Miriam Margolyes has revealed her neighbours in Tuscany have developed a rather cheeky nickname for her.
The Bafta winner and all-round national treasure was recently a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show Your Place Or Mine, where she spoke at length about the home she and her partner share in Montisi, Tuscany.
“I bought an old farmhouse in 1973 when things were affordable,” she explained. “It was an old shabby place, which had been empty for eight years, but I bought one with my partner, and with a chap, a friend of ours, and it’s where we go for our holidays, and we love it.”
She added: “I go year after year, I never get tired of it. And if it hadn’t been for Brexit, I would be there always.”
Later in the interview, host Shaun Keaveney asked Miriam how she’s settled in with the locals in the decades she’s been staying in Tuscany, which prompted the Harry Potter star to reveal they’ve given her a choice nickname.
“The Montisani call me la napolitana which basically means ‘the whore’,” Miriam revealed. “It actually means the ‘Neapolitan lady’ or ‘the lady from Naples’. But I know what it really means.”
Miriam went on to say that the nickname was inspired by the fact she has “a cheeky face and rather large breasts”.
“Am I allowed to say ‘breasts’ on Radio 4?” she questioned. “Well, I’m afraid I have, I don’t know of any other way of saying it. Other than something that would not be acceptable.
“So they cottoned on that I was a naughty one, and so they called me la napolitana. And now, they actually call me ‘Miria’ – they don’t put an ‘m’ on the end, they abhor a consonant at the end of a word. Words are meant to end in vowels, so I’m ‘Miria’.”
Miriam questioning whether she’s allowed to say the word “breasts” on Radio 4 might surprise some people who know her for her unfiltered style while being interviewed.
However, the British star has been burned before, after inadvertently dropping an F-bomb on Radio 4 in 2022 without realising she was broadcasting live to the nation.
Last year, she admitted she was “overcome with horror” by the incident, insisting: “It’s an unforgivable blunder to utter such words on the nation’s main morning programme – and I felt I’d let myself and Radio 4 down.”
She added that she “felt ashamed about it until the producers sent me flowers to comfort me”, despite her worries that “they’d be furious”.
Miriam concluded that the incident was “a reminder that sometimes you do need to button yourself up”.