From drug dealing to punk rock grannies

LINDA Marlowe is of the opinion that she’s the oldest rock chick in the business. You’ll just have to take her word for it, because once you’ve heard her giving it laldy with ‘Sister Sadie’, the raunchy rock song she wrote in the 1970s when strutting her stuff with an all-female punk band, you will be convinced she can only be lying about her age.

She must be adding on a few years rather than subtracting them, as women of advancing years have been known to do. That certainly seems to be the case as I watch the snake-hipped Marlowe shaking her booty and looking like the thinking man’s Joan Collins (although Marlowe is a finer actress than the 70-something diva of the bus pass) one evening in a small Borders town. Theoretically in possession of a bus pass herself, the 61-year-old erstwhile ballerina sure knows how to rock’n’roll, but then the glamorous actress knows a fair bit about sex and drugs, too, as she reveals in her one-woman show, No Fear!, which she brings to Edinburgh this week following a short tour.

The show, reveals Marlowe, expertly fashioning the first of a chain of roll-ups over the chardonnay, is the story of her life. And what a life it’s been. The svelte, sophisticated actress is sometimes known as Steven Berkoff’s muse and she triumphantly brought her show, Berkoff’s Women, to Edinburgh four years ago. She created it while down on her luck. She had had to take a job as a sales assistant in Selfridges because there was such a dearth of work for actresses of a certain age, despite her successes with Berkoff (he wrote Decadence for her and she was Gertrude to his Hamlet) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as film roles in movies such as The House of Mirth.

On television she’s been in everything from The Avengers to Spooks. In the autumn, she stars opposite Martin Kemp in a new ITV series, Family, in which she plays the godmother of a gang of London hoodlums. Kemp plays her son.

Last year, she returned to Edinburgh with a second solo piece, Diatribe of Love. But because she’s had a fair few adventures as she’s tripped through life dressed in shiny blouses and killer heels, armed with her red lipstick, friends were forever telling her to use her own experiences in a show.

Australian-born Marlowe wryly acknowledges there’s no shortage of material. No Fear! movingly and amusingly chronicles the life of an actress, wife, mother and grandmother, who has faced the traumas of divorce (four times) and had two abortions, been a drug smuggler, an impoverished single parent, and had a lesbian lover. Oh, and then there’s the time she met Marilyn Monroe. And don’t forget her girl power punk era when, with the Sadista Sisters, she sang strangely witty, dirty songs about whores having nervous breakdowns. Marlowe - Johnny Rotten with scarlet lipstick - wore a green wig and fishnets; plastic rats adorned her waistline.

"The idea was to do an outrageous parody of silly models and simpering females," she recalls. "We were a big hit - I remember playing Edinburgh in 1973 and there were queues around the block." Despite doing it for themselves, the Sisters broke up. "I couldn’t have stayed in rock’n’roll. I couldn’t have handled the fame."

Marlowe has, though, had to handle a lot of other things. When she was about 10, her English-born parents (her father was an actor) returned to Britain. She trained as a ballet dancer, but turned to acting because she knew she was never going to become a prima ballerina. At 17, she was pregnant with her son, Ben, now a Baptist minister and the father of three daughters. Her second son, Sam, is 24. His father was her third husband, Harry. Sam lives with Scottish actress Marnie Baxter, whom Marlowe is also directing in a Fringe production, High Brave Boy.

She married Ben’s father, the late actor William Marlowe, but they eventually divorced. It was at a time when a co-respondent had to be cited in divorce actions, so Marlowe donned a wig, met her husband in a hotel room, and played the other woman so a private detective could testify in court that her husband had committed adultery. She plays this scene brilliantly in No Fear! in Chandleresque style. "It’s one of only two illegal things I’ve done in my life," she confesses.

The other is smuggling "nine kilos of best Moroccan black" across the Atlantic. "I’ve never done drugs," she says. "I don’t even like marijuana. But Ben was living with my mother and she wanted him to go to a posh school, so I had to find the fees. One day, I was at this bizarre party where I met some American students who said they needed someone to take some marijuana over to Washington. I said, ‘I’ll do it!’ I was this free spirit, a bit wild in those days, so I never even thought about the consequences. They offered me $500, about 200, which wasn’t exactly a fortune."

Dressed in a baggy suit and tweed coat, she had the hash strapped to her body. "Remember there were no security checks or sniffer dogs back then." She was told she would be met in Washington by a guy "who looks like Jesus" - and sure enough a long-haired, bearded fellow in sandals greeted her after she had sweated her way through Customs.

Dragging on another cigarette, Marlowe says: "I look at my face and I see my life, but I’m never going to deny my age. You only do that when you fear dying and I have no fears of death at all."

• No Fear!, Assembly Rooms (venue 3) (0131-226 2428), noon; High Brave Boy, Metro Gilded Balloon Teviot (venue 14) (0131-226 2151), 2pm both until August 25