Dame Joanna Lumley has insisted she didn’t want a successful acting career and simply took on roles to “keep herself alive”.
The 79-year-old star has enjoyed a prolific film and television career spanning five decades, with credits like On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The New Avengers, Absolutely Fabulous, and more recently, Amandaland.
However, Lumley said she was never “longing for stardom” and only worked to “pay the rent” and “keep her head above water”.
The Wednesday star - who recently shared troubling thoughts about her health and mortality - opened up about the “precarious” acting profession to Radio Times.
“I’ve had no career – I was trying to earn money to keep myself alive,” she said.
“I’ve never had any idea of a destiny or where my career would go and I have never ever asked myself, ‘Will this damage my career?’ I loved acting, so that was going to be my chosen thing.”
The BAFTA-winning star added: “We actors just wanted to get to be better actors, and we wanted to work so we could pay the rent. We weren’t longing for stardom.
“We’re jobbing actors and we’re no different, really, from painters and decorators. It’s a precarious profession at the best of times and I’ve just done anything to keep my head above water.”
The British star - who is best known for playing Patsy Stone in the comedy series Absolutely Fabulous - started out her career as a model in London in the 1960s.
She said she was initially typecast as the “pretty girlfriend” in roles and was told she could keep working until she was 29, by which point she would be considered “too old”.
The presenter said she resolutely told herself to “stick around” and praised the more “interesting” roles that have opened up for older women in recent times.
The eye-opening interview comes after Lumley said a number of recent personal losses have made her realise she “doesn’t have much time left”.
She revealed several of her “beloved friends are beginning to leave”.
“As you near the top of the hill you suddenly think, ‘Gosh, there’s not all that amount of time left,’” she told My Weekly.
“My time must be coming quite soon, and I don’t want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet.”
Earlier this month, the British star admitted she “wouldn’t mind” undergoing assisted dying if she reached a “miserable” state where she was unable to talk or eat without help.
