Jennifer Ellison Modeling For New Calendar Girls: Laura Davis meets three Calendar Girls preparing to strip off on the Empire stage DESPITE the Calendar Girls story bringing so much joy to film and stage show audiences, it started with a moment of great sadness. John Baker, who up to that point rarely suffered from illness, was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Shocked by this terrible news, his many friends in the close-knit North Yorkshire village where he lived, got themselves into action.
Most surprising was the local Women’s Institute, who decided to create a calendar in the style of Pirelli to raise funds for the Leukaemia Research Fund. On an October night in 1998, eleven women met at the home of local artist Terry Logan prepared to bare all for a good cause. Sadly, John did not live long enough to witness the fruits of their labours, nor the hot property their story has become. Telling their tale when the Calendar Girls stage show tours to the Liverpool Empire next month is a cast that includes Liverpool-born Jean Boht – best known for playing Ma Boswell in Carla Lane’s TV show Bread. She plays Jessie, the senior Calendar Girl, and the retired village schoolŠteacher. “People have said to me that Jessie has the best lines in the Šshow. She tends to exit with a witty Šone-liner,” she says. “But if you think that a line is funny, then it will never work. You have to play the situation rather than the joke.
Boht, 74, is looking forward to returning to the city of her birth, although she is a regular visitor and can often be spotted watching husband Carl Davis conducting at the Philharmonic Hall. Her most exciting experience in a Liverpool theatre came relatively early in her career, she reveals.
“I got a call from David Scase, at the Liverpool Playhouse,” she explains. “He’d found this young actor called Anthony Hopkins. Would I come back to play his mother?”Fellow Liverpudlian Jennifer Ellison will play Celia in the show – ahead of shooting the film Sure Fire Hit in October, with Sex and the City’s Chris Noth, in which she plays a trainee assassin. “Celia appears to be a Štypical WAG. She’s the trophy wife who embodies what most people dislike about young women,” says the 27-year-old mother-of-one.
“It’s all make-up and hair extensions for her. She’s married to a much older husband who neglects her. He’s brought her to Yorkshire where she knows nobody and while he spends all his time playing golf, she’s lonely and that’s why she’s joined the WI.”There is nothing showbizzy about Ellison’s background – her mother is an administrator while her father drives a taxi. Yet you sense that they have given her unstinting support in everything she’s achieved.
“When I was young, I used to think that being famous was all glitz and glamour, but it’s not and you have to learn to take the knock-backs as well, such as the parts which suited me perfectly but which I didn’t get,” she says. “For example, I’d been offered a role by DisneyŠin a big Hollywood movie and my mum and I had our bags packed, ready to fly off to LA in the morning.
“Then, at half-past eleven at night, the phone went and we heard that Adam Sandler, who was the executive producer, had decided at the last minute that the character I was playing should now be older. So it was all off and you can imagine how disappointed I was. “Sure enough, had I been working in Hollywood as I’d planned, I wouldn’t have met Rob, my husband, and we wouldn’t now have Bobby, our baby son.”Bobby comes ahead of her career, she adds. She spends the day with him and he sleeps during performances in the evening. Another priority is the opening of the Jennifer Ellison Fame Academy in Liverpool next year.
“We’ll be teaching skills like script technique, audition technique, we’ll be giving people a real insight into the business and how the West End theatre works,” she explains. “There’s a huge amount of raw talent out there in Liverpool and people have a love and a passion for performing.”Those hoping for a chorus of Cambrian accents in this Calendar Girls company will have to satisfy themselves with the lilt of Rachel Lumberg (Ruth) and Margaret John (Lady Cravenshire). Ruth Madoc has decided that her interpretation of Marie, the leader of the local branch of the WI in Calendar Girls, will have purely Yorkshire tones.
“She’s a bit Šof an Aunt Sally figure who’s there to be knocked down,” says the 67-year-old. “I also think that there’s a touch of Gladys Pugh from Hi-De-Hi in her, although she’s a bit more efficient than Gladys.”Madoc has signed up for 20 weeks of Calendar Girls, so she will be on the road for most of the coming year. She will be meticulously prepared for Ševery eventuality on the tour, she says, much to the exasperation of her husband, who’ll be accompanying her.
“He’s ex-Army and he always complains that I’m Šworse than a battalion,” she laughs. “My middle name is Just-in-Case, because I like to be prepared for anything. “You should certainly take a kettle with you – that would be my main piece of advice and please don’t, as I once did, turn up at the wrong theatre. That was most embarrassing.”