An Interview:

'Every woman feels she is too old and has missed the boat' Felicity Kendal -January 2002 Like millions of others, my parents and my friends' parents loved the programme THE GOOD LIFE. Our dads were probably all a little in love with Felicity Kendal's eternally perky, dungaree-clad Barbara. Over 25 years later I am sitting opposite Kendal in a London rehearsal room. The astonishing thing about Kendal is that she barely looks a day older than she did in The Good Life. Her face may be a trifle more lined, but she still resembles a pretty little cat who has just acquired the keys to an entire dairy. Her figure is absurdly girlish for a woman of 55. Just as well: Kendal is about to star as Flora in Charlotte Jones's hit play Humble Boy, which opened at the National Theatre last summer and tomorrow transfers to the West End. Humble Boy is a comic-tragic version of Hamlet. It transposes Elsinore to the Cotswolds, and transforms Hamlet into Felix, a plump, unhappy astrophysicist grieving over his father's recent death. Gertrude becomes Flora Humble, a queen bee and rather merry widow in her late 50s who has just had a nose job, and has a close but difficult relationship with her troubled son. Flora is a first for Kendal. After years of creating roles in a string of plays by the likes of Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Simon Gray, she is for the first time taking over a role from another actor. It is perhaps a sign of how much Kendal wanted to play Flora that she doesn't mind following in the footsteps of no less a personage than Diana Rigg. "I'd never considered 'taking over' before," she says. "Doing a part fresh is interesting; stepping into someone else's shoes isn't. But this caught me by surprise. As soon as I saw the play I knew I wanted to play Flora. There was something in the writing that I fell for - the way it goes for the guts of an emotion but isn't at all sentimental. And I felt I understood Flora. She is someone lots of women would understand. She is a woman who always thought she would be more than she turned out to be. Every woman has those emotions, those feelings that you are too old and that you have missed the boat." Kendal doesn't come across as a woman who looks or feels as if she has missed the boat. After all, her career has brought her TV fame, as well as plenty of leading roles on the West End stage. But Flora represents more than just a good, meaty part for an actress of a certain age. Flora is a first for Kendal, who has played sexy, vain, ditzy and daffy and even self- obsessed - but almost invaribaly fundamentally nice. Flora is by no means a villain, but she is a complex woman whose honesty can also make her very cruel, and whose honey-pot attractiveness has made her emotionally lazy. A generation of grandfathers in cardigans may weep, but Flora is really Kendal's opportunity to throw off the image of nice little Barbara for ever. "So many roles for women demand that you make the audience fall in love with you or sympathise with you, but Flora isn't written like that at all. She is an attractive woman, but when you play her you don't have to worry about being attractive in any way. I find that interesting," she says. Not that Kendal is complaining about the way her career has turned out, pointing out that actors should only "carp about the roles that you didn't get when you've got bugger all, and that hasn't been the case for me". But there is a touch of wistfulness in her voice when she talks about the Shakespearean roles that haven't come her way. Ironically, one of the roles she would most like is Gertrude in Hamlet, a part that has always struck me as being rather thankless. "Oh no," says Kendal. "Gertrude is a very interesting woman. It is those younger Shakespearean roles - Ophelia and Miranda - who are the real pills. Thank goodness I am too old to play Miranda." Kendal spent her childhood touring India and performing in Shakespeare plays with her family. When she told her actor-manager father that she intended to leave India to try her luck as an actress in England, he was not encouraging. "You stupid little bugger," he said. "They won't appreciate you." He was of course quite wrong, but in a way I think he might also have been just a little bit right. In Humble Boy Flora says: "When I was little I always thought that I was marked out, special, that I was on the verge of something momentous. I used to tingle with anticipation." Many women feel like that when they are young and, once they are past a certain age, have to come to terms with the humdrum reality and ordinariness of their lives. I feel like that, and I'd sneak a guess that Kendal does, too. Humble Boy is at the Gielgud Theatre, London WC2-Box office: (+44)(0)20-7494 5066.