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By the time an actress turns 70, her days of on-screen nudity are usually far behind her. Not so for Annette Crosbie, who bared all for the very first time, in beloved Brit flick Calendar Girls. "I wasn't wearing a bra", she reveals, "but you can't see anything". Still, as they say in Paris, the crew got an eyeful. "That wasn't a big deal for me. I'm not too bothered about the way I look from the waist up, probably because I'm on HRT, so I've still got some kind of bosom. Had anybody asked me to take my clothes off from the waist down that would have been a different matter altogether. Gravity has taken over and you get very self-conscious."
At ease with appearing as nature intended, Crosbie was free to appreciate the discomfort of others. "We had a wonderful gaffer, a lovely man from Ireland, who got so embarrassed about the whole thing. Every time he was called in at the last minute to fix some lights he would try to get to where he had to go without looking. Poor man, he was always bumping into something."
Award-winning veteran of a thousand costume dramas, sitcom legend, OBE and honorary vet Annette Crosbie is at the top of her game. For years she was respected as one of the stage and small screen's leading character actresses. Her role in One Foot In The Grave, in which she played the long-suffering but dutiful wife of a grumpy madman - "I wouldn't have put up with him for five minutes in real life" admits Annette - elevated her to the status of beloved TV hero.
Her early years weren't quite as rosy, though, burdened as she was by emotionally distant parents and a strict Scottish Presbyterian upbringing. "It's not unlike being Irish Roman Catholic," explains Crosbie. "Guilt figures largely. If you're enjoying yourself, whatever it is, it's wrong, and you shouldn't be doing it. You never got praised. Your parents didn't encourage you. You were always apologising. You were always trying harder. But you could never, ever satisfy anybody. And you find yourself still working for your mother's approval even though she's been dead for years."
From the age of 14 Crosbie harboured dreams of an actor's life. That didn't go down well at all. "When I told people that I wanted to be an actor I might just as well have said I was thinking of becoming a prostitute. The reaction would have been the same. It was difficult. When I left school at 17, my mother insisted I do a year at a commercial college, learning shorthand and typing skills. She said I was bound to be out of work and needed something to fall back on that wasn't a mattress."
Fleeing the stifling environs of home for the wilds of Bristol, Crosbie enrolled in a two-year acting course at the Old Vic. "Back then, and this is 50 years ago now, the Old Vic was just one room above a vegetable market and a church hall, but I was where I wanted to be. It was probably the happiest time of my life."
Crosbie's classical training came in handy when TV bekoned, casting her in two decades of intensely theatrical costume dramas, the most celebrated being 1975's Edward The Seventh, in which Annette, at the age of 38, played Queen Victoria from the ages of 17 to 81. "Playing the older Victoria was much harder than pretending I was 20 years younger, because of the weight she put on in later life. By the end of the series I was covered in padding, I had heavy prosthetics on my face, and was buried under mountains of petticoats and corsets. I was big as a barrel. There was only one dressing room I could fit into, with a toilet door just wide enough for me to back through. I couldn't get my own skirts up, or even reach my knickers, so my dresser had to pull them down for me. We were on very intimate terms."
Despite a flourishing acting career Crosbie's priorities lie elsewhere. "My obsession is the treatment that racing greyhounds get. I have four of my own, Hinny, Starkey, Bonnie and Jedda, but I can't save them all myself. It is an appalling animal cruelty scandal that these dogs are killed when nobody wants them any more. There are no laws protecting them, and that's what I'm trying to change."
Here's the happy ending. Her parents may have come up short on the parental love front, but now Annette has all the hugs she needs, from her two grown kids, Owen and Selina, and from One Foot in the Grave obsessives. "People try to hug me all the time, now. Sometimes it's very nice. Little old ladies are fine, though I was once grabbed on a train by a man who had stalked me for an hour. That wasn't quite as welcome."
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