Isla Blair: From Bangalore

‘I like everything to do with tea.

‘The china and silver teapots and strainers and sugar tongs... give due seriousness to this brew that began its life thousands of miles away under the Anamudi Mountain in the blue, blue hills of the High Range, and ripened into two leaves and a bud under the Indian sky.’

I read this in Isla Blair’s accomplished autobiography A Tiger’s Wedding which opens describing her magical childhood years in India during the last days of the Raj, growing up on a tea plantation: and I am therefore unsurprised to be offered the perfect cup of tea at Isla’s home in Barnes, where she now lives with her husband and fellow actor Julian Glover. The afternoon tea ceremony - including lemon cake (plus napkin and fork) - creates the perfect space to talk about her debut book.

Although Isla’s childhood idyll - spent with her beloved sister Fiona, beautiful parents and a devoted Ayah, surrounded by exotic wildlife and breathtaking scenery - ended when the two girls were sent to school in post-war austere Scotland, Isla surprises me when she expresses no hurt or anger at this enforced separation, neither on the page nor in conversation. ‘My compassion was much more for my parents,’ she tells me. ‘People expect me to be bitter but I am not. If they had not sent us away, they would have been regarded as neglectful. They missed us horribly. It was worse for them in a way.’

Isla’s memories are so vividly and crisply recounted in A Tiger’s Wedding that I compliment her on her powers of recall. She laughs: ‘Oh yes my memory drives Julian insane. I can tell you what people were wearing at a party in 1975. I always remember names and faces. People always think learning lines is the hardest thing for an actress. It’s not for me. I learn by hearing them. Once I hear something out loud, I never forget it. I am the same with music.’ Shockingly, Isla did not learn to read until she was 11 – ‘I slipped through the net... I was illiterate but I was not dyslexic. My sister used to read all our letters out loud. I pretended I had read them,’ she says, the skills of recall naturally developing fast, in compensation. Isla is currently championing the Evening Standard’s Literacy Campaign.

On her career - notable first appearance as a pixie in a green hat with long ears - including encounters with stars like Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Quayle (and indeed the star she was to marry) - Isla writes with style, honesty and with humour. She clearly loves her work; but it is her home, marriage and family that provide her with readily-expressed joy. ‘Even when we are both on tour Julian and I always come home at weekends to spend time together. We’ve done that all our married life.’ When their son Jamie was born, she tells me: ‘I fell in love with him. I was alarmed and frightened about how much I loved him because I knew it would last me all my life.’ Jamie, now a director, and his wife Sasha, have two daughters, Edie and Ava, making Isla a granny. ‘Becoming a grandmother was absolutely the most surprising and wonderful thing. It’s the biggest joy.’

Whilst we are talking I spot a large, black, stuffed bird sitting in their conservatory. Isla explains: ‘I bought a stuffed elephant, because I love elephants but its trunk looked, well, a bit like a male appendage. So the elephant had to go. We took it back to the shop but the man said he did not have a returns policy for elephants, would we like this crow instead?’ He’s a bit forbidding, so to counteract any bad crow karma I wish Isla good luck with her lovely book - you are not supposed to wish actors good luck, but it’s perfectly acceptable with writers - which I heartily recommend you read, preferably with a cup of fine tea straight from India.