Celia Imrie Books in Order

Celia Imrie was born in Guildford, Surrey, on 15 July 1952, and grew up there as the fourth of five children. She went to Guildford High School and then trained at the Guildford School of Acting. Long before she published novels, she was the kind of performer people remembered instantly, sharp, funny, and very hard to ignore.

She almost took a different road.

As a girl, she wanted to be a ballet dancer, and dance stayed important enough that she later called her memoir The Happy Hoofer. Acting became the life, though. After drama school she got an early break as an assistant stage manager and understudy on a touring production of Hedda Gabler, which sounds like exactly the kind of practical, all-hands start that shaped the rest of her career.

Over the next decades, Imrie became a familiar face across theatre, television, and film. She won the Clarence Derwent Award for The Sea and later an Olivier Award for Acorn Antiques: The Musical!. On screen, many readers will know her from Calendar Girls, Nanny McPhee, Bridget Jones, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Absolutely Fabulous. She has always seemed equally at home playing broad comedy, quiet sadness, or complete chaos.

Then she added author to the list.

Her first book, The Happy Hoofer, came out in 2011 and told stories from a busy acting life with a lot of candor and comic timing. In 2015 she moved into fiction with Not Quite Nice, a Riviera novel about Theresa, a woman who heads to the south of France hoping for peace and finds a much busier second act. That book grew into the Bellevue-sur-Mer sequence, continued in Nice Work and A Nice Cup of Tea.

Readers who warm to Imrie's novels usually like the same things people enjoy in her performances. She has an eye for eccentrics, social awkwardness, and the moment a polite situation tips into farce. Sail Away puts two older women on an Atlantic cruise and turns their bad luck into a comic mystery. Orphans of the Storm shifts gears into historical fiction, following lives pulled toward the Titanic. Meet Me at Rainbow Corner heads to wartime London, where friendship, work, and love are all shaped by the pressure of war.

Across the books, some patterns keep returning. She writes a lot about women starting over, people building makeshift communities, and places that look glamorous until trouble slips in through the side door. Even when the settings are beautiful, the real draw is usually the company: capable women, difficult relatives, performers, romantics, strivers, and the odd rogue.

She also seems especially interested in later-life reinvention. Her heroines are often old enough to know better, but brave enough to do it anyway. That gives her fiction a nice mix of wit and steel.

Imrie continues to act as well as write, and she has spoken about how much the south of France helps her settle into writing mode. She lives between London and Nice, France, which feels fitting for a career split between backstage hustle and bright seaside escape. That mix runs through her books, too, practical, funny, a little glamorous, and always alert to the trouble waiting just offstage.