Wearing a deep-red velvet gown Ruby Wax strikes a pose on her canopy bed as her seven-year-old daughter bounces next to her. “Geddoutta the way, Marina, you’re in my shot,” mock-snarls Ruby, as Marina quickly bounces off again.
When she finally relaxes with husband Ed Bye in the living room – eating a small bowl of jelly, legs flung over the side of the armchair – she is a much toned down version of her loud, brash, on-screen persona. Smart, sharp, and funny, she is also small and pretty. She speaks quickly in staccato sentences and fidgets constantly – particularly with a plastic pig she’s discovered on the table next to her, which does an inflatable poo when squeezed. It will, she says, be the star of her next show.
Ruby met Ed in 1985, when he was directing her in the comedy show Girls On Top. She tried to get him sacked. “He was a tall, lanky person with legs that were too thin," remembers Ruby. “I thought he was far too young and inexperienced to direct because we were doing such a sophisticated show. But I was disillusioned – we were doing a pile of c… and we were lucky to have a director.”
Their wedding bordered on the farcical. “Ruby laughed hysterically throughout the whole thing," says Ed. They hadn’t picked up the ring yet, so Ruby wore the receipt instead – “The receipt was nice, though,” says Ed – and when she signed the registrar she wrote, “Best wishes, Ruby Wax”.
In the past she has described Ed as her “angel”. “I probably paid her,” says Ed. “I was probably drunk,” says Ruby, but nevertheless, does admit: “He is selfless, he sacrifices a lot. He is the ideal woman I was looking for. He’ll cook for the children while I’m watching television – you know, regular slavish things. Or take care of them and get them up in the morning and read them bedtime stories.”
At this point their two daughters, Maddy and Marina, burst in and clamber over their parents’ laps to contribute to the conversation. “Mummy is delicate and and precious with her body – if she wasn’t she’d be schmushed,” says Marina mysteriously. “Mummy’s embarrassing,” adds Maddy, bluntly, as they both run out again.
“I wish I'd had a mother like me,” says Ruby. “I’m not giving them a mum that’s at home all day, but then I’m not giving them someone who takes their frustrations out on their kids. What they see is a really happy image of me – I’m not skipping around but I’m pretty satisfied. And when I do bad things, like lose my temper, I’ll say, ‘That’s one of my flaws’ or ‘That’s my fault’ instead of always blaming the kid. So even if I do stuff wrong, I try to correct it and say, ‘Mummy didn’t learn that from her mummy, so she doesn’t know how to do it very well.’”
Ruby’s relationship with her parents – Austrian Jews who fled Vienna for Chicago in the late 1930’s – and her miserable childhood have been well documented. Not only has she used them in her material, they were the subject of her documentary Miami Memoirs.
By the time Marina arrived, Ruby had adapted to motherhood but she suffered postnatal depression quite soon afterwards, which recurred for a short spell in 1998. She checked herself into the Priory clinic on both occasions, but only stayed for four days. "I think it was because I'd had three children in a row, late on and fast, and I never stopped working, so I became depleted," is how she describes it.
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
