Queen Elizabeth rolled eyes, snapped at Miriam Margoyles: 'Be quiet'
'Harry Potter' star Miriam Margoyles recounted her encounter with Queen Elizabeth where the latter snapped and rolled her eyes at her in her upcoming memoir 'This Much Is True.'
The 80-year-old veteran actress talked about the time she was invited to attend the annual reception for British Book Week at Buckingham Palace. It was a very large reception and as soon as she arrived at the royal event in a taxi, she was guided toward throngs of people lining up to enter the venue. She wrote how it was her dream to meet the British monarch one day and the event was going to be her dream come true.
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'Fulfil a dream'
"I knew that the queen, along with other members of the royal family, was expected to mingle and I felt this might be my opportunity to fulfil a dream," Margoyles, who played the lovable Professor Sprout in the 'Harry Potter' franchise, wrote in her memoir, according to the extract obtained by Daily Mail. "As a child growing up in Oxford, I had a little 'den' just outside the kitchen, and I decorated it with pictures of the queen from floor to ceiling. I remember on June 2, 1953, standing at my bedroom window and saying: 'This is Coronation Day and you must remember this all your life.' And I have. Over the years I've played various queens, including her great-great-grandmother Victoria more than once. But that was the nearest I got until that evening."
Margoyles recalled how noisy and huge the gathering at the event was and how she teamed up with a president of the Association of Scottish Booksellers to hunt down the queen. They were advised to form a semi-circle and smile and after the queen saw them smiling in her direction she would approach and talk to them. However, when the moment finally arrived and the queen approached her, Margoyles froze up and did not quite reply as impressively as she had originally planned.
"Her Majesty, looking exactly like the queen with a helmet of iron-grey hair and her handbag clamped like a grenade to her elbow, was standing in front of me. 'And what do you do?' she said. That was where I made my first mistake: meeting the royals does tend to make people daft. Instead of saying, like any normal person, 'Your Majesty, I am an actress who records audio books', I took a deep breath and replied: 'Your Majesty, I am the best reader of stories in the whole world!' Her Majesty looked at me wearily, rolled her eyes heavenwards, sighed and turned away to my Scottish friend," Margoyles wrote.
'Be quiet!'
When the queen directed the same question to Margoyles' friend, her pal seemed to respond more intelligibly. "Your Majesty, I'm an academic trying to help dyslexic children to read. We've discovered that if the letters on the page are printed in different colors, it helps the children to absorb the information more easily," the friend said, which quickly got the queen interested. However, as she was listening in on the conversation, Margoyles said that she could not help but barge into the conversation. "'How fascinating!' I said. 'My goodness, I didn't know that.' Her Majesty turned back to me and said sharply: 'Be quiet!' The 't' of 'quiet' was especially crisp. Everyone looked down, trying to contain their embarrassment at my gaffe. Undeterred, I spoke again: 'I'm so sorry, Your Majesty, I got carried away with excitement,'" the actress wrote.
She continued: "The queen rolled her eyes — again — and started talking about how that morning she had visited a London school and been fascinated by the way English literature was taught there. I was keen to respond so, once more, ignoring the royal request for my silence, I blurted: 'But, you see, Your Majesty, we are so lucky to be born English and to have English as our first language. Imagine, for example, Your Majesty, if we had been born . . .' I paused, looking for a country that didn't boast much of a literature, and came up with ' . . . Albanian!'"
That seemed to have scandalized the monarch, as the royal family is famously known for staying as apolitical as possible. "Alarm crossed her face and she moved away, anxious to put some distance between herself and this clearly crazed woman. Clutching the handbag even more closely and murmuring 'Yes, yes' to herself, she disappeared into the throng," Margoyles concluded of the encounter.
However, it was by no means the last time that she came face-to-face with a royal as she was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to drama. She got the chance to meet Prince Charles at the time, who pinned the prestigious order on her.