When we speak in mid-May, Miriam Margolyes is about to mark a big birthday. ‘I never thought I would be 83,’ she shares with her characteristic barbed joviality, ‘and I’m going to be if I live until Saturday.’ It’s a cause for celebration, not just for her longevity, but for a career that has never been in ruder health. Only a few years ago, she was bemoaning her comic role in the public eye, expressing a wish to tread the boards as a Shakespearean actor. But in her ninth decade, she is enjoying the shape her fame has taken: ‘I’m better known than I’ve ever been in my life,’ she marvels. 

Now the author of three books, a member of Call The Midwife’s roster and something of a panel-show darling, Margolyes has won over audiences with her frank, approachable manner. And people do like to approach her. ‘They ask what I call Reader’s Digest questions: who’s the worst? Who’s the best? What’s it like being old?’ But all this pales in comparison to her life’s work as the nation’s most formidable interpreter of her favourite novelist. ‘I am a Dickensian actor,’ she says. ‘People say “Miriam is an over-actress”. I don’t care. That is required in this instance.’

Her affection for audience and author culminates in a new solo performance, Margolyes & Dickens: The Best Bits, her first Fringe show in 12 years. Half the set is reserved for an audience to ask those Reader’s Digest questions, while part two reprises the same format as her Dickens’ Women, bringing to life Charles Dickens’ most colourful characters. Margolyes’ love affair with him stretches back to her girlhood, when she first read Oliver Twist at school. ‘The vitality of it!’ she exclaims. ‘It’s very filmic. I came across this chap, Fagin the Jew, and that sparked my interest. It was clear that he was not only extremely funny but horrible, evil, a complete arse. I thought “how can that be Jewish? I’ve never met anybody like that.”’

Fagin is among Dickens’ most infamous creations, his own contemporaries accusing him of prejudice for his portrayal of the Jewish crime lord (he edited some of the more offensive content out in later editions). When pressed on whether she believes Dickens was antisemitic, Margolyes is typically forthright: ‘everybody is antisemitic, darling,’ she says. ‘He was a chronicler, a journalist, and Jews couldn’t earn a living. Maybe they couldn’t speak the language. They were refugees, and he reported what he saw. But he added that extra spice of evil, which is extraordinary.’ 

That’s not to say that Dickens is beyond reproach. Margolyes is incandescent about how he treated his wife, whom he attempted to have incarcerated in an asylum in a scheme to be with his mistress. ‘He was a bastard, no question. But he wrote like a king, like a god.’ Would Dickens have been cancelled had he published today? It is difficult to answer sensibly, argues Margolyes, because he wrote then, not now. Anyway, she’s a believer in dialogue. ‘You have to accept sometimes that people are imperfect, even the ones we admire. You want your great artists to be great men. They are not. They are great artists.’

Margolyes herself has courted controversy over the years, triggering headlines with her love for a well-timed swear or salacious anecdote. She hasn’t held back from condemning what she considers the ills of our time either, aiming a sharp tongue at Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu (‘he is doing his best to wipe out a nation, and that is loathsome, contemptible and wicked’) or Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic: ‘the wars, the greed, the lies, the National Health Service collapsing . . . I don’t remember anything in my lifetime being as awful as things are at the moment.’ There’s a sense from her outrage that the public are shocked by the wrong things. ‘I think of myself as a moralist. I may say “cunt” and “shit”, but I haven’t hurt anybody. I haven’t deprived anybody of food or shelter. It’s what you do that matters, not what you say.’

Revisiting Dickens now feels pertinent, with diseases like scurvy reappearing, homelessness reaching record highs, and experts predicting Victorian levels of inequality in the UK. ‘Nobody has learnt anything. We just go on in this endless cycle of cruelty and occasional kindness. I think he was terribly aware of that,’ says Margolyes of Dickens. Is there anything we could learn from him about facing our challenging zeitgeist? ‘What he does teach is what people hide. I’m always interested in that. That’s why I ask the questions that I do, because they jerk people back. They’re momentarily shocked and they drop their guard. That’s the moment I’m waiting for.’

Now that Margolyes has settled into her eighties, does she relate to Dickens differently from when she first devoured Oliver Twist aged 11? ‘I don’t think my age has dimmed the happiness I feel when I open a book by Charles Dickens. I feel the same excitement, the same surprise and the same joy in the prose.’ She feels similarly about the Fringe, where she performed long before finding TV fame; it’s clearly a thrill to return, accompanied by the main man in her life. ‘It’s a bit of a lark... it’s nice to have a lark when you’re 83.’

Margolyes & Dickens: The Best Bits, Pleasance At EICC, 7–15 August, 4pm.