She’s been described as ‘a sociopath wrapped in a layer of whipped cream’. But nobody’s dared to ask just who the ‘delightfully evil’ stepmother in the BBC’s Fleabag — brilliantly played by Olivia Colman — is based on.
The award-winning series, which scooped plaudits for its creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge and a role in scripting the next Bond film, was hailed as the new way forward in British TV drama.
The series that has just ended will be the last, but TV companies are trying to recapture the magic with similar ideas.
Meanwhile, Phoebe and her wayward character Fleabag — a late-20s single woman who says: ‘I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it’ — are still much-discussed and watched on iPlayer and YouTube.
Phoebe Waller Bridge (pictured above) both wrote and starred in Fleabag and much of her work can be paralleled to her own life
Phoebe Waller-Bridge's father Michael (left) on his 2016 wedding day to Phoebe's step mother Rosemary Goodenough (right)
Fleabag's on screen parents are played by Olivia Colman (right) and Bill Patterson (left)
Hers is the name and the face of 2019. But who was the monster stepmother Phoebe was writing about — the smiling but killingly cold artist who painted a portrait of Fleabag showing the back of her head only?
Maybe it’s just coincidence that Phoebe’s own stepmother, Rosemary Goodenough, is a gifted artist with a winning smile.
Maybe it’s just coincidence, too, that in the flurry of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook posts that Rosemary has put out in recent months featuring pictures galore of her extended family, there’s not a mention or photo of her talented stepdaughter or her TV show.
Sian Clifford (pictured above) plays Fleabag's on screen sister Claire who works in the financial sector
Maybe it’s just coincidence that Oscar-winner Olivia Colman’s hair was styled to look like Rosemary’s. And that her speech at the end of Series One has a very strong echo of a YouTube performance featuring Rosemary and Phoebe’s father Michael Waller-Bridge, a photographer and City financier.
Isobel Waller-Bridge (pictured above) is Phoebe's sister
Rosemary herself — a 66-year-old thrice-married aristocrat — is far too shrewd to discuss any of this in detail. And yet she doesn’t deny it.
Speaking from her Norfolk home, she courteously sidestepped the Mail’s questions this week. Had she seen Fleabag?
‘Yes, absolutely. I think Phoebe has hit the zeitgeist very cleverly.’
Some people believe that Fleabag is strongly autobiographical — do you recognise any of the characters in it?
‘I think only Phoebe can answer that.’
Some sharper-tongued folk have drawn parallels between Olivia Colman’s character and yourself — are you, indeed, the inspiration? Are you amused by it?
‘Again, only a question Phoebe can answer.’
How did you and Phoebe get on, after you came into her father’s life when she was 19?
‘I’m sorry, that’s far too personal a question.’
Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Sian Clifford (pictured above) play on screen sisters who don't always see eye to eye
An answer — though whether it’s the right one, who can tell? — might be found in the fact that Rosemary often favourably mentions Phoebe’s musician sister, Isobel, another phenomenally talented Waller-Bridge, on social media.
A year older than her 33-year-old writer sibling, she composed the score for Fleabag as well as the new TV version of Poirot starring John Malkovich, and the recent adaptation of War And Peace. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the actress chosen to portray Fleabag’s sister, Sian Clifford, bears a startling resemblance to her.
Isobel’s achievements get a favourable mention from Rosemary, while Phoebe’s do not — an allegory perhaps reflected in that double-portrait Fleabag’s stepmother painted of the two sisters, with Claire facing the artist, and Fleabag presenting the back of her head.
A still from series 2 of Fleabag which shows the wedding between her father and stepmother who is played by Olivia Colman
The show charts Fleabag and her relationship with her family such as her sister
In one episode, the two sisters go away to a wellness retreat with each other
Whatever the real-life relationship between the two sisters, they started life as a happy family unit in Ealing, West London — Phoebe, Isobel, younger brother Jasper, and parents Michael and Teresa.
The marriage lasted until Phoebe was in her late-teens, when, after divorcing Michael, Teresa moved the children to Battersea and a 17-year-old Phoebe, who had been acting since she was eight, went to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
It is a measure of the sisters’ ultimate love of each other — an important thread of the Fleabag storyline — that Phoebe asked, and Isobel consented, to write the music to the TV series.
To say that life around the Waller-Bridges was unorthodox would be a massive understatement.
Fleabag (right) with her onscreen father on the day of his wedding to his new wife, following the death of Fleabag's mother
Fleabag walks her father down the aisle during the ceremony for his at home wedding
Fleabag and her father on the day of his wedding in series 2 of the popular BBC show
Phoebe’s father, an extraordinary figure, studied theoretical physics at university before taking a master’s degree in science and technology. In a dazzling career,
