‘I was asked if I would wear Nicole Kidman’s breasts’

18 February 2009

Geraldine James, recently notorious as the breast-feeding mother in Little Britain, talks to Tim Walker about her role in Howard Barker’s Victory

Geraldine James’s agent telephoned one day and asked if she would care to play an over-protective mother. And he added there was something that she ought to know: it involved breast-feeding and, ah yes, the recipient would be a man in his thirties. The distinguished stage and screen actress has always liked surprising people and that was why, after she had seen the script, she agreed to appear in the ‘Bitty’ sketches in Little Britain — although not, she hastens to add, with her own breasts.

‘Everybody assumes they were mine, but in fact they were prosthetic and made by the man who made the fat suit that Matt Lucas used when he played Bubbles,’ says Miss James matter-of-factly.

‘Like Bubbles’s, they were low-slung, which was helpful because all I had to do was lift a tiny bit of my jersey and David could pile straight in. There was pipework running through them to provide the necessary liquid and that meant, behind the sofa or whatever, several men close by had to be operating a pump.

‘I grew fond of those breasts and when I was asked to appear in the American version of the series, I asked if I would be getting the same pair and they told me: “No, we have got you Nicole Kidman’s.” I wasn’t sure if that was going to work — Miss Kidman is, after all, a lot thinner than me. I never did ask what it was that she had needed them for, but they still fitted pretty well.’

People tend to react with either wonderment or exasperation to Geraldine James’s career. Those who take the latter view point to how she never capitalised on The Jewel in the Crown, one of the most successful television series of the 1980s which ran to 14 episodes. The casting directors wanted her to replicate the same role over and over again and she simply wasn’t having any of that.

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