal family come out of it extremely well, except for Prince Philip. The point of the book is that it shows up what Thatcher has done to our nation. And I am all in favour of exposing that bitch.’ It’s 15 years since she recorded the porn tape Sexy Sonia: Leaves From My Schoolgirl Diary – ‘no repeat fees there and I had to do all my own sound effects’ – though there is scant sign that she has become ‘respectable’. It is largely her wicked sense of humour, as well as her size, that has made her such a favourite on the other side of the pond.

‘You can be whatever you want in LA and I try to steer a course between the Yiddisher Momma and the Venice Beach Girl – Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda. I would say on the whole Shelley Winters wins.’

Not that she has any intentions of adopting Californian lifestyles or fads. ‘I never had any plastic surgery and don’t intend to, though I might dye my hair. I don’t believe in all this New Age nonsense. They’re very frightened over there. They’re very frightened of failure and fat. And I’m afraid of neither.’

Meanwhile, she has another tour of Dickens’ Women in Australia and a new theatre project that she won’t discuss because she is ‘superstitious’. ‘I’m on a winning streak at the moment and enjoying every minute of it. Every bit of smoked salmon tastes as brilliant as the last. And that’s what success is, isn’t it?’ she laughs. ‘Smoked salmon every day.’