Celia Imrie has had such a varied career that it is hard to know where you might know her best from. Perhaps it is as Miss Babs, the permanently flustered antiques-shop owner in Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques, or as Philippa Moorcroft, Dinnerladies’ spectacularly uptight HR manager. Maybe it is as Bridget Jones’s family friend Una Alconbury, or from Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
A career across stage and screen
You may know her as Mrs Quickly, the ghastly would-be stepmother in Nanny McPhee. Or maybe you first encountered her in Upstairs, Downstairs, To the Manor Born, Bergerac, Lovejoy or The Darling Buds of May, or as Claudia Bing, the magnificently awful PR rival of Jennifer Saunders’ Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.
More recently, she returned as Una in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy; joined Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley in The Thursday Murder Club; and popped up in The Diplomat. Then, of course, there was The Celebrity Traitors. Imrie entered the castle as a Faithful, survived being chained up in a wooden cabin, and accidentally farted while doing so – instantly producing the Guardian’s No 2 TV moment of the year – and eventually got murdered in plain sight by Alan Carr.
Returning to the big screen
Now she is back in Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint, alongside John Bradley as a Christmas-hating model-soldier painter sentenced to community service at a struggling retirement home, where he somehow ends up directing a chaotic production of A Christmas Carol. Richard E Grant and Jim Broadbent are along for the festive ride, too.
So, from flogging dodgy antiques with Victoria Wood to meddling in Bridget Jones’s love life, retiring to India with Judi Dench to committing Celebrity Traitors flatulence on national television – plus the really important matter of what on earth she is getting Richard E Grant for Christmas – what would you like to ask Celia Imrie?
Please get your questions in by 12pm on Tuesday 13 October and her answers will be printed as part of the Readers Interview series. Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint is in cinemas on 6 November.
