Bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford dies aged 91

Jenny Seagrove: She was a force of nature. She started in a pretty humble situation and she climbed her way up to the top and I don’t think she ever left it. And on her way, she inspired, literally, I think, millions and millions of people. I tell you a funny story, it seems like fate meant that I should do ‘A Woman of Substance’ because I was a young actress. I was doing a film in New Zealand – and I saw at the airport the copy of A Woman of Substance, and I looked at the back and I thought, ‘I’m going to buy this because I might be able to buy the rights’ because no one’s ever going to cast me as a Yorkshire working class lass. When I got back to England, my agent rang and said, Diane Baker, who’s producing A Woman of Substance, wants to see you for Emma Harte – and the rest is sort of history. So we had this screening and this beautiful, glamorous woman walked into the room. She walked straight over to me and she gave me the biggest hug and she said, ‘Oh Jenny,’ she said, ‘You are my Emma’. And I burst into tears.
Ciaran Jenkins: It was just so phenomenally successful as a novel and then as a TV series, wasn’t it?
Jenny Seagrove: What Barbara did was she wrote – she actually championed women when it wasn’t sexy to champion women. And this woman fought her way up from nothing. And, you know, we did a publicity tour in America and women would come up to me at the airport in the middle of the night and say, ‘you’ve changed my life.’ They’d go up to Barbara and say, ‘you’ve inspired me, I’m setting up my own business.’ This went on for years and years, and I’m absolutely certain that she still got letters saying, ‘thank you for changing my life,’ because she did – she inspired people. And I think that A Woman of Substance holds the title of the show in Channel 4 with the highest viewing figures. I don’t think it’s ever been topped.
Ciaran Jenkins: What were the qualities, do you think, that set her apart then, as a writer?
Jenny Seagrove: Certainly in A Woman of Substance, which I do think was her very, very finest novel, there was such a lot of truth in it. And it was because of that truth that women thought ‘we can do that, we can change our lives if we work hard and we want it enough, we can do it.’
Ciaran Jenkins: She said, didn’t she, that great novels have to have a ring of truth. Do you think she was aware of the impression and the effect that she had and the legacy that she left?
Jenny Seagrove: Yes, I think she probably was. I don’t think one is ever as aware as everybody else around you – and she was really a very humble woman. I mean, you could never see Barbara without full makeup and all her beautiful clothes because that was her presentation. But in herself, she never lost the Barbara Taylor from Leeds. That was who she was through and through. And she held onto it like a kind of badge, even though she lived in high society in New York, that was her grounding.
Ciaran Jenkins: And you were at her 90th birthday party last year. What sort of 90-year-old was she?
Jenny Seagrove: I was lucky enough to be invited to New York. And we were in this wonderful – what used to be – a speakeasy. She arrived in full diamonds and beautiful clothes sparkling everywhere, sharp as anything, and a bagpiper played her into the room. She just – she was a show woman. She knew how to present. She knew how to impress. And yet, when you spoke to her, you felt the most important person.