Margolyes, who will celebrate her 71st birthday in Wellington during her one-woman theatrical tour of New Zealand, said yesterday that with only 104 people booked to watch her perform her acclaimed Dickens' Women show, last night's performance at the Oamaru Opera House threatened to be her smallest ever audience.
Despite that, she said she was loving every minute of her second trip to New Zealand, and was adamant Dickens was certainly not "highbrow".
"He was never like that. I guess he's the last great artist that everyone appreciated until the Beatles came along.
"I just feel sorry that people are so caught up in their own imagination that they can't give it a go."
The accomplished stage actress, who has played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies, as well as appearing in Blackadder, will take her two-hour show, in which she plays 21 women and two men from the works of the Victorian author, to the Dunedin Regent Theatre tonight, and said audiences had been very receptive.
Her experience of "striving through" the New Zealand countryside, particularly in Nelson and Timaru, had been a "major pleasure."
"It is a very good experience; you get used to all kinds of conditions and all kinds of audiences. The theatres have been really pretty good.
"Ninety percent of the audiences have been women, and quite a lot of young people because of Harry Potter.
"I love meeting the audience and they do seem to love it.
"This time I just said that I would really like to see more places than I did the last time I was here.
"I swim every day, so I have also got to know all the swimming pools as well."
