On the road with Mr Dickens Charles Dickens evangelist Miriam Margolyes couldn't resist retracing the author's famous American odyssey. And, just like her hero, she saw the light about the country she thought she knew. By Miles Fielder

When I ask the 63-year-old Margolyes why she made the series, she snorts with laughter. "Because the BBC came to me and said, 'Would you like to retrace the footsteps of Dickens going around America?'

What do you think I said? I would have paid the BBC if they hadn't paid me."

Margolyes is a self-proclaimed Dickens nut. She read Oliver Twist at 11, and the rest is, as they say, history. Margolyes is the patron of London's Dickens House Museum and a frequent speaker at Dickens Fellowship conferences around the world.

She co-wrote and performed the one-woman stage show Dickens' Women and played Catherine Dickens (Charles missus, nee Hogarth) in a television mini-series written by Peter Ackroyd.

"People don't read Dickens much, " she says, beginning another forthright sally, "because they think he's too difficult and the books too long, and everybody's got the attention span of a gnat at the moment.

He's a wonderful writer, very funny, very insightful about human nature.

People should read him instead of bloody Jeffrey Archer. I mean people need something to get their teeth into. So, I am something of an evangelist. Although it's not because I worship him. I think he was a very wicked man, like his daughter said.

But he wrote like a god."

Margolyes has more than divine prose to thank Dickens for. In a distinguished 40-year acting career (she was awarded an OBE in recognition of her work in 2002) , her breakthrough is generally considered to be the BBC television adaptation of Dickens's opus Little Dorrit, in which she played Flora Finching (and which she made three years after making her Dickens-character debut, playing Mrs Bumble in Oliver Twist in 1985, also for the Beeb) .

That career began in Cambridge in 1962, when the 21-year-old undergraduate joined the Footlights troupe to perform with the future Pythons (she and Cleese, Chapman, Idle etc couldn't stand each other, apparently). She subsequently found her vocation doing voice-overs, initially for TV commercials - a PG Tips chimp, the sexy Cadbury's Caramel Bunny - but also for radio and film.

From the late 1970s, she was appearing in front of the film camera, although, arguably, in best-forgotten roles such as Elephant Ethel in the 1977 British sex farce Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers, as well as equally forgettable bit parts in American films, such as the Barbra Streisand-vehicle Yentl.

By the 1980s, Margolyes was doing better in TV, showing she could do drama (The History Man) and comedy (Blackadder) or both (The Life and Loves of a She-Devil) . By the 1990s, she was having more success in cinema, and won a Bafta (but missed the Oscar nomination everyone expected her to get) for Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Since then, Margolyes has established herself as a rarely-out-ofwork character actor, working on Immortal Beloved, Babe, Romeo + Juliet, Mulan, End of Days, Magnolia, Cats & Dogs, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and, most recently, the Oscar contender Being Julia.

Margolyes has done plenty of stage work, too, much of it in Australia.

Dickens'Women debuted there and she starred to great acclaim in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit in Melbourne.

In fact, Margolyes has been visiting Australia for the past 20 years. She has a 156-acre home north of Sydney and was recently awarded residency status.

She also has homes in Italy, Los Angeles, London and Kent. She was born in Oxford in 1941, to a Jewish Belarusian emigre family who originally settled in Glasgow, but describes herself as a "great restless traveller". Calling herself an Old Labourite, she has no truck with Blair's Britain and spends little time here these days.

Her movement back and forwards across the Atlantic and the Pacific is by now a condition of her career success, but it might also be a reaction to what she has described as the fortress mentality of her family. Margolyes didn't marry nor does she have children, as her mother wanted her to.

But she does have a long-time partner and she did take up acting, something her mother had always wanted for herself but could not bring herself to undertake. For years, Margolyes tended her sick, though reportedly dominant mother. When her mother died, her father moved into Margolyes's Victorian pile in Clapham.

He lived there until he died, aged 96, in 1995.

Margolyes has been described as boisterous, bawdy, even. At 17, she posed nude for the painter Augustus John. She also once f lummoxed Joan Collins by farting in her presence.

Then there was Margolyes's tiff with the Queen, who told her to "be quiet" for talking too much at a Buckingham Palace function (she was redeemed by receiving her Order of the British Empire from Prince Charles, who admired her audio book recording of Oliver Twist) .

Given Margolyes's bold behaviour and her penchant for travelling, it's unsurprising that the new Dickens show tells us as much about Margolyes as it does Dickens. It also has plenty to say about the modern state of the nation.

"The tour was [for Dickens] a journey of disillusionment, " says Margolyes.

"That was him realising America wasn't the answer to his prayers, or anyone's prayers. He went to America expecting to find a utopia, and, of course, no country can live up to that. The thing that disgusted him was slavery. He grew in America. He realised that a political system on its own is not going to answer our prayers; that human nature itself has got to change. Subsequently, he spent a good deal of his life and work trying to draw attention to the evils of society; evils that, of course, we still have to deal with - poverty, crime, the hateful class system. It made him into a much more serious artist.

"I had a curiously parallel experience, actually, " Margolyes says. "I live in America a lot of the time, but in California, and I thought I knew America well. But I don't know it at all, I realised after this trip. It was running up to the elections, and my series turns out to be more political than I expected it to be. The rise of the religious right, coupled with the political right, has been a huge force in America and, clearly, that's what elected the ghastly president. My own political feelings, which perhaps I should apologise for, come over very strongly in this series. So, you will see an opinionated, fat Jew as well as a Dickens evangelist. I, like Dickens, found the trip very instructive."

Margolyes says her favourite writer was "incredibly prescient and frighteningly apposite. American Notes gives you a shiver, because it rings so true today." At which point she directs me to a quote from American Notes: "If the Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be their fault."

"Things haven't changed, " Margolyes says. "One thing that doesn't change is that the Americans don't like criticism. I don't think this show will be seen there, " she says, "which makes me sad. That's why Dickens didn't go back to America for 25 years.

When he went back, in 1868, that was a journey of forgiveness.

"But America loves a celebrity, and when Dickens first went there he was the biggest celebrity that had ever visited America. He was a man of the people, much loved. Our series is about that young man."

DICKENS ON AMERICA

On war:

"If the Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be their fault. What with their swagger and bombast, what with their claims for indemnification, I have strong apprehensions. I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country - in the failure of its example to the earth."

On industry:

"I have carefully abstained from drawing a comparison between these factories and those of our own land. The comparison would be a strong one, for it would be between the Good and Evil, the living light and the deepest shadow."

On slavery:

"Shall we cry shame on the brutality of those who hamstring cattle: and spare the lights of freedom on earth who notch the ears of men and women, cut pleasant posies in the shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face, rack their poetic fancies for liveries of mutilation which their slaves shall wear for life and carry to their grave?"

On public habits:

"The prevalence of chewing tobacco and expectorating became most offensive and sickening."