Miriam Margolyes has reflected on the uptick in women receiving Botox injections, calling it a “travesty”.
The 84-year-old Harry Potter actor said in a new interview that she would love to own a self-portrait by the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt, because he painted himself authentically – unlike young women today, who she claimed were concealing their real faces with injectable cosmetic treatments.
Margolyes explained: “Rembrandt was unafraid to paint the sadness in his life. He painted himself unvarnished – I think that’s quite hard to do when it’s your own face.”
“I think of all these women who put Botox in their faces in order to conceal the lines of life. That to me is a travesty,” she told The Times.
According to 2023 data, Botox – an injectable toxin that temporarily relaxes the facial muscles and reduces the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines – has become one of the most popular non-surgical cosmetic treatments in the UK, with an estimated 900,000 Botox injections per year.
Margolyes has been outspoken about the subject of cosmetic treatments before, recently telling The Observer that “greed and the insistence on externals” were the things that enraged her the most about modern life.
She said: “What people look like, how much money they have, Botox, all that nonsense. When you kiss someone, you don’t want ‘filler’. You want the mouth. You want the subtle yielding of skin that belongs to someone you love or desire.”
Margolyes explained that she recently went to a meeting and wondered if she should have worn makeup, saying: “But then I just thought, you know, f**** it. This is what I look like. This is who I am. Who am I trying to kid?”
She continued: “I’ve never been beautiful, yet I’ve managed with the force of my personality and the energy of my intelligence. And that will have to do.”
Earlier this year, the actor hit out at reports she had been unwell, reassuring fans that she was ready to perform ahead of her stint at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival over the summer.
“You might have seen on the internet and in some papers that I’m ‘at death’s door’ but I’m very much alive,” she said. “And I’m raring to go to the Fringe this year.”
