Miriam Margolyes, OBE is a British-Australian actress, who is best known for playing Pomona Sprout in the Harry Potter film franchise, voicing Fly the Border Collie in the 1995 comedy-drama film Babe and its 1998 sequel, and portraying Grandma Rosy in the live-action sequences of the 1995 Universal Pictures animated film Balto.
For Disney, she portrayed Aunt Sponge and voiced Glowworm in the 1996 live-action/stop-motion film James and the Giant Peach. She also voiced the Matchmaker in the 1998 Disney animated feature film Mulan and Bessie the Cornish Cow in the 101 Dalmatian Street episode "A Summer to Remember".
Margolyes was born in Oxford, the only child of Joseph Margolyes, a Scottish physician and general practitioner from the Gorbals area of Glasgow, and property-developer Ruth (née Sandeman), daughter of a used furniture dealer and auctioneer at Kirkdale, Liverpool, who later relocated to London. The maternal family surname changed from Sandeman to Walters before Margolyes' birth. She grew up in a Jewish family, and her ancestors moved to the UK from Belarus and Poland. Her maternal great-grandfather, Symeon Sandmann, was born in the Polish town of Margonin, which Margolyes visited in 2013. Her grandfather Margolyes was born in a small shtetl called Amdur (now Indura) in Belarus, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Margolyes attended Oxford High School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English. There, in her 20s, she began acting and appeared in productions by the Cambridge Footlights.
Roles[]
(James and the Giant Peach)
Trivia[]
- She was considered for the role of Lilia Calderu in Agatha All Along, but turned it down because she did not want to play a witch again and did not like being in America.[1]
