‘I directed Miriam Margolyes – there are parts of her people don’t see’

On the famed sofa of The Graham Norton Show a couple weeks back, Miriam Margolyes delighted with her characteristically bawdy tales, and shocked with her brazen question to Alexander Skarsgård: “You’re not gay, are you?”

Nestled within that outrageousness was swift promotion of her beautiful new short film, A Friend of Dorothy. In it, she plays Dorothy, an elderly widow with limited mobility who meets young, closeted queer man JJ (played with startling fragility by newcomer Alistair Nwachukwu) after he accidentally kicks his football into her garden.

A friendship blossoms, as they provide a sense of belonging and stability to one another at a time when, despite their different life stages, both are feeling cast adrift. It’s a real tugger on the heartstrings, funny, and a reminder that long before becoming the farting, swearing, onion-munching viral persona many know her as today, Margolyes was and remains a spectacular thesp.

“Graham Norton always brings up her acting, because he knows,” smiles fellow actor Lee Knight, who makes his directorial debut with the film and was in the chat show audience that evening.

“Our generation knows her for going on Graham Norton and telling funny stories and being this wonderful, hilarious person who says what she thinks, and we love that.” But, he adds, she also has “this desire to understand people. She’s got an inquisitiveness that is an absolute necessity for an actor” – hence the seemingly innocuous Skarsgård grilling – plus “empathy in bucket loads, and I just wanted to really tap into that.”

On Norton’s sofa, Miriam Margolyes lathered Knight with praise, telling the host and audience that he had essentially made her performance in the film what it was. As an 84-year-old with almost six decades’ experience on stage and screen and blissful self-assuredness, what could she have possibly meant by that?

“It makes me quite emotional when I think about it because everyone sees Miriam as so confident – and she is, I’m not doubting that –  but she’s also in her eighties,” Knight says. Arriving on set in London, Margolyes, despite absolutely being the “formidable, joyful, hilarious” woman we’re all accustomed to, was a little uncertain. “She has parts of her that you wouldn’t see, like all of us… of course, seeing her at work in a very different aspect, I get to see the actor.”

She was worried about remembering her lines opposite a sprightly young actor, and concerned about her mobility (she has spinal stenosis and requires assistance with walking). “She was nervous, and she said it to me: ‘You can tell everyone, I was petrified.’ I knew that I was the director to help support her,” says Knight. “I know what Miriam’s capable of and my heart was set on really showing quite the depths of her talent and ability.”

In one scene, the actress navigates a tender monologue about the isolation of ageing. Knight closed the set, sat at her feet with a script ready to assist with lines, and urged her to embrace it. “I said, ‘I want you to enjoy it because [there’s] nothing to be afraid of because I’m right there with you’,” he recalls. “If she ever got stuck, she just heard my voice and I just gave her the line very calmly and that’s how it should be.”

Knight, an actor who has appeared in shows including Vigil, Sherlock and The North Water, has worked with “some wonderful directors” and some “really not wonderful directors”, and so he primarily wanted a set that brimmed with “joy and inclusion”. The sweet connection between Margolyes and Nwachukwu was palpable, with the actress gushing over his performance on The Graham Norton Show.

“It was all pretty beautiful,” Knight says. “She kind of fell in love with him from the moment she set eyes on him and he sort of fell in love with her as well.” Meanwhile, a young woman who joined the crew to assist with Margolyes contacted Knight after filming to tell him that the actress, who is a lesbian, plus the film’s message of queer acceptance, had inspired her to come out to her family. 

In the film, Dorothy’s persona bears some semblance to Margolyes; her first line is “Oh, for f*** sake!” and even her bowels get a mention. Knight acknowledges that he “was writing for an actress, a specific actress” subconsciously, but the story is based on his lived experience. Some years ago, he and his husband befriended an elderly neighbour, Shirley, a widow whose children lived abroad. Shirley was an avid theatre goer, and couldn’t quite believe her luck when she discovered that she lived next to two actors. Shirley’s solo theatre trips became a group activity, Knight would be on hand when her flat flooded or her hip broke, “and this beautiful friendship unfolded”.

“[This] line is in the film, she said it to me with such truth once, and she looked at me and she said, ‘You will never know what it means for someone like me at my age to have two men that can help me and support me.’ I thought about it and I wondered what she meant, and then I remembered she told me stories where she would hide gay men in her garden during the war,” Knight recalls. Shirley was a grown woman at a time when being gay was illegal in Britain. To become best friends with a gay couple in her winter years was special.

“For her, I think that the value [was] in how far we’ve come and how special she found it and how safe she felt with two gay men. Gay men, we love our Dorothys, and I grew up finding safety and solace with older women,” he adds. “That’s why I wanted to explore that, because I don’t think some people would understand how much value you can bring to each other’s life.”

For a debut film, A Friend of Dorothy has been a fairly high-profile affair; alongside Margolyes, Stephen Fry also stars as Dickie, who – spoiler– is the executor of Dorothy’s will. How does a filmmaking newbie bag not one, but two national treasures on a project? It’s all in the script, Knight says – plus a connection or two. Knight was at a charity event attended by Fry and brought his name to his producer the following morning. Conveniently, his producer had worked with Fry, and could get the script to him. “He read it and honestly, I think it was within hours, he said yes. He just wrote back this email saying, ‘This is absolutely wonderful, yes.’ And I just couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t.”

There’s also the little fact that A Friend of Dorothy is an Oscar and BAFTA-qualifying film in the short film categories. ‘I mean, it’s all a bit wild. It is all a bit mad,” Knight says, eyes saucer wide. “The whole discussion about Oscars, BAFTAs, I thought was hilarious early on, but then I saw people’s reactions… That has overwhelmed me, where I started to realise the power of the story.” The film has been doing the rounds at film festivals, often to rapturous response. It feels like a warm hug, people tell him, a paean to genuine connection in a grossly disconnected world. “I think people seem to need that at the moment.”

A Friend of Dorothy will be released on a to-be-confirmed streaming service from 1 January 2026.

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