Speaking to the Radio Times Podcast, the actor, writer and director looks back on her career so far – and forward to what’s next.
There seems to be very little that Dolly Wells can’t do. She’s played a vampire-hunting nun in Steven Moffat’s Dracula, a woman locked in a basement with David Tennant in Inside Man and an incompetent assistant in Sky comedy Doll & Em (co-written with her best friend, actor Emily Mortimer).
Now she has turned her hand to directing with BBC Three’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. Based on the bestselling book of the same name, it follows precocious teenager Pip (Emma Myers), who decides to investigate the unsolved murder of an older girl from her school.
“It was Emily who told me about the series,” the 52-year-old explains over videocall from her home in Brooklyn. “It’s made by the company that produced The Pursuit of Love – which she worked on. I remember her saying, ‘They’re looking for someone really interesting and I thought you should do it’. I said, ‘They’re not going to want me!’ It’s hilarious. She’s like a proud mum. She always thinks everybody would want me to do everything and they’d be crazy not to.”
But, it was indeed Wells whom they wanted and went with. It’s shot beautifully – with a hint of Sex Education. We’re in a twee British town, with a slightly Americanised high school and teenagers getting up to more than you’d like to think.
Wells was raised just off London’s Kensington High Street, the youngest of six siblings. She was christened Dorothy Gatacre, but was always Dolly.
“I have a horrible memory, from when I started school, of the headmistress holding me in her arms on stage in front of the whole school, saying this girl likes to be called ‘Dolly’ like it was a bad thing! She said, ‘We’re not going to allow that. She’s going to be called Dorothy’. I had to stay behind after class and learn how to write Dorothy, not Dolly.”
Listen to the full Radio Times Podcast with Dolly Wells here:
Years later, she would change her surname from Gatacre to Wells. She was 18 when she discovered the man she had thought was her stepfather – comic actor John Wells – was actually her biological father.
“I was the only child of my mum and dad. My other five siblings have a different father [Edward Gatacre] and I’d been brought up with his name. I didn’t want to be disloyal [by changing it] but I thought in the arena of acting it wouldn’t matter because he doesn’t really watch telly. Dolly Wells is my actual name, and it’s much simpler and shorter than Dolly Gatacre – and it was a nice way of making it all OK.”
Dolly and John were thick as thieves. She tells me about an incident at school where her classmate knocked her into a table and her tooth went missing, nowhere to be found. It was only after a trip to the dentist that they realised the tooth had been shoved up into her gums.
“My dad was so adorable. He made a little voodoo doll of the boy [who pushed me], because we were so upset. He made it out of plasticine and we put pins in it. When I went to school the next day and the boy walked past calmly, I couldn’t believe that the plasticine and candles hadn’t worked!”
There are plenty more examples of how John Wells shaped Dolly’s career path. “I was eight and my dad had Peter Cook and Dudley Moore round. I put on a hat and pretended to be a man, and they all went along with it – saying, ‘It’s so sweet of you to give us your time’. I sat there thinking, ‘How am I going to stop this because they totally believe me?’ I said I had another meeting and walked off.
“I also remember hours of me and my dad playing doctors. He would come in on his knees pretending to be different patients and I would tell him what was wrong with him. He would play with me for hours. It was probably almost as fun for him as it was for me. I know that feeling with my own kids. You’re so desperate to make your children laugh, it’s pathetic.”
Despite a creative start, it took Wells a while to establish herself as an actress. After finishing at Manchester University she did odd jobs alongside acting; she was a photographer’s assistant, had a stall at Portobello market, wrote for the Daily Express and Evening Standard. It was only when she had her daughter (Wells also has a son with ex-husband Mischa Richter) in her 30s, that she decided to go for it.
“I had this feeling of… you have to push in the world. I think I was scared to be ambitious, and I didn’t massively understand what it was to be that. My mum, with the greatest respect, who is 91 and adorable, never really worked. If you asked her, ‘What do you do?’ she used to say, ‘I do my face. I do my hair.’”
Wells was once quoted in an interview saying, “If you’re a character actor, it doesn’t matter if you get older and can no longer play the pretty ingénue.” Have times changed?
“It’s quite nice getting older. I wish people had told me that as a woman. So much has changed. Beauty is everywhere and everything and every size or colour or shape or height or age. It’s so embarrassing to think in the past that people thought that after 40 you wouldn’t get any acting work. What? People haven’t got a story to tell over 40? That’s bonkers!
“When I had my daughter, I had an instinct of, I’m not going to make her looks very important. I’m going to push for the funny and the clever and the interesting, the odd and the peculiar. It makes me and my daughter laugh – but my mum really thought her biggest claim to fame, her biggest achievement, was her legs. It’s odd to think there was a time when that was enough.”
It’s not just on screen that we’re seeing genuine change – it’s also behind the camera.
“I think more women directing and being in charge is a really good thing. It doesn’t need to be really stressful on set. People don’t need to be scared of a director.”
Wells now writes, directs and acts. Will she be hanging up her boots any time soon?
“Directing gives me real respect and empathy for actors. It’s a very odd thing to put yourself in situations – be it funny or awful, where you give it your all so that people can come home from a long day at work and watch something that moves them or makes them feel happy.
“I’m also writing a film, which is really hard. I love writing with Em but she’s writing a film and I’m writing a film, so that’s quite lonely. And we’re longing to do a third series of Doll & Em. But right now, I’m also filming And Just Like That. I really love acting and I don’t want to hang up my boots!”
For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
All six episodes of A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder are available to stream now on BBC iPlayer, and will air on BBC Three later this month.
Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on.