Felicity Kendal has been a national treasure since she played Barbara Good back in the 1970s. She catches up with Good Housekeeping in the June issue and she looks just as fabulous as she did back then!
The secret is that there IS no big secret. She works hard to look how she looks by exercising a lot! “It’s a given that you have to exercise more as you get older, because you’re trying to go up a down escalator,” she tells Good Housekeeping. Kendal works out for an hour, four times a week. “I do a combination of yoga, Pilates and weights. I use five kilos in each hand, they’re heavy! Very often I don’t feel like it, but you get to the point where you either get stiff and stop, or you keep going.”
She’s not strict with herself all the time, though. “My pleasure is a glass of wine… maybe two,” she says. “After that, I can’t remember!” She doesn’t believe in feeling guilty about such things – or trying to impress other people. “At my age, women get to point where we don’t make decisions to impress somebody else, but to please ourselves. Like when I got my tattoo four years ago. It was the opposite trying to be younger and ‘with it’, it was about celebrating the fact you’re not young any more so you know what you want to do.”
Kendal is in a long-term relationship with partner Michael Rudman, to whom she was previously married to before divorcing in 1990. She doesn’t believe that they will ever re-marry: “I think marriage is great, and lovely to do when you’re young and saying: this is the beginning of our life together. But what’s really nice now is that you’re not a scarlet woman if you live with somebody. Michael and I talk about marriage and then we decide we can’t be arsed. I think marrying the same person twice looks like carelessness – that’s the way we look at it.”
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Posted by Amy Power.
