Spare a thought for luxury property concierge Heaven, who thinks her job is a way to “live vicariously” through her billionaire guests. She is so disorganised that the bosses have brought in five-star hotel expert Jasmin. Cue plenty of competitive drama in this icky (but undeniably watchable) reality series about running a mansion on Sydney Harbour. Disasters include lost bottles of vintage champagne, an unwelcome dog guest and a pair of disgruntled hunky chef brothers. Hollie Richardson
Heatwaves: The New Normal?
7pm, BBC Two
It’s a suffocating 31C at the time of writing, so the question posed here is enough to make a nation sob – and reach for another fan. BBC weather expert Sarah Keith-Lucas delivers some hard truths as she looks at what rising temperatures are doing to all industries. HR
Scrublands: Silver
9pm, BBC Two
As the second season of this gripping, slightly sinister Aussie noir continues, Mandy is in trouble. She’s been arrested for Jasper’s murder and doesn’t have an alibi. However, while the police wander down a blind alley, journalist Martin has other ideas: could a system of sexual exploitation around tourist visas offer him a way in? Phil Harrison
Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector in The Gilded Age. Photograph: HBO/Sky Atlantic
The Gilded Age
9pm, Sky Atlantic
Busybody Bertha’s (Carrie Coon) “vision” for her daughter has started to interfere with business, and George (Morgan Spector) can’t have that, especially with the Duke’s deal beginning to fall apart. Meanwhile, Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) makes an eligible acquaintance and Agnes (Christine Baranski) is adjusting to life on the outside. Ellen E Jones
Elsbeth
9pm, Sky Witness
When a young motorist is suspiciously found dead in his vehicle, Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) goes undercover at his pricey wellness retreat to ferret out a lead and, as one does, ends up confronting her own emotional repression. Accused of covering up past abuse, she unravels, just as the retreat leader’s shady past resurfaces. Ali Catterall
Crime Scene Cleaners
10pm, Channel 4
A frankly stomach-churning documentary series that most of us could do without. But, for those with strong dispositions, it follows the experts who clean up crime scenes, which this week include a London spot where a teenager has been stabbed to death in a rental car. Over in Louisiana, a potentially explosive meth lab is discovered. HR
Two-time Oscar winner Michael Douglas has revealed he may be finished with acting, saying he has “no real intentions” to return to the industry.
Speaking at the Karlovy Vary international film festival in the Czech Republic for the 50th anniversary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – which Douglas co-produced – the 80-year-old actor and producer told a press conference that unless “something special came up” for him, he would not act again.
His last role was playing Benjamin Franklin in the Apple TV+ series Franklin, which was filmed in 2022 and released in 2024.
“I’ve had a very busy career. Now, I have not worked since 2022, purposely, because I realised I had to stop,” he said.
“I’d been working pretty hard for almost 60 years, and I did not want to be one of those people who dropped dead on the set,” he added.
“I’m very happy with taking the time off. I have no real intentions. But I say I’m not retired, because if something special came up, I’d go back. But otherwise, I’m quite happy. I just like to watch my wife [actor Catherine Zeta-Jones] work.”
He added that he was “trying to get a good script out” of a ‘“little independent movie”, but joked: “I’m not pursuing work. My golf game is getting better.”
In 2010 Douglas underwent chemotherapy and radiation for stage four throat cancer. At Karlovy Vary, he said he was “fortunate” to avoid surgery, which “would have meant not being able to talk and removing part of my jaw … that would have been limiting as an actor”.
Douglas also addressed the current state of US politics, saying that he felt his country is “flirting with autocracy”.
“I look at it generally as the fact of how precious democracy is, of how vulnerable it is and how it always has to be protected,” he said. “I hope that what we’re struggling with right now is a reminder of all the hard work the Czechs did in gaining their freedom and independence. Politics now seem to be for profit. Money has entered democracy as a profit centre. People are going into politics now to make money. We maintained an ideal, an idealism in the US, which does not exist now.”
However, he added that he would “not to go into too much detail” as “the news speaks for itself”.
“I myself am worried, I am nervous, and I think it’s all of our responsibility to look out for ourselves,” he added.
Marie Antoinette’s magpie eye for the lavish and precious — and the latest trends — knew no bounds.
Had she not bought a handsome bracelet set with antique cameos at the gates of Versailles from a then-unknown teenaged goldsmith named Jean-Baptiste Mellerio?
Almost 250 years later, it was inside the boundaries of the palace’s estate that the jeweler’s descendants unveiled the “Jardin des Rêves” high jewelry set, composed of a necklace with a detachable pendant and a single earring.
They come in a bespoke trunk modeled after the “marmotte,” a trunk with straps in which the dynasty’s founder brought his creations to Versailles, which was technically the “first Mellerio boutique” according to brand lore.
Taking pride of place on these gem-set multicolored creations — and the Pierre Frey fabric lining the trunk — is a voluptuous pineapple motif.
A stylized version of the fruit, featured prominently on a color-filled tapestry in Marie Antoinette’s private apartments, caught the eye of Laure-Isabelle Mellerio, artistic director of the 412-year-old French family-owned jeweler and a member of its 14th generation.
The Jardin des Rêves high jewelry set.
Courtesy of Courtesy of Mellerio
Not only did this resonate with the house’s penchant for gardens, naturalistic treatments and color, but the tapestry itself gave a glimpse of the doomed queen’s “intimate taste,” Mellerio said.
“At the time it was the king of fruits, a recent import, and this exoticism allied to the richness of color [showed] how advanced the queen’s taste was,” she continued. “There is this layering of an original motif with the printed cotton tapestry, another novelty at the time.”
Plus, Mellerio herself found the fruit attractive from a jeweler’s standpoint. In particular, its volume makes it “immediately impactful because everything that’s round like that becomes very pretty as a pendant because it moves and catches the light,” she said.
Two years were necessary to source the stones used to evoke the chromatic richness of the Toile de Jouy print that called for some 27 colors — the maximum number possible, a docent noted during the evening.
The necklace, a multicolored take on the house’s “Pierreries” design, features more than 170 carats worth of juicy-hued gemstones that include aquamarines, heliodores, tanzanites, emerald-green tourmalines, rubellites, morganites, rosy imperial topazes and sapphires in blues or pinks.
Hanging from a 1.12-carat ovoid Mellerio-cut diamond is the pineapple.
Executed in a gem-set lattice filigree evoking the pattern of the rind and set with more than 8 carats of precious stones including diamonds, with leaves paved with some 300 smaller gems, it can be detached and worn with the solo earring as a matching set — but the artistic director suggested a stud earring for an of-the-now asymmetric vibe.
For managing director Christophe Mélard, the set is something of a crowning achievement that indicates the direction the house has taken over the past two years, marked by the introduction of the monochromatic Pierreries necklaces and continued with XXL-sized Talisman high jewelry pendants meant to be worn in a more quotidian manner.
“When we presented our jumbo Talisman necklaces, we evoked the idea of unfussy high jewelry,” he said. “Here, it’s the same idea with the necklace. It has an almost-costume side and this idea of having something that feels a little off the beaten track of so-called classic high jewelry appealed to us.”
The set’s price tag of 900,000 euros — or 750,000 euros, French taxes excluded — might also catch the eye. “We considered it was [judicious] to make it extremely attractive by the quality of the product, its desirability and the history behind it, but also by a price some may consider unreasonable but we consider very reasonable [all factored in],” said the executive.
While he said the Jardin des Rêves set would likely not land Stateside, where the jeweler has been exclusively stocked at Bergdorf Goodman since February 2024, a second pair of earrings with its pineapples will be presented at the New York department store.
It’s a development that reads as a nod to a market that’s proven fertile ground for the French jewelry house, with a strong debut that saw the U.S. grow to a 25 percent share of business in 2024.
The first half of 2025 has been more subdued, with sales contracting year-over-year. The jeweler also effected a 20 percent price increase, due to the combination of the new U.S. tariffs and significant cost increases on raw materials, including gold.
Mélard was nonetheless cautiously confident, thanks to U.S. consumers’ appetite for exceptional pieces that could lead to a swift turnaround.
That’s also why designs such as the pineapple-filled Jardin des Rêves set are key.
“In the past, we leaned a great deal on being the jeweler of queens,” Mélard said. “But we are also in the mindset of finding contemporary queens, [who] walk on the streets, go to dinner, work and have at some point in their life the opportunity to wear sets that are a little more exceptional.
“This set is also here to support Mellerio’s contemporary aspiration of being joyful, playful in its way of offering a high jewelry gesture to its future client,” he continued.
The author Sir Michael Morpurgo has spoken of the importance of taking the arts to places off the beaten track as he prepares for a recital of new poetry inspired by Vivaldi at a festival on and around Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.
Morpurgo agreed to perform at the inaugural Music on the Moor festival, partly to draw attention to inland areas of Britain’s far south-west often missed by visitors heading for the coast.
He said the festival, which begins on Wednesday, was being staged in “the middle of wonderful nowhere”.
Morpurgo, who lives across the border in Devon, said the arts survived relatively easily in towns and cities. “There are more people there to come to concerts and plays and theatres. We are left certainly down in the West Country with very little. When someone starts up something like this in the middle of wonderful nowhere, it must be supported. Local people have a longing for this sort of thing. I love it when someone says, we’re starting up a festival.”
The poet Ruth Padel and the Brodsky Quartet will perform together at the church in St Neot, Cornwall. Photograph: Peter Barritt/Alamy
The events are taking place in the villages of Blisland, St Breward and St Neot, as well as the town of Bodmin. Murpurgo will recite his re-workings of poems believed to have been written by Vivaldi as an accompaniment to The Four Seasons.
The poems will be heard at St Petroc’s church in Bodmin alongside renditions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by musicians including Krysia Osostowicz, the first violinist of the Brodsky Quartet and players from Cornwall and Devon.
Morpurgo said: “It’s a church in not the richest town in Cornwall. It has high levels of unemployment and difficulty but we’re doing it in that place. The thought of bringing Vivaldi to Bodmin with the grey skies and the storms is so completely wonderful.”
The writer said The Four Seasons was as relevant and vital now as it had always been. “We are so often detached from our seasons. Seasons become a nuisance to us. We complain about the weather, and the seasons are changing because of global warming. But it is the case that there is this rhythm to life. And we have been guided by this rhythm for centuries and centuries and centuries. It’s in our DNA. And I love to be reminded of that.”
Osostowicz, who is also the festival’s artistic director, said: “When you read about Cornwall in the news it’s all about the coast and tourists and fishing. Nobody seems to think about inland Cornwall very much and it’s just a wonderful area.”
A focus of the festival is “music bouncing off other art forms”, Osostowicz said. Other highlights include the poet Ruth Padel and the Brodsky Quartet performing together at the church in St Neot. Earlier, there will be a talk on the church’s medieval stained glass.
The festival opens at Blisland on Wednesday with How Pots Sing, a demonstration by the potter Chris Prindl accompanied by music by Bach, with tea and cakes also available.
As recently as 1974, scarcely a decade after his death, the artist Augustus John received the kind of tribute reserved for a great British national treasure: a two-volume life by the premier biographer of the age, Michael Holroyd, who was already renowned for his life of Lytton Strachey. Accompanied by the media hoopla of the moment – lavish Sunday newspaper serialisation, breathless TV coverage, hundreds of column inches in the broadsheets, and immense global sales – it was the kind of celebrity bonanza that impinged on this reviewer as a student. I still possess a dog-eared copy of volume one, replete with embarrassing marginalia.
Barely a generation after that astonishing, even ridiculous, outpouring of sentimental enthusiasm over the “genius” of a philandering Edwardian self-promoter, the 21st century now takes its inevitable revenge on the past in Judith Mackrell’s belated second look at the artist John, and at his (to us) neglected sister, a woman whose place in the British art scene is still a work in progress. It’s a haunting, melancholy tale of talented siblings whose gifts got lost in the fever of the times. He was overpraised, whereas she was underrated; he lived his life in public, and died full of self-loathing; she cultivated solitude, in answer to her brother’s fame, and died in utter obscurity.
At least in its origins, though, their story is a shared one, beginning with the horror of their provincial childhood in Wales.
Gwendolen and Augustus John were born in 1876 and 1878, respectively, to young Welsh parents. The family idyll was shattered by the premature death of their mother in 1884. As Gwen and Gus, they were semi-orphans in a house they remembered as “a kind of mortuary”. As the “two Johns”, raised in provincial Tenby, they were empire children, growing up in Britain during an era of extraordinary and sometimes troubling transition.
You can read the mind of the age in its literature, the psychologically tormented fiction of writers such as Wilde and Stevenson, who explored the dark side of humanity in their shocking tales of Dorian Gray and Messrs Jekyll and Hyde.
At the same time, after the Education Act of 1870, this was a time of sweetness and light. These late-Victorian children – like our baby boomers – grew up in a society blessed with liberty, literacy and luck; an intoxicating sensation of historical good fortune as the citizens of an imperial dominion on which the sun never set. With some distant rumbles of revolution across Europe, it was still pre-modern. It would take a world war and global revolution to transform it into the Modernist and Postmodern landscape of the 20th century that’s now understood to have been the essential precursor to our own disrupted times.
Mackrell paints her sad and subtle double portrait of the lives of Gwen and Gus with scarcely a sideways glance at the riches of this context. Her camera lens is focused on these ill-assorted siblings as if they are forever young, and strangely timeless. He, tall, rebellious, messy and romantic; she, short, shy, tetchy and otherworldly. Both were – to use an Edwardianism – self-consciously “bohemian”, having grown up in thrall to ideas of “art and beauty”, though neither was born into boho society in quite the same way as were the founding members of the Bloomsbury group.
The pair arrived in London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in the mid-1890s, the era of The Yellow Book and the Oscar Wilde trials. In their different ways, both were ambitious to exploit the wild promise of the new world around them.
A collection of Augustus John’s paintings at Christie’s London auction house in 1963 (Getty)
Women, for Gwen, were the supreme embodiment of humanity. “We are more than intellectual and animal beings,” she wrote, fired up by the women’s rights movement and experimenting with lesbian love. We’ll never know what kind of artist her brother aspired to be. Soon after he joined the Slade, he suffered a dramatic conversion.
In the summer of 1897, while diving on Tenby beach, Gus hit a submerged rock and nearly died. Suddenly a more authentic John – his “unadulterated self” – was born. For the next two decades, he would become this bohemian celebrity, and such a master of the contemporary canvas that Virginia Woolf, forever snarky, would later characterise the first years of the new century as “the age of Augustus John”.
Within two tumultuous decades, his moment had come and gone. Up to the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 – one of the strangest quasi-cultural, diplomatic catastrophes in European history – Gus was in his pomp. Married to Ida, with many children by different partners, and living in a celebrated, but tormented, ménage à trois with Dorelia (Dodo) McNeill, he epitomised “art” to a fundamentally philistine society. Today, he cuts a raffish, unsympathetic figure as Edwardian England’s idea of an artistic genius.
‘In her own quiet way, she burns as brightly as Gus’ (Wikimedia Commons)
In hindsight, Gus represents the flamboyant last throw of a doomed romantic tradition. His elder sister Gwen attracts our attention as the reticent, steely, and guarded representative of a new sensibility. Their relationship, tangled up in sibling intimacy, is the enigma at the heart of Mackrell’s nostalgic diptych.
Having bullied Gwen as a girl, Gus seems nonetheless to have welcomed her bold decision to join him at the Slade, where she devoted herself with some passion to her art while overshadowed by the grotesque egotism of her younger brother.
As students, they lived together in penury, dreaming of love and fame. Gus rattles towards his precocious career as an extravagant, vaudeville visionary, seducing his models, fathering children out of wedlock, and squandering his considerable gifts. Mackrell renders this familiar tale with discretion, but draws a blank with Gwen, who keeps herself to herself.
In her own quiet way, the elder John burns as brightly as the younger, painting some remarkable studies in oil, and takes herself off to Paris, where she starves in quest of her art. “Silence is the element in which great things are formed,” she wrote in a notebook, quoting Thomas Carlyle. Her brilliant 1907 study, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, embodies that credo.
Augustus pictured in his Hampshire studio, circa 1938 (Getty)
Gwen’s nature was as passionate as her brother’s. Throughout these Paris years, she had a long and difficult affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, a promiscuous rogue who became fascinated by her “corps admirable”. Mackrell memorably describes her as “a woman who looked powerful in her nakedness”, and for a tantalising few pages, we begin to get a closer look at the artist who once declared “I was born to love.”
Gus had taken pre-war London by storm, but Gwen was born for the century. Fashionable criticism, as usual, got it wrong. In 1917, The Burlington announced that her younger sibling had “come to stand for modern art”. In truth, the European avant garde – notably, the Vorticists, the Expressionists and the Surrealists – had left him in their slipstream.
Contrariwise, it was Gwen who now attracted the most fervent art-critical appreciation, but recognition was slow for a reclusive artist who was increasingly unreachable in France. One of the most poignant lines in this sad biography is the revelation that 1928 was “the last time [Gwen] and Gus ever saw each other”.
(Supplied)
What followed for her brother was “the worst spell of my bloody life”: desperate philandering, exacerbated by bouts of ferocious drinking, and the dawning realisation among the eager young models who tottered into his studio that this romantic bohemian legend was “a monstrous old goat”, even a rapist.
Gwen, isolated abroad, seems to have been suffering the first distressing symptoms of bowel or stomach cancer, and could no longer travel. Solitude, for Gwen, brought her “nearer God”. She died in September 1939 amid the chaos of a France at war with Nazi Germany. The details of her death, where and when she was buried, were lost.
“In death, as in life,” summarises Mackrell towards the end of this baffled attempt at a double biography, “Gwen remained frustratingly out of reach.” Gus became “a national treasure” who admitted that “Hell seems nearer every day.” He died in 1961. Within 10 years, critics were asking, “Was he really that good?”
By Mackrell’s account, the wound at the heart of their sibling intimacy remains hidden. Perhaps she should have interrogated John’s own unreliable memoir more closely for the key to unlock a chamber of family secrets. We already know it hinted at a mutually complicated relationship and the notion that Gwen had “hated her brother”, calling him “her evil genius”. Who knows? It’s a grim truth of the biographer’s art that sometimes the more you look, the less you find. Posterity, meanwhile, makes its own reckoning.
‘Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John’ by Judith Mackrell (Picador, £30) is out now
Also to note on Tuesday: Jordanian-Romanian footwear designer Amina Muaddi will open her first-ever boutique, a jewel-box boutique on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne. The interior was designed by the multi-talented entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami. Californian brand Frame and auction house Sotheby’s are celebrating their capsule collection that was already feted in New York and London.
Wednesday will be about comings and goings: Demna will present his final couture collection at Balenciaga, and Glenn Martens will debut at Maison Margiela. Will the Balenciaga show be attended by Demna’s successor, Pierpaolo Piccioli? They both attended the opening of the Balenciaga exhibition at the Kering HQ.
Martens has big shoes to fill. The last Margiela show was the reveal of John Galliano’s Maison Margiela Artisanal collection under Pont Alexandre III in January 2024, which Vogue Runway and Vogue Business global director Nicole Phelps described as a “fashion show that captured the world’s attention like absolutely no other”. “I have worked with Glenn for years, I have witnessed his talent, and I know what he is capable of,” OTB chairman Renzo Rosso said about Martens when his appointment was announced in January 2025. “Glenn, who studied at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts like Martin [Margiela], has already shown his prowess and his vision in couture,” he added about the 42-year-old Belgian designer.
Paris couture week will end on a high note, with three live performances of Jordan Roth, theatre producer and self-proclaimed couture devotee, titled Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty, at the Louvre. He describes it as a “narrative fashion performance.” Roth will be accompanied by six dancers and conductor Thomas Roussel.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us atfeedback@voguebusiness.com.
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Looking for a hint for today’s Connections puzzle? Below, we have clues to help you unlock whichever category has you stumped for the puzzle on July 7, 2025.
Connections first launched on the New York Times in June 2023. The premise is deceptively simple: Players have to find the thematic connection of four groups of four words … without making more than four mistakes.
Today’s Connections has categories about blowin’ the whistle, takin’ it to the hoop and more.
Below are the hints, categories and answers for today’s Connections game, puzzle #757, on July 7.
A hint for each Connections category today, July 7
Anne Reid wants to get one thing straight from the off. She adores working with the director Dominic Dromgoole. “He treats actors like grownups. Some directors feel as if they’ve got to play games and teach you how to act. But a conductor doesn’t teach a viola player how to play the blooming instrument, does he?” She talks about directors who get actors to throw bean bags at each other and go round the room making them recite each other’s names. “Blimey! I want to be an adult. I think I’ve earned it now.” She pauses. Reid has always been a master of the timely pause. “You can’t get more adult than me and be alive really, can you, darling?”
Reid turned 90 in May. She celebrated by going on a national tour with Daisy Goodwin’s new play, By Royal Appointment. I catch up with the show at Cheltenham’s Everyman theatre. She’s already done Bath. Then there’s Malvern, Southampton, Richmond, Guildford and Salford. I feel knackered just thinking about it, I say. She gives me a look. “Oh, they send me in cars. I don’t have to toil much!”
Yesterday she did a double shift – matinee and evening show. Reid is magnificent as the queen in this witty, moving drama, directed by Dromgoole. The play documents Elizabeth II’s years on the throne via relationships with her dress designer, milliner and, most poignantly, her dresser. We witness the major events of her reign backstage as her team prepares appropriate outfits for them. Reid’s queen is fabulously multifaceted – funny and mischievous, loyal and dutiful, devastated and disappointed, nostalgic and lustful. There are myriad lines to learn and she’s on stage virtually the whole two hours. When Reid emerged for the evening performance’s encore, she looked as if she could have happily popped out a third show of the day.
Anne Reid as the queen in By Royal Appointment, with (from left) James Wilby, Caroline Quentin and James Dreyfus. Photograph: Nobby Clark
She tells me she’s delighted with the part, not least because it’s so different from the roles she played earlier in her career. Back then she tended to be cast as working-class mothers tethered to the kitchen or women working in aprons (Victoria Wood’s canteen comedy Dinnerladies, the cook in the revival of Upstairs Downstairs). “I’ve always been below-stairs, and you can’t get more upstairs than the queen!”
The weird thing is, she says, she grew up in a middle-class family and was privately educated. Her grandfather, father and all three brothers were journalists. Reid’s dad was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and she discovered in 2015 (when participating in the genealogy TV show Who Do You Think You Are?) that he also had a sideline spying for the British in the second world war. Her brother Colin was a columnist for the Daily Mail, and her husband Peter Eckersley worked for the Guardian before becoming head of drama at Granada, which is where they met.
Did she ever fancy a career in journalism? “No, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. My dad wanted me to be a performer because my grandma was some sort of small-time performer. I had a letter from him in the war saying, ‘I want you to drink milk when Mummy gives it to you because that will make you strong, but most of all I want you to learn elocution and to sing and dance.’” She was sent to boarding school in Wales, dutifully took the elocution lessons and lost her geordie accent, and her teacher told her parents that Anne was a born actor. She went to Rada and was the only girl in her year to win a prize.
For the past couple of decades, her parts have been more varied and challenging. Now she’s best known as the genteel Celia in the BBC’s comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax; the family matriarch Muriel in Russell T Davies’s dystopian series Years and Years; the grande dame Lady Denham in the Jane Austen adaptation Sanditon; and the mousy May, who has a sizzling affair with her daughter’s boyfriend in the 2003 movie The Mother. All of them dream roles, beautifully played.
Anne Reid as Valerie Barlow in Coronation Street, 1967. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock
Reid is a household face rather than name. When I tell friends I’m interviewing her, most look blank. Then I show them pictures of her best-known roles, and they say they love her.
We meet in the boardroom at the Everyman. Reid is elegantly casual – shirt, slacks, a dash of lipstick. She can look a little sour and disapproving, then she smiles and her face lights up. It’s one of Reid’s great dramatic gifts, transforming her from dour curmudgeon to empathetic beauty (and vice versa) in a flicker.
Your career has been amazing, I say. She gently rebukes me. “Well, it hasn’t, actually, darling!” Give me a chance, I say – I mean in recent years. “Yes, right! Well, in the beginning I don’t think casting directors rated me. A casting director said to me once, ‘Dear Anne, you always help us out when we’re absolutely desperate.’ Meaning they’d tried everyone else in the business and no one was available. On Desert Island Discs, Kirsty Young said to me, ‘Your career’s the wrong way round.’ I said to her, ‘I think it’s the right way round actually.’ Most people have success in their 20s and then it starts to fade away. Mine’s just got better and better and better.” In 2010, she was awarded an MBE, presented by the queen, upgraded to a CBE in King Charles’s 2025 new year honours list.
Reid was actually famous in her 20s – again a household face rather than name, as Ken Barlow’s first wife, Valerie, in Coronation Street. She made her debut in 1961, and was electrocuted by hairdryer a decade later – still one of the iconic soap deaths. Reid says she was desperate to leave. “I said, ‘I have to go – I’m going mad.’” Was she bored? “Oh yeah! I was so frustrated. I didn’t get a laugh in nine years.”
She thinks that being in Coronation Street pigeonholed her as northern and working class. Didn’t she tell casting directors that she was privately educated and more than capable of playing posh? “Honey, have you ever met a casting director? Once you’ve done Coronation Street, you’re working class. I do think that hangs about.” Even if she was married to the upwardly mobile teacher Ken Barlow? “Well, he’s pseudo-middle class!” she says dismissively. “God, I don’t know how he’s stayed in there so long. I would have gone totally bonkers.” I tell her William Roache is in his 65th year on the Street. She looks aghast. “It suits some people, but it doesn’t suit me. No! I would have been in the funny farm by now, darling.”
Reid and Peter Eckersley on their wedding day in Manchester, 1971. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
It was on Coronation Street that she met Eckersley, who wrote many of the scripts. She adored him, and tells me how wise and witty he was. “My husband was the funniest man in the world. You know that thing Clive James said: ‘A sense of humour is just common sense dancing’? Wonderful saying! Pete had that pinned up on his office wall. Michael Parkinson said he was the funniest man he’d ever met, and so did Victoria Wood.”
She married Eckersley in 1971, the year she left Coronation Street, and got pregnant soon after with their son Mark. But life didn’t work out as she had planned. First her mother became ill and then Eckersley was diagnosed with cancer. She became a full-time carer and mother. In 1981, Eckersley died. “He was ill for a very long time. It was a miracle that he survived that long. We were both 45. Terribly young when I think about it now. I can’t really talk about that much.” She looks upset. “Mark was nine.”
How did she cope? “People deal with these things. You just get on. I wish I’d been the person I am now. I’m much wiser now. I was a fool when I was young.” In what way? Well, she says, Mark had a top education at boarding school, became head boy and went on to the University of Oxford, where he met his wife, but she’s still not sure she did the right thing in sending him away. “He’s lovely. He’s a film editor. And I’ve got two lovely grandsons. Family’s the most important thing in my life.”
When Reid finally returned to work, she’d been away for 12 years, and it felt as if she had to start again with bit parts on TV and in repertory theatre. Wood gave her a break in Dinnerladies in the late 1990s. By now Reid was in her 60s, and this is when she thinks her career really began. She’d never done comedy before except at Rada. “The relief of working with people like Vic was so lovely. Yeah! Yeah, sad!” And I can see her travelling back to the days working with Wood, the comic genius who died aged 62 in 2016. “Sad that she’s gone. She could never have imagined that she would die before me. Vic was a huge talent. Absolutely huge!”
Anne Reid (right) and Victoria Wood in a scene from Wood’s BBC series in 1989. Photograph: Radio Times/Getty Images
It was The Mother that transformed Reid’s career as a serious actor. In an early interview, she said she’d love to be cast in a role where she had to come out of the sea in a bikini and be made love to by James Bond. Here she got her chance, with Daniel Craig, 33 years her junior (and not yet cast as Bond). Reid played the part with such tender yearning and uninhibited passion. The film, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, was groundbreaking. Beforehand, we only seemed to see older women with noticeably younger men if it was played for laughs or weirdness (Harold and Maude) or they were famous beauties (Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, and even then she was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman).
“The Mother changed my life,” she says. Did she realise how radical the part was? “Not really, no. Roger used to say, ‘It’s a film about this old granny.’ I was only 68!”
You were a baby, I say. “Of course I was, but it’s because he was only 40 or something. He said ‘We can’t cast Julie Christie because everyone wants to fuck Julie Christie!’, the implication being that no one in their right mind would want to fuck me.”
‘I want to be an adult. I think I’ve earned it now.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian
That’s outrageous! “I know! I know. He said, ‘I wanted to cast somebody you wouldn’t notice if you passed them in Tesco.’ Thanks a lot! You can see why I don’t feel I’ve been valued, can’t you!” She smiles.
I tell her I think it was a brave film. “Yeah, but I think they wanted to shock people. I mean all that business about leaning down and giving a …” She stops herself for once. Blowjob, I suggest. “Yes! And the actual sex was very unromantic. I thought all that was rather ugly, personally. I don’t think it was necessary. Nooooo! But young men want to shock the public. And Hanif, who I love dearly, certainly does. I do think it could have been more about the emotion than the shocking thing. I found some of it disappointing. I haven’t watched it for years.” It’s really good, I say. “Well I did win the Film Critics’ best actress award. That was really important.” Then she changes her mind. “Oh, it doesn’t matter! Who remembers, darling?”
At the time, she said it was important to show that sexual desire doesn’t simply disappear in older people. “I don’t think it does, really,” she says. What about now, 22 years on? “Oh, now would be ridiculous, darling, but there you go! No, I don’t really think about it.” But what she does think about is desire in general – to push herself, to have fun, to make the most of her life. Reid says it drives her nuts when people in their 60s tell her their best days are behind them. “A dear friend said it to me yesterday: ‘Oh, I’m 62 now – I might never do another play.’ Then a taxi driver – I live in black cabs – said, ‘It’s all over now.’ He was in his early 60s, and you think My God! Well, if you don’t need those years, give them to me because I could do with them. So many of the most wonderful things in my life have happened since I was 68! I hadn’t done cabaret then. I’d not done Last Tango in Halifax. Travelling – I’ve been all over the place. I can’t bear negativity! I can’t bear it, and I get so angry with people who give up.”
Now she’s on a roll. “I’m a real optimist. I always see the best side of things. My father-in-law was the most divine man, an English teacher, and he said happiness is not something you find – it’s something you take with you. Some people will always be miserable, and some people will always find the upside and be happy.”
Anne Reid and Daniel Craig in The Mother in 2003. Photograph: BBC Films/Allstar
Reid never remarried after Eckersley died. Have there been partners? “Ah well, that’s for me to tell you.” Go on, then. “No, no, I don’t talk about my private life.” Is there anybody in her life at the moment? “Nononononono! Not for a good long time. I don’t like living with anybody. I’m very happy on my own. I just prefer to be on my own. I can get up at two in the morning and play the piano if I feel like it. Yeah. I’ve got wonderful friends, and I like to get up and do what I want to do. If I want to go to New York today and I’ve got the money I’ll go, I don’t have to ask anybody or say, ‘D’you want to come with me?’” She pauses. “I used to think it might be quite nice to be American, but I don’t now!” She cackles, and doesn’t even mention his name. “God! What a nutcase!”
She says she’s having a riot touring the play. Every night she and her co-stars Caroline Quentin and James Dreyfus stay up late at night shooting the breeze. Sometimes they are joined by Dromgoole’s daughter Grainne, who is also in the play. “Dominic worries about us. He thinks I’m too wild. He’s always saying, ‘Go to bed! Go to bed!’ because he worries that I live the life too much! But blow that! That’s half the fun.”
As for the future, she’s hoping to take the play to New York, is writing a cabaret that she plans to perform later in the year, and wants to finally get on with her memoir. There’s obviously no point in talking about retirement, I say on the way out. She laughs at the idea. Then, with the sweetest voice, she gives me a warning: “If you write anything horrible about me, darling, I’ll come round and put a bomb through your letterbox and blow your house up.”
Perhaps we should reconvene in 10 years’ time if we’re still about, I suggest. “You don’t know! I might be.” And she heads off, singing: “I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly!”
The 25 people who have gathered in a small Madrid theatre over the past few months to consider identity, relationships, gender-based violence and inclusion aren’t exactly the crowd you’d normally expect to haunt a cutting-edge drama space housed in a former slaughterhouse. And that is precisely the point.
The men and women, aged between 65 and 84, are the first cohort of an initiative that aims to introduce those who live around the Matadero arts centre in the south of the Spanish capital to the joys and challenges of contemporary theatre. Last year, mindful of the fact that many of the older residents of the barrios of Usera and Arganzuela rarely attended contemporary theatre and would be unlikely to darken the doors of the new Nave 10 space, the Matadero and the city council came up with a plan.
“The idea of Nave 10 was to create a contemporary theatre space that provides space for relatively young directors and authors,” said Marta Ruiz, who leads the educational outreach work at Nave 10.
“But we also realised that the programming you get at a very contemporary art space, such as Matadero, can seem a bit remote to people over 65, who may see it as something aimed at a younger audience. That’s why we decided that, in order to create a dialogue between generations, it would be good to bring older people in and make them feel that they were a part of things.”
Participants in Escuela de Espectadores Sénior rehearse plays being shown at the Matadero arts centre. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The Guardian
Last summer, Ruiz and the actor and director Mariana Kmaid Levy began spreading the word around local cultural centres and day centres that they were looking for two dozen older people to take part in a free project that would involve seeing 10 plays and attending classes, workshops and talks.
“From there we put together this group that has spent the whole season coming two or three times a month to see the shows, to do activities and workshops, to get to know the theatre a little more inside and to delve a little deeper into the themes of the works,” added Ruiz.
For the past nine months, those enrolled in Escuela de Espectadores Sénior (the Senior Audience School) have watched, dissected and discussed everything from The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant to Jauría, a play based on the infamous trial of five men who raped a young woman in Pamplona nine years ago. The most recent play was an auto-fiction two-hander by the actors and writers Nao Albet and Marcel Borràs about two ageing friends.
Some of the participants, such as Carmen Horrillo, have been delighted to learn how a production is put together on a technical level, but also to be given the tools to decipher some of the forbidding codes of modern drama.
“It’s easier for me now to explain why people should come and see this kind of contemporary theatre,” she said.
Isabel Cotado, whose membership of the programme has helped her navigate the early days of her retirement, feels it’s also been about shaking up old perspectives.
The school offers classes in contemporary theatre for older people, as well as putting on performances. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The Guardian
“I’ve learned about understanding and accepting people as they are,” she said. “I’ve also learned to laugh about my own life and my own problems – it takes the sting out of some of the nonsense you face in life. Life isn’t just about you.”
Kmaid Levy said that while the group’s “enthusiasm and life experience” had helped them interpret the works and empathise with the characters, the sessions had also proved instructive for the professionals involved.
“This a group of people who speak about theatre in different ways and have another vision and another way of looking at things,” she said.
Albet and Borràs also said their interaction with the group had yielded a different perspective.
“They gave us really interesting points of view about experiences they’d had and that’s always great,” said Borràs. “We normally get reviews and criticisms from friends in the profession or from critics or on social media.”
Luis Luque, the artistic director of Nave 10, said the basic idea of the project – which will resume with a new cohort later this year – was to forge links between participants, between local residents and the venue, and between art and a sometimes neglected sector of society.
“They’ve seen that contemporary theatre speaks to them, too,” he said. “It isn’t something remote; it’s something that calls to them as men and women and poses them questions.”
He highlighted Jauría, which is based on the court transcripts of a trial that provoked a nationwide debate about sexual violence.
Participants watch scenes performed by their fellow members. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The Guardian
“They’re been very honest and very passionate about Jauría and have felt compelled to speak because they’ve witnessed assaults and some have been abused,” he said. “They come from a generation where there was a very brutal sexism – especially the women. When older men see this, they say, ‘What did we do about all this?’ The questions they’ve come out with have been very interesting. It’s not about taking the blame; it’s about taking responsibility.”
Theatre may not point the finger, said Luque. “But it does show you your reflection in the mirror when it comes to how you’ve behaved.”
Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Madrid’s councillor for culture, tourism and sport, is keen to fight against the creation of “cultural ghettoes” and the idea that certain kinds of art are only for certain people. Proof of the school’s success came in a recent chat with a participant. “She told me she’d come to the theatre with her grandchildren and that she’d explained what the play was about before they saw it,” de la Cruz said.
Or, as Horrillo puts it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. “People should go and see this; they can decide afterwards if they like it or not,” she said. “After all, this is art, too.”
