The actress Miriam Margolyes has described how her mother was so horrified at learning of her sexuality she made her swear on the Bible to never sleep with another woman.
Margolyes, who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, has been with her partner for 50 years. She said telling her parents that she was gay while in her 20s was the most difficult aspect of her journey towards living openly as a lesbian because of attitudes towards same-sex relationships at the time.
The 74-year-old told AudioBoom: “People who were gay were pitied and ridiculed by my parents – they had no modern sense of people being allowed to be who they were.
“And I didn’t tell my parents, in fact, until I was something like 27. My mother was utterly appalled and disgusted. She told my father, although I didn’t want her to, but she did because they shared everything.
“They made me swear on the Bible in the drawing room, in the most formal way, that I would never sleep with a woman again."
Margoyles adored her parents and said she would not sleep with another woman because she believed they needed her to say that, despite knowing this would not be a promise she could keep.
Margoyles says her father’s reaction was particularly “extraordinary” because he was a doctor and held progressive views about prejudices such as racism. However, he would not tolerate his daughter being a lesbian.
“The curious thing,” she added, “is that I embraced homosexuality with as much joy and delight as I’ve embraced everything else in my life.”
