Fenella Woolgar on how she’s defied ‘fascist’ casting directors with major roles from Midwife to The Buccaneers: I was told to get a nose job

• Woolgar is also starring on the stage in a new farce called Mates In Chelsea
• READ MORE:  A reckoning of sorts, but is the Beeb letting itself off for aiding a monster? CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Steve Coogan’s Jimmy Savile drama

Call The Midwife favourites are often given either a lingering death or a slow-burning romance that ends with them skipping off into the sunset. Not so for Fenella Woolgar’s Sister Hilda, who simply vanished. 

One minute she was there doling out gentle advice and providing some light relief, the next she was gone, mysteriously dispatched to… Chichester.

‘I was sad not to get a dramatic goodbye but it does mean there’s an opening to go back if I want to,’ laughs Fenella, who’s every bit as jolly as the nun she played for four years. ‘And while I really miss the cast members and crew, I think we actors like to do lots of different things.’

She’s since had fun getting her teeth into meatier roles, including a scene-stealing portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Reckoning, the recent BBC drama about Jimmy Savile. She’d had some experience playing the Iron Lady before, having starred in West End show Handbagged a decade ago. 

‘It was interesting to play a different side of her in The Reckoning, where you see her off-duty with someone she thinks of as a friend,’ says Fenella, 54, of the scenes between Mrs T and Savile. ‘The work I’d done on her before all came in handy. Her accent came back almost straight away.’

Fenella played Sister Hilda in Call The Midwife for four years

Fans can see another side to Fenella in new Apple TV+ costume drama The Buccaneers, an adaptation of the unfinished Edith Wharton novel. 

She plays stony-faced Lady Brightlingsea, who is less than impressed when a bunch of rich, louche American girls come over here in 1870 to marry our lords.

‘It’s a joy of a show, apart from the corset,’ she says. ‘This era was the worst for pulling in the waist to a silly degree, and my corset was very tight. You can only eat tiny amounts and you can’t lie down during a break. It makes you realise that women in those days were dressed to never be able to run away.’

She’s also currently starring on the stage in a new farce called Mates In Chelsea at London’s Royal Court Theatre, in which she plays another upper-class ‘harridan’ who’s struggling to keep her son in line. 

‘It’s a farce but there’s this undercurrent of social comedy too,’ she says. ‘There’s an element that investigates where power lies in this country. But more than anything else it’s just really funny.’

Not bad for an actress who was once told she needed to get a nose job if she wanted to succeed. She’d finished at Durham University and was pondering a life on the stage, having fallen in love with acting at school. 

‘I was told by a director before he’d even seen me act, “You will never get any work unless you have a nose job”,’ she reveals. 

‘It was a shocking thing to say to a young woman, but I was determined it wouldn’t stop me. I was lucky I wasn’t fresh out of school so I was a bit more mature.

‘I do sometimes wonder whether it’s affected my casting – it can be frustrating. The profession is so strange, it puts a particular type of look front and centre. 

Woolgar played Margaret Thatcher in The Reckoning (above). She’d had some experience playing the Iron Lady before, having starred in West End show Handbagged a decade ago

‘We don’t tend to have a great variety of face shapes, and the end result is terrible fascism. The idea that we must all look exactly the same. In real life people with a variety of faces fall in love, so I don’t know why only a certain look is allowed on screen.’

She adds that there is a benefit to being a ‘character actress’ though, because she gets to play all sorts of roles, from Midsomer Murders and Dalgliesh to the 2003 film Bright Young Things. 

A mother of three teenagers with her doctor husband, she also has a successful second career as an artist and won Celebrity Portrait Artist of the Year in 2019.

She’ll never play badminton for Britain though. ‘I had to learn to play for Mates In Chelsea and I’m still not very good,’ she admits. ‘But how I love the challenge of doing something new.’

• Mates In Chelsea is on at the Royal Court Theatre until 16 December.

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