Lesley Joseph "struggled" to get back in shape for ‘Birds of a Feather’.
The 68-year-old actress reprised her role as man-eater Dorian Green for a stage production of the sit-com in 2012, and admits slimming down to fit into her tight costumes for the show and subsequent new TV series wasn’t easy.
She said: " I had to struggle quite a lot to get the weight off, and to get the legs… My legs have had amazing reviews, it has been a disappearing act because I had allowed myself to appreciate the occasional apricot and crumble and things, so I put on a little bit of weight and when I knew we were doing it on stage, I thought, the entrance that Dorian’s got to have, I’ve got to be the weight I was before.
"So I employed a wonderful fitness and lifestyle coach called Belinda who was quite strong on me and I lost about a stone and a half, getting towards two stone, the legs slimmed, everything slimmed, and then when we went back on television, I thought, ‘I can’t eat now because I’ve got to keep it all off’ and now I’m doing ‘Hot Flush’ on stage, it’s hard work."
Lesley is proud of the success the revived TV show – which also stars Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke -has received, and she thinks a lot of the credit needs to go to the scriptwriters.
Speaking to Graham Norton on Radio 2, she said: "I think where they’ve been very clever is they updated it by 15 years rather than expecting us to go on where we left off. And they scripts have been clever enough to incorporate what’s going on now, so we fit in very easily with the modern world."
Lesley Joseph struggled with fitness regime
