smokers we love: joanna lumley
B Y R O B E R T H A I N A U L T, C E L E B R I T Y C O R R E S P O N D E N T
Best known for her much-loved role as the emaciated, beehived psychopath Patsy Stone from Jennifer Saunder ' s award-winning sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, Joanna Lumley is more than a pretty face, a killer set of manners and a CV to die for. She ' s also a smoker. nightmare there [ in New York ], you can ' t smoke anywhere; it seems the stupidest vice to pick on. I mean, I know lots of people must die of smoking-related diseases, but then lots die of alcohol-related diseases and nobody stops you drinking. We smokers are just a whipping boy.'"
Despite playing chain-smoking Patsy, the real Joanna smokes only six cigarettes a day, but she loves them. She has been smoking Rothmans since the mid-70s but sometimes squeezes in a ' sneaky Silk Cut '. Speaking to the Daily Mail in May 2015 she said: ' I ought to smoke. I try to smoke. I’ d very easily give it up. It just slips away from you and I think:“ Damn, I ought to be smoking!” I do like it— and you’ ve got to die of something.'
She may not live up to the lung-shredding reputation of Patsy but she has always been a firm defender of smoking. She spoke to Notebook Magazine about censors wanting the new Absolutely Fabulous movie to ' tone down the smoking ' because of the ' message it sends to children.' She said:“ Children can access videos of beheadings and play the most horrifically violent video games, yet they will most definitely smoke if they see someone smoking on TV. It’ s madness.”
She has repeatedly stood firm about the idiocy of the smoking ban. In 1999 she told the Sunday Times " It ' s a
Despite this, she has always been polite when asked not to smoke. In January of the same year she was caught out by the smoking ban at Edinburgh ' s Tower restaurant and when she was asked to put out her cigarette by a waiter an onlooker reported a nervous silence. " People almost expected a Patsy-like explosion but she was absolutely charming. She apologised immediately and, taking her glass of champagne in one hand and her cigarette in the other, stepped outside." Onto a freezing terrace, no less.
So perhaps she is a little addicted, or perhaps it is a question of identity. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph in 2009 she said“ Give up smoking? No! One of my few ambitions in life was to become a smoker. I got the idea when I was about seven. I was in Malaya as a child and I saw this wonderful picture of a woman in a magazine... Beyond her was Manhattan and all those lights and she had a cocktail in the other hand, and I thought,‘ Yes, that ' ll do.'” Smoking, it seems, isn ' t something you do but is something you are: a smoker. Well, if it ' s good enough for JoLu, it ' s definitely good enough for us. Bolly, sweetie?
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