Dame Jilly Cooper scolded the team behind Rivals and told them to stop making her “macho men” cry on screen, an executive producer on the show has said.
The Disney+ show is based on the best-selling novel written by Dame Jilly who died unexpectedly last October, aged 88, after suffering injuries from a fall at home.
Speaking at Hay Festival on Sunday, Laura Wade, writer and executive producer on the show, said Dame Jilly was like a ray of “human sunshine” but had dished out one memorable piece of criticism.
Ms Wade said: “We were so lucky to have Jilly… You would expect someone to be quite strict about what you do with their key characters, and she really wasn’t.
“She would tell us, if I was making Rupert (Campbell-Black) cry too often, that was one of her favourites – ‘stop making my macho men cry all the time’.”
Set in the 1980s, with the backdrop of the Cotswolds countryside, Rivals follows the high-stakes world of British television as careers, marriages and reputations hang by a thread when professional and personal lives collide.
Dame Jilly was an active part of its production and served as an executive producer.
During the panel discussion at Hay Festival, Victoria Smurfit, who plays Maud O’Hara in Rivals, recalled the moment the cast and crew found out about Dame Jilly’s sudden death.
The actress said: “I came back (from a break) and Eliza Mellor, our extraordinary on-set producer, was in the room and everything about her was devastated, and I remember walking in and going, ‘Oh God, someone’s died’.
“And it is a testament to Jilly’s sparkle and her champagne soaked soul of heavenly delight that at 88 there was not one iota of me that thought it might be her.
“She’d been across all the episodes, she’d been across season three, she’d been across everything, and she dropped and rolled…
“And now she gets to have fun up there.”
