The versatile voice of Miriam Margolyes unveils some home truths about Kent’s famed Victorian author in Dickens’ Women. Chris Price reports.

It is easy to see why Miriam Margolyes thinks nothing of playing 23 characters in her one-woman show Dickens’ Women.

Few things come more naturally for the Harry Potter star, who will tour 39 cities around the globe this year in the show she co-wrote, bringing different voices to life.

“I have always done voices,” she said. “When I was a little girl I used to walk to school and I got bored on my own so I made up little plays and I played all the parts.

“When I hadsan audition at the BBC, I got the panel to imagine they were in a train carriage then I did different voices.”

Ever since then work has come thick and fast for Miriam and at 71 she isn’t planning on slowing down just yet.

“I’m recording a radio comedy series today and I have been doing it all week,” she explained during a break from recording. “It means my days are very full.”

Called Gloomsbury and scheduled for broadcast next year, the programme is an affectionate radio parody of the Bloomsbury group, a band of bohemians whose arty and adulterous adventures dominated the cultural scene in the early 20th century.

The story follows the fortunes of Vera Sackcloth-Vest, played by Miriam, who is a writer, gardener and transvestite. Her character is a send up of Vita Sackville-West, who grew up at Knole at Sevenoaks and designed the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, but Miriam is not worried about staying faithful to her role’s real-life inspiration.

“You just dream up a character. Vera is very upper class and very aristocratic. She is also incredibly sexy but in a very upper class way.”

Although she is from Oxford, Miriam has strong Kent connections. She owns a home, the Gun Emplacement, in St Margaret’s Bay, near Dover, which is the closest house in England to France. Built in 1910, Sir Peter Ustinov was billeted there during the Second World War and he bought it from the Ministry of Defence in 1946. Miriam bought it in 1977 and now rents it out as a holiday home.

Family holidays for Miriam were often spent on the Kent coast as a child, where they would stay in boarding homes in Ramsgate and Margate. Miriam is also a fanatic about Kent’s most famous son, Charles Dickens.

“I’m mad about the guy,” she said. Her one-woman show, began life as a two-person play when Miriam wrote it for the Edinburgh Festival with Sonia Fraser. When Miriam’s acting partner dropped out at the last minute a couple of years later, she decided to do it on her own.

“That was blimming hard,” she said. “I had to learn a whole new script in a week. Now it is quite perfect. It is funny, interesting, educational and even shocking in some places.

“It is the story of his life, using the real women in his life to tell it. The characters he wrote about were all based on real women, so it is not something you can mess about with. I am very proud of it. It is a brilliant piece of writing and I am not embarrassed to say that at all.”

Miriam Margolyes’ show Dickens’ Women comes to the Deal Festival at St George’s Church on Friday, July 6. For returns call 01304 370220.

The show is then at Dickens World, Chatham on Saturday, July 7. Tickets £21 to £24. Box office 01634 890421.

Miriam’s cottage, the Gun Emplacement in St Margaret’s Bay, near Dover, can be viewed at www.countrycottagesonline.com