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Harry Potter actress: ‘My parents made me swear on a stack of Bibles to stay away from women’

Harry Potter actress: ‘My parents made me swear on a stack of Bibles to stay away from women’

Out actress Miriam Margolyes is best known for her role as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter series, but her homophobic parents didn’t need magic to try to “pray the gay away.”

In a new interview with Audioboom, the 74-year-old actress opens up about the extreme lengths her parents took to deal with her burgeoning sexuality and how they took “Bible-thumping” to a new level:

People who were gay were pitied and ridiculed by my parents – they had no modern sense of people being allowed to be who they were. And I didn’t tell my parents, in fact, until I was something like 27. My mother was utterly appalled and disgusted… and she told my father, although I didn’t want her to.”

She told him, because they shared everything, and they made me swear on the Bible in the drawing room, in the most formal way, that I would never sleep with a woman again. Extraordinary really, as my father was a doctor and in many ways he was an enlightened man especially around racism. But about homosexuality… never!”

Fortunately, she embraced her sexuality with, as she says, “as much joy and delight as I’ve embraced everything else in my life.”

Margolyes has been with her partner for nearly 50 years.

Listen to the full interview below.

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