Post your questions for Imelda Staunton

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She’s acting royalty – literally, having played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown – but what questions would you ask her? It is perhaps fitting that Imelda Staunton ended up playing Queen Elizabeth II in the last two series of The Crown, considering she has been acting royalty for years. Her film career has seen her voice champion egg-layer Bunty in 2000’s Chicken Run, followed by roles in Mike Leigh’s 2004 drama Vera Drake and the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. In 2014, she played the formidable Welsh miners’ strike campaigner Hefina in Pride . She also plays Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first two Downton Abbey films, and voices Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy in all three Paddington films. For a whole generation, however, she will always be Dolores Umbridge in two of the later Harry Potter films, where she somehow made a pink cardigan almost as frightening as Voldemort. On TV, she has cropped up in everything from Little Britain and Doctor Who to Psychoville, Brassic and a memorable guest appear...
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‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

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He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back

One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’”

Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily for £4”. His chief film role so far had been in the 1955 drama documentary The Unloved, in which he played a boy in a home for delinquent kids.

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