Mariella Frostrup doesn’t think she’s middle-aged. She’s 56. ‘I mean, what is that for a woman these days?’ she asks, and I think she’s going to tell me that the 50s are the new 40s. Or 30s, even. ‘It makes me ancient. A crone. A hag.’
She says this with the confidence of someone who knows she’s none of these things. In her sixth decade, Frostrup is emblematic of empowered, experienced midlife, with a polymath’s CV, two children in the lower end of their teens and enough fuel in her tank to have recently developed a penchant for grime music. ‘Stormzy, Bugzy Malone, Kano, the rappers, they are the great storytellers today,’ says Britain’s best-known bookworm, not sounding at all prehistoric.
Plus, she might be about to do something very youthful indeed. ‘I’m thinking about going to university.’ What? She’s surely not going to abandon her long-running Radio 4 books show, her new BBC books podcast, the agony aunt column, the television presenting and snap shut her impressive contacts book (the arts, politics, rock ’n’ roll, Hollywood and activism, it’s all in there) in favour of lecture theatres and essay crises?
In the 30 years she’s been famous, Mariella Frostrup has shown a knack, if not for reinvention, then at least for staying one step ahead
‘No, I’d still be working, just not with the same relentlessness,’ she clarifies. ‘I’d probably want to read politics and sociology, not English literature, as I think I’d be a difficult student. I definitely don’t want to get to 70 having done the same thing over and over, and I don’t want to be hawking my goods at 65 to an uninterested TV network, going, “OK, OK, I will be the grey one”, because they only allow one token woman on television at a time. Society sort of tolerates a mad old bint, but a normal woman trying to achieve something in later years? Think about it, you’ve got Mary Beard, Joanna Lumley and Germaine Greer, and after that I don’t need any more fingers to count them on, do I?’
If she does enrol it would make sense. In the 30 years she’s been famous, Frostrup has shown a knack, if not for reinvention, then at least for staying one step ahead.
In her 20s and 30s she was the quintessential party girl whose lost weekend drinking tequila with George Clooney in Cannes set the bar very high for all who followed in her footsteps. Next, in a last gasp before she reached 40, she met her husband, the human-rights lawyer Jason McCue, on a charity trek in Nepal and settled down, it seemed, overnight. ‘I fell for him because he was really confident in himself and I admired what he did. I thought he was sexy in a Bridget Jones/Mark Darcy/human-rights lawyer kind of way. I am seven years older than he is, which feels like a lot but it’s OK since he has always looked like my grandfather,’ she laughs.
Then she became a standard-bearer for later-life nesting, having a baby at 41 and again at 43, and moving out of London to Somerset to embrace wholesome country living. Finally, last year she defied the omertà that surrounds the menopause by going on TV and telling three million viewers about her own and why she’ll be on hormone-replacement therapy until she dies. The programme was a broadcasting triumph, and she now sees women pushing past A-listers at parties to share their experiences with her.
‘It is great to feel I have shifted the paradigm a tiny bit,’ she says. ‘The menopause is still such a taboo, combining the things we fear most: ageing, irrelevance. As a woman you are treated differently when you get to your 50s, there’s no denying it.’ Today she takes testosterone and melatonin to help with the sleeplessness and swipes an oestrogen gel into her armpit ‘when I remember’. (Which is 100 per cent not what it says to do on the box.)
Partly as a result of that – and one suspects, her Norwegian heritage – she looks fabulous, with the merest tracery of tiny lines around her eyes and the same shaggy, blonde bob she’s always had. And we haven’t even mentioned her best-known feature: the Frostrup voice.
Today she’s wearing a prim tea dress, pearls and sensible shoes, but that voice sounds like it should be ordering a cocktail and flirting magnificently in a louche late-night bar somewhere. Quite possibly with a Hollywood hottie like Bradley Cooper – though as she is about to tell me, he’s out of luck.
‘I’d watched A Star Is Born and had a bit of a crush on him, but then I sat next to him at the Baftas and thought, hmm, his lips are a little thin, his hair is too artful. His girlfriend [Irina Shyak] was also on the table. Now she was the real eye candy.’
There are some in the industry who think that voice, along with her ability to unpick people emotionally, would have made her an astute choice for Desert Island Discs when host Kirsty Young stepped down last September. Young is suffering from the chronic illness fibromyalgia and cannot say when she will return to the airwaves.
For the record, Frostrup, who is a Radio 4 fanatic, wasn’t offered it. The honour went to Lauren Laverne instead. ‘I think it was all decided even before news of Kirsty stepping down was made public,’ she says diplomatically. ‘And I would have been reluctant. It’s great to own a programme like that and make it yours but trying to stand in for someone who is brilliant, and shine? That’s a poisoned chalice.’
Anyway, books, not music, are her thing. She has just published one of her own, an anthology of female travellers, but she’s better known for exploring other people’s, as the host of Radio 4’s influential Open Book. She is also currently consumed with enthusiasm for her new podcast, Books To Live By, where guests discuss the books that have resonated in their lives. So far she’s interviewed ballet dancer Carlos Acosta (‘his books were all about being a lost boy, lonely’), the actor Dominic West (who reads Thomas Hardy, W H Auden and enjoys discussing ‘death and decay, mortality, the withering of life’) and screen superstar Cate Blanchett (who recommended Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath and Lucia Berlin’s A Manual For Cleaning Women). ‘She answered the door wearing a boiler suit and no make-up, and had a list of books about being a woman struggling to achieve her ambitions and yet still being the parent or the wife they want to be.’
Juggling work and parenting is not something you easily associate with the serene-seeming Blanchett, nor death with the castle-dwelling father-of-five West, whose career is soaring. ‘That’s the point. Books are a window down into someone’s soul.’
She struggles to name her own favourites because she simply has so many. ‘If pressed I’d choose Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse because it’s so brilliantly illuminating on the frustrations still inherent in being a woman, and Cloudstreet by Australian novelist Tim Winton because it’s about human relationships and love in its full dysfunctional glory.’
Mariella Frostrup with George Clooney at the Baftas, 2006. In her 20s and 30s Frostrup was the quintessential party girl
As windows go, hers are wide open.
Born in Oslo, Frostrup grew up in Ireland, where her early years were damaged by her dysfunctional family. Her parents divorced when she was eight and her mother’s new partner brought violence into the household. Her father drank himself to death when she was 15 – she nursed him to the end. She left school at 16 with no qualifications and sailed alone from Ireland to start afresh in London, her possessions stuffed into four plastic bags.
Given this, it’s easy to believe her when she says ‘fear, total fear of recreating that’ makes her invest in her marriage and her mothering, and compels her to wring the best from ordinary life. Hers is not perfect. She squabbles with McCue and has to chase children Molly, 14, and Dan, 13 via Snapchat for answers to boring domestic questions. She’s an inveterate shouter at the radio too. But she is far too wise to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
‘Marriages really do undulate, like geography. There are times when your partner is the last person in the world you want to be in a room with and times when they are the only person in the world you want to be in a room with. Today’s world is very intolerant. It asks what is the point of a relationship unless you want to have sex every two minutes and be together 24 hours a day. There’s a lot worth sacrificing for stability. I almost think that when people have children, there’s a case for signing some kind of contract to say you are going to stay together for the next 20 years.’ She’s exaggerating for emphasis but her point is clearly made. ‘There is no question that children are irrevocably damaged by the separation and divorce of their parents.’
Her turbulent early life also gives her a healthy contempt for people who make themselves the victim of their own drama. ‘I have got less tolerant as the years have gone by and I recognise people lying to themselves, playing the victim in real life or in my postbag. Definitely among my friends I am not considered the kind, tolerant one. I’m good in a crisis but not the person who just lets you talk and soaks up the agony.’
She’s also brave enough to diverge from some of the tropes of modern womanhood. The bourbon and porn ladette culture of the Nineties didn’t emancipate women, ‘it set them back, all that misogynistic behaviour. If we didn’t see it as ironic we were humourless.’
Feminism now? ‘We need to move forward without being fuelled by a sense of self-righteous fury. There’s too much scalp-seeking hysteria created by the power of social media.’
Next, you’re about to see Frostrup hosting BBC1’s Celebrity Painting Challenge, in which six famous faces paint and draw, with the results auctioned off for charity. When she talks about it she tells me an off-the-cuff story not about celebrity but about kinship. This year’s contestants include model Amber le Bon, daughter of Duran Duran frontman Simon and his supermodel wife Yasmin.
‘What stuck with me was the extraordinary generosity of the le Bons,’ she says, ‘who turned up en masse for the charity auction and bid for all the artists’ work, not just their daughter’s. They were such an obviously impressive, united family – despite Yasmin and Simon getting into a bidding war for Amber’s pieces. We were all in love with them.’
Now try your own painting challenge…
Event picks five super spring shows
1 Van Gogh in Britain
Tate Britain
In 1873, Vincent van Gogh moved to London, aged just 20. A new exhibition looks at the three subsequent years he spent living in the UK – and how, fired by the novels of Dickens and paintings of Constable, those years influenced the artist he would become.
Mar 27-Aug 11, tate.org.uk
In 1873, Vincent van Gogh moved to London, aged just 20. A new exhibition looks at the three subsequent years he spent living in the UK
2 Manga
British Museum
This spring, the British Museum hosts the largest-ever exhibition of Manga outside Japan, tracing its roots back to the 12th century. Manga can be literally translated as ‘pictures run riot’ and consists of comic books and graphic novels. Nowadays, it has also become a billion-dollar global industry, influencing the worlds of film and gaming.
May 23-Aug 26, britishmuseum.org
This spring, the British Museum hosts the largest-ever exhibition of Manga outside Japan
3 Lee Krasner
Barbican
Krasner’s career has always been overshadowed by that of her famous husband, Jackson Pollock, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. An upcoming show at the Barbican is her first retrospective in Europe for more than 50 years. Remarkable – given that she, like Pollock, was one of the driving forces of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
May 30-Sept 1, barbican.org.uk
Lee Krasner’s career has always been overshadowed by that of her famous husband, Jackson Pollock, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century
4 Videogames
V&A Dundee
Opened last year in a spectacular building on the banks of the River Tay, V&A Dundee – the first outstation of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – is worth a visit in its own right. It also offers a second venue for V&A exhibitions, such as that on the history of videogames, which recently closed in London.
Apr 20-Sept 8, vam.ac.uk/dundee
Opened last year in a spectacular building on the banks of the River Tay, V&A Dundee – is worth a visit in its own right
5 Leonardo da Vinci: a life in drawing
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death – and to celebrate, 144 of his drawings are being shown simultaneously at 12 venues across the UK. They’re from The Royal Collection – which boasts probably the finest group of Da Vinci’s drawings in the world – and are usually kept, away from public view, at Windsor Castle.
Venues nationwide, till May 6, rct.uk
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death – and to celebrate, 144 of his drawings are being shown simultaneously at 12 venues across the UK
Frostrup hasn’t got an artistic bone in her body and confines herself to bringing pieces home from her travels with Jason. She’s doing an art programme, she says, ‘because we’ve got a terrible habit in this country of elevating the arts to unreachable heights for most of the population. I don’t want to see them dealt with in a rarefied manner, but brazenly put out there in primetime.’
Brazenly putting the unexpected out there is also why she wants a grime artist to talk about his favourite books for her podcast (‘they’re Dickensian, writing about what life is like for urchins’) and why she’s lobbying the BBC to make a follow-up to her menopause documentary. ‘The last one took me five years. I imagine this’ll take another five,’ she says.
‘It’s ironic, isn’t it? I have had enough success in my career to have a degree of influence. I’m in a stronger position than when I was younger, but of course, I’m also not in a stronger place because I’m middle-aged and a woman and there’s an overarching narrative about the end of our usefulness, which happens around now.’
So if she does go to university, I think we can all guess the subject of her dissertation.
‘Celebrity Painting Challenge’ begins on BBC1 in April. ‘Wild Women’ by Mariella Frostrup is out now (Anima, £25)
The first episode of Books To Live By…With Mariella Frostrup is now available here.