Miriam Margolyes makes ‘enormous amount of money’ recording messages for fans
Miriam Margolyes has revealed that she makes “an enormous amount of money” by recording messages for fans at ￡100 a time.
The actress, 83, is signed up to the Cameo website, where members of the public can request personal messages from celebrities.
“There is a website called Cameo and people pay you to say happy birthday to people they love. Sometimes I’m asked to cheer up someone with terminal cancer. This is not easy. Sometimes I’m asked to propose to somebody on behalf of the person who’s paying me.
“I enjoy it. I do as many as I can. And I charge ￡100 and I’ve made an enormous amount of money,” she told the Hay Festival.
“I’m not ashamed of that. I think that’s perfectly fair.”
Of course – I want it all
After explaining that she is a socialist, Margolyes said: “Don’t think I don’t like money – I love money. I love it and I want as much of it as I can get.”
Margolyes said she has also raked in the money for her autobiography, Oh Miriam!
She said: “I didn’t want to write it. I was offered a quarter of a million to write it. No contest!”
Asked if she needed to record her ￡100-a-time Cameo messages, Margolyes replied: “Of course. I want it all.”
Some of her showbusiness anecdotes did not make the final edit of her book, she explained. “There were a couple of things that were regarded as libellous. I told everything I could about who was sweet and who was horrible. But a couple of things were regarded as unwise.”
I showed my dislike
And did she argue with her publishers, or cave in? “I caved immediately, because they were paying me.”
The famously outspoken actress reasserted her dislike for Cambridge University contemporaries Bill Oddie (“not a nice man”) and John Cleese (“John has become a total a*******”).
She is a regular guest on BBC One’s The Graham Norton Show, and said that the only fellow guest she had disliked was Lily Allen.
“She thought when she was on the programme that it was all about her. She thought, ‘Who is this woman? Miriam who?’
“She wasn’t friendly and I didn’t like that and so I showed my dislike, which wasn’t very nice of me because she was much younger than me and I should have just taught her how to behave.”
