How Miriam Margolyes inadvertently got caught up in a £17million cocaine operation
There’s a refreshingly old-school appeal to the recent career of one of Britain’s undisputed national treasures, star of stage and movies, the inimitable Miriam Margolyes.
While to millions, she’s best known as Harry Potter’s Herbology professor Pomona Sprout, her career is a long and enviable one. Her credits also include The Age of Innocence, Little Dorrit, Little Shop of Horrors, Romeo + Juliet, and originating Madame Morrible in the West End production of Wicked, which are all feathers in a large and particularly distinguished cap.
However, showbiz infamously doesn’t offer much for women to do after the age of 50. While Margolyes has been working incessantly over the past decade or so, that’s arguably not what she’s famous for. Instead, for many, like other thespians of a bygone era, once the roles started drying up like Orson Welles and Burt Reynolds before her, she ended up being a spectacular interview on the talk show circuit.
Today, she’s the elder stateswoman who has seen it all, done it all, speaks her mind and is fresh out of fucks to give. She has no problem with telling people where precisely they can get off, what her politics are and unloading on the state of the current acting industry.
However, she’s no grump. Maygolyes is charismatic, funny and has boatloads of the best stories you’ll ever hear, but one of the best to come from her latter years has nothing to do with her acting career. In fact, it has barely anything to do with her at all, because it happened under her nose for months without anyone being the wiser.
From December 2015 to April 2016, Margolyes rented out a cottage she owned above the White Cliffs of Dover. Nothing suspicious about that, it seemed, until the revelation came about who she’d been renting it to. It turned out that the cottage wasn’t a holiday home, it was drop off point. The British screen legend had been taking money from a full-blown crime gang so they’d have a place to drop off all the cocaine they’d been smuggling in from the continent.
It sounds like a crime novel, but this is 100 per cent true. Over that five-month period, 500kg of Class A drugs, mainly cocaine, had been brought into the country by two Dutch pilots. They would then split their payload into several different packages and drop them off at several different holiday cottages they’d rented in the United Kingdom. There were drop-off points in Kent, Buckinghamshire, Essex and, of course, Dover, the location that belonged to Margolyes.
When the operation was exposed in 2016, it became clear quickly that she had no knowledge or even any suspicion of the gang’s actual activity. Which makes sense as the gang seems like something picked straight out of a particularly futuristic crime thriller. Right down to the modified Audi A6, which had modified back seats that contained a hidden compartment accessible via a switch in the cigarette lighter. It’s no surprise that until they were caught, the gang were responsible for trafficking £17million worth of drugs.
Knowing our Miriam, she probably would be happy to spin that one out next time she’s on Graham Norton, so why not ask her about that if you see her, rather than yet another question about Harry Bloody Potter?