Madame Arcati: There's only one actress who can play me (& she's dead)

Angela Lansbury: Me as Art Deco

My thanks to the American astrologer and investigative journalist Eric Francis for unearthing this splendid photo of Angela Lansbury posing as me. I interviewed him earlier this year - and to appreciate his singular views on the joys of self-sex, click here.

Lansbury projects elegant goofiness for fans of the Art Deco period; and I'm confident that her Madame Arcati (in last year's staging of Blithe Spirit) pleased fans of TV whodunits. But there's the problem: elegance. Only that scrumptious, asymmetrical gargoyle Dame Margaret Rutherford captured the essential wilful otherliness of me in the black & white movies: Arcati is not just some harmless fruitcake with fidgety mannerisms but an ideological warrior of the drawing room who happens to summon up spirits.

She is the timeless crank always proven right. Julian Assange, please take note.

I realise that such ideas are traumatic to diddumsy secular critics who take their scripture from sexy tabloid traditionalist Dr Brian Cox. So as New Year looms I'll move on as an act of charity.

Margaret Rutherford: Me me me

Also, Madame Arcati has no business being tall. This is where Penelope Keith went wrong when I saw her play me at the Savoy Theatre a few years back. I've always regarded tallness as faintly ridiculous and excess to requirements, such as in British Prime Ministers. Only haberdashery shop assistants need to be tall. Madame Arcati does not do excess.

At the Savoy I sat behind Nicky Haslam who wore a thick fur coat throughout the performance even though the theatre was properly heated. From the wafting odour I adjudged that his coat required laundering. But I was too polite to say.

Madame Arcati's first interview: Spacey's clan, Fallowell's cock and my view of Perez Hilton

If you want to delve into Madame Arcati's innards a little deeper then here's your chance.

The delightful blog of culture and outré video inquisitions Virtual Factory has been granted the unique honour of an interview with me and elicited all sorts of answers, some of which I recall. Here's a snatch:

Q: Tell me your most perverse fetish. Don't keep it clean.

MA: Cling film aside, I curiously delight in Royal Doulton’s Bunnykins collectibles based in the mythical village of Little Twitching. I have only to run a finger along the cool English Translucent China of Reggie Bunnykins’ floppy-stiffy ears and my thigh muscles relax somewhat. God help you if you're in the same room as I should I be caressing a Reggie figurine and his floppy-stiffies. My cleaner gives me a wide berth at such times.

Q: What happened to the most requested author of HMP Holloway, Susan Hill and you?

MA: I don’t know about Susan. One minute she was confiding the most extraordinary things in me (my lips are… coated in a Tom Ford Private Blend). And in the next she had swanned off to the Spectator and now writes a very tiresome right-wing blog there about hedgerows and Wellington boots. I don’t know why I thought she was a socialist. But anyway, I have a soft spot for Sue who I think should be made a Dame for her services to ghosts.

The Madame Arcati interview click here.

Madame Arcati graciously returns for Christmas

Goodness, how time flies. Anyway, Madame Arcati is back for the panto season, a little early, mind; rather like those unwelcome Siberian swans flying into Slimbridge. If someone had the nous to shoot them over the North Sea we'd be saved lots of drama queen autumn weather warnings on TV.

What have I been up to since I gave up blogging in June?, you ask. I wrote one or two pieces for the delightful Anorak site but quite honestly I prefer my own shelter. I'm not one for sharing or mediation. Otherwise I have been absorbed in the timeless wisdom of astrology and its tricky charts: so that in addition to my legendary sharp eye and perpicacious mind, I now offer you penetrating insights normally occluded by mere intellect. Don't you feel Christmas has come early?

One thing I want to draw attention to before I leave you for now is Molly Parkin's utterly brilliant and funny memoirs, Welcome to Mollywood, published this week. Not only did I think up the title in a moment of Croatian reverie last summer but Madame Arcati and her pupper-master feature in it. Naturally I shall review it; I just can't wait for you to read it (my review). It's a feelgood for the slightly pervy (her book).

I am sooo glad to be back among you. Put the word out, won't you dearies.

Blithe Spirit: Madame Arcati saves Rupert Everett!

Coo-ee, it's me.

I am delighted that Blithe Spirit is such a Broadway triumph. Regular bloggees will know that I have been unstinting in my promotion of Rupert Everett, and naturally I had a fateful hand in pushing this Cowardy production in his direction. His future is now assured. Google will confirm that the names Rupert Everett and Madame Arcati are recurringly intertwined both in life and now in art. This confusion is doing nothing but good for my visitor figures.

Angela Lansbury, 83, is I suppose an adequate substitute for me as Madame Arcati though I can't help but wonder whether she sometimes muddles her lines and thinks she's still in Murder She Wrote. No one can improve on Margaret Rutherford as me: she brought to Arcati that essential ambiguity that runs through her person in all sorts of ways, a woman misunderstood even in these broad-minded times. The turban doesn't help.