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Ginny Dougary

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Hello and welcome to my new website. I have been a journalist for the past four decades and here you will find a selection of some of my interviews, features, restaurant reviews and travel pieces. I write freelance for both the UK and Australian markets and my work appears regularly in the Radio Times, The Observer, Daily Mail and Fairfax newspapers.

Over a lifetime of journalism, I have been fortunate enough to have interviewed some of the most extraordinary global figures in music, politics, art and literature. Each month, or so, we will be featuring an encounter From the Archive – from Benazir Bhutto to Donald Trump, from Madonna to Elizabeth Taylor, John Updike to Oprah Winfrey. These pieces will be featured with a new introduction by me putting the interview, on occasion, into some kind of historical perspective and in some cases describing the impact they had during and after publication, or perhaps how my feelings about the subject have changed in the intervening time. I hope this will be of interest to anyone revisiting the interviews or coming across them for the first time.

Heston Blumenthal: “Hand on heart, I don’t just stick my name on something”

10 December 2013 by Ginny Dougary

Could Heston Blumenthal get any more bonkers, I asked myself last time we met, five years ago – and the answer, based on this most recent encounter, has to be a resounding “Yes!” His creative thought process sounds like a stream of consciousness fuelled by industrial quantities of whatever Hunter S Thompson was on. His …

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David Suchet on Poirot: “I’ll just miss him as my dear, dear friend”

13 November 2013 by Ginny Dougary

How are we to bear it? For it is quite insupportable, is it not, to think that “the little grey cells” of Belgium’s best-loved detective will soon cease to fizz. Or to consider that the fastidious patting of his waxed moustache with the corner of a pristine white napkin at the dinner table will become …

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Stand up and be counted: Eddie Izzard interview

1 November 2013 by lloyd

As Live at the Apollo returns tonight for a new series, read Ginny Dougary’s interview with host Eddie Izzard in which he talks about his ambitions to enter politics, learn more languages, run more marathons and start a family. The lights cascade down in neon green and flashing blue, the electronic music pounds to a …

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Meet the real Countess of Downton Abbey

29 September 2013 by Ginny Dougary

The Countess of Carnarvon is golden, healthy, sporty and jolly, with such a charmingly retro way about her, she puts me in mind of John Betjeman’s famous paean to the tennis-plying Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, “furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun”. Her voice is creamy and rich, and she has a ready, robust laugh that …

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Kirstie Allsopp talks Britain’s education system, working hard and filling your house for free

23 July 2013 by Ginny Dougary

Kirstie Allsopp shares her Notting Hill home in west London, a hotchpotch of different styles and influences, with a bevy of boys: her property-developer partner, Ben Andersen, their seven-year-old and five-year-old sons, Bay and Oscar, as well as her stepsons Hal and Orion by Ben’s ex-wife, Theresa. All this “boysyness” is offset by Allsopp’s battalion …

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Big School: David Walliams on superstardom, finding happiness and why being an outsider is good

16 July 2013 by Ginny Dougary

David Walliams and I are sitting opposite one another on benches round a long table in a school refectory in north London. Behind him is a counter and a sign on the wall, “I ❤ TUCK SHOP”, where the T has been subtly altered to mean something quite different. Walliams swivels round to have a …

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Kim Cattrall on vanity, menopause, loneliness, arousal and money

5 July 2013 by Ginny Dougary

Kim Cattrall is as demure in person as she is wild on screen, at least as the gal who is still her best-known character: the sexiest beast from Sex and the City, Samantha. I find her sitting on a dining room’s pretty curved banquette, like an indoor cabana designed for Marie Antoinette, which is rather fitting …

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Pilou Asbaek

12 June 2013 by Ginny Dougary

What’s with these Danes? They’re so tortured and gloomy on the screen and so very warm and friendly off it; it’s like the depressive comedian syndrome in reverse. Pilou Asbaek, who plays the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, Kasper Juul, in Borgen (horrendous childhood) and the ship’s cook, Mikkel, in A Hijacking (who slowly loses his mind) is …

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David Dimbleby: keeping older women off television is a crazy loss of talent

2 June 2013 by Ginny Dougary

David Dimbleby has his nose deep in a book, literally. He keeps turning the splendid crimson and gold tome over and over, almost inhaling it. It belonged to his broadcasting giant of a father, Richard – who died at the age of 52 in 1965 – but he is not trying to summon his spirit. …

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John Simpson on twice breaking the first rule of journalism

25 May 2013 by Ginny Dougary

There’s a tremendous din in the Chelsea restaurant that John Simpson has picked for our interview. He turns up bang on time and is concerned that I’ve been waiting for him. We’re sitting in a booth and as a former rugby player and boxer – which he tells me later in the context of his …

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Award-winning journalist and writer

“May the dance never end, and may journalism never be controlled.”

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