People used to ask Mum if she was an actress. She wasn’t. But she looked like one. Stunning. Proper cinema-worthy. Honestly, if she’d gone into film, Hollywood would’ve been shook. I once described her in nursery as having “almond-shaped green eyes, a (crescent-shaped) Georgian nose, and a perm.” She was in the audience, as it was a celebration of Mother’s Day. She cried laughing.
Someone’s probably thinking I’ve just described Barbra Streisand. I haven’t. Mum wasn’t Georgian either. No clue where I got that bit about the nose. I looked more like Mum than Dad anyway.
Dad, incidentally, looked exactly like Hugh Grant. So much so that people used to ask Hugh Grant if he was Sir Terrence Olivier (my dad). And—Hugh Grant got quite miffed that he wasn’t just impossibly handsome on his own merits. Once, Dad even asked him about it during an interview, and—Hugh was properly stumped. There they were, sitting opposite each other in a BBC studio, like long-lost identical twins.
They even shared a birthday—ten years apart. Do twins sometimes have a decade between them? Food for thought.
Anyway, ours was one dashing family.
No one ever said I looked like an actor, though. But people did ask if I’d ever had a part in cartoons. And, naturally, I took the bait and answered, as I always did, with a question of my own: “Which ones?”—Like, yes, I did indeed.
I was genuinely curious about which cartoons they might have seen me in. I even asked Mum about it. I mean, had I ever been in any cartoons when I was little? Maybe I’d forgotten something? Mum once suggested “Cheburashka” or “Little Raccoon”. That was good enough for me. For the uninitiated, Cheburashka is a beloved Soviet cartoon character with giant fuzzy ears, an eternally kind and shy demeanour, and no known species. Little Raccoon, equally shy and wide-eyed, stars in a gentle animated parable about friendship and not being scared of your own reflection—basically the Soviet Bambi, minus the trauma. I kept hoping someone would ask again, so I’d have a better answer. No one ever did.
Do you remember how you described your parents when you were little? Was it accurate, or hilariously off?
Do you think families are really “cinematic,” or is it only when memory reframes them with humour and exaggeration?