A childhood fascination with Willy Wonka led an Australian comedian to track down the original Veruca Salt. Matthew Hardy and Julie Dawn Cole tell ‘The Lists’ Brian Donaldson how all this led to a Fringe comedy.

Everyone reaches a low point in their lives, when it feels natural to seek solace in objects that remind us of happier, perhaps more innocent times. When Matthew Hardy was dumped by two girlfriends (years and continents apart), he couldn’t stop sticking on the first movie he remembers watching. The 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is an iconic film for many reasons: the performance of Gene Wilder as the maverick Wonka; the sinister Slugworth, who appears to be whispering poison in children’s ears before his true, honourable intentions are revealed; the LSD-imbued terror of the chicken decapitation scene. Not to mention Golden Tickets, rivers of chocolate, Everlasting Gobstoppers and Oompa-Loompas.

For Hardy, the real pleasure in the film was to be had in the performance of little Julie Dawn Cole as Veruca Salt, a name now synonymous with selfish, brat-like behaviour. ‘She was my favourite character from the movie when I was five,’ recalls Hardy. ‘I couldn’t believe that a little girl was so abrasive to grown-ups and I’ve since spoken to a lot of women who liked her when they were kids and still do now; it first gave them the idea that a female could be so authoritative.’

When long-suffering flatmates suggested to Hardy that he should get his Veruca obsession out of his system and track down the actress who would now be a grown woman, it set off a sequence of seemingly unconnected events. These led Hardy to realise that there could be something in all this and maybe, just maybe, a comedy show might emerge. ‘I went to Long Island to see an old mate of mine, a school teacher, who asked me to talk to his class about Australia. At one point, one of the kids bit into his jelly and peanut butter sandwich and said, “Man, this is scrumdidilyumptious!”, which is such a Wonkaism.’ On a later trip to Manhattan, he was chatting up a woman in a bar who enticed him into buying her an expensive cocktail. ‘She ordered something called an Everlasting Gobstopper, which cost about 16 bucks and was written up on the board in the Wonka font.’

Believing all this to be too much of a coincidence, he sent an email to someone who appeared to represent Julie Dawn Cole. ‘My agent called me and said, “Another nutter wants to do an interview with you”,’ she recalls. ‘I must have been in a rather generous mood and the fact that he was in Australia made me think, “He’s far enough away, he’s not really going to come stalking.” I checked on the internet and he seemed to be who he said he was.’ A series of emails and calls followed and a script began to form with Hardy eventually inviting Cole out to Australia to help with PR for his burgeoning idea. ‘I thought that was all very jolly as I’d never been there before but I said if I’m coming all the way out there, I might as well be in it.’

With the project growing bigger than Augustus Gloop at an all-you-can-eat Frankfurter buffet, Hardy soon had a vision of the show’s structure as it stands today. ‘We had conversations that I would record and from those I’d try to construct a script. So, she’d be in England and I was in Australia at our respective psychiatrists, unburdening our issues of lost love or hurt or hope killed or whatever.’ Through those conversations, extra aspects were added, such as the reading of letters the young Cole wrote to her mother during the long months on the Wonka set.

While Matthew Hardy is a seasoned campaigner on the comedy circuit (during his first stint in London he earned enough from gigging to give up his day job as a toy soldier at Hamleys), the Edinburgh Fringe is an alien concept to Julie Dawn Cole. ‘I feel like I’m going back to being a student again. This is Matthew’s world, not mine. It’s going to be mad and scary and terrifying. For me, it’ll feel like standing in front of a train crash every night. But if I don’t like it, I don’t have to do it again.’

Still, at least at the end of each show, she’ll be able to forget all about Matthew Hardy and Willy Wonka and Oompa-Loompas until the next performance. Well, not quite. ‘We’re sharing accommodation,’ she says with a giggle. ‘We’ll be like an old married couple by the end of it. I’ll be nagging him, getting him to pick up his laundry. But we’re very good friends, so if I have to tell him, I will. In true Veruca Salt style.’

Willy Wonka Explained: The Veruca Salt Sessions, Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, 6–29 Aug (not 11 & 12), 7pm, £8.50–£9.50 (£7.50–£8.50). Previews 4 & 5 Aug, £5.

The Fringe has been known to eat American comics alive. But Jennifer Coolidge has survived Hollywood, so how hard can it be. The film-star and former “MILF” chats to ‘Fest Magazines‘ Lyle Brennan.

Hollywood, to those of us who don’t know it well, is built out of images of idealised glamour: gleaming, 45-foot letters; red carpets; handprints in concrete paving. For many of the aspiring stars currently populating Edinburgh, it no doubt makes for a tantalising picture. But when Jennifer Coolidge, speaking from her retreat in New Orleans, mentions that she will return to her Los Angeles home later that day, she doesn’t exactly sound thrilled.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that, for the 48-year-old character actress, the novelty of Tinseltown has worn thin after more than 20 years. Since moving there from her native Massachusetts, she has racked up appearances in some of the most popular comedies to hit screens both big and small, granting her the kind of ubiquity that almost makes you forget she exists outside of those four corners. Her filmography reads like a greatest hits of recent US entertainment: guest spots on Friends, Sex and the City, Frasier and Seinfeld; brilliantly unselfconscious performances in Christopher Guest’s semi-improvised mockumentaries; supporting roles inLegally Blonde and Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant; and—yes—those indelible scenes as Stifler’s Mom, American Pie’s prototypical “MILF”.

Hollywood has served her well, it seems, but while she stops short of slating it altogether, she frequently calls life there “weird”. It’s not so much LA’s notorious insincerity, its desperation or its debauchery, as chronicled in countless rockstar biographies, that has soured her affair with the city – it’s the continuing rise of cheap reality TV.

“Hollywood’s gotten different. When I got there it was very much all about movies and television shows. But now there’s this new thing, and I guess I have to get on the bandwagon but…” She tails off for a moment, perhaps too repulsed to wade into contemplating the genre. “You could have a whole show about people that don’t buckle their pants. I could come up with that show and probably sell it.”

Her distaste will strike a chord with anyone who’s despaired at the prospect of another summer of Big Brothertedium, but for Coolidge, escaping the trend wasn’t as simple as switching channels. Her solution was a change of scene and a self-reinvention she compares to those of the chameleonic Madonna. And what better sanctuary for the disillusioned actress than the freer, more self-reliant world of live comedy?

Although she’s been performing her one-woman show for barely a year, Coolidge will take a bold step into stand-up’s spiritual home when she brings Yours for the Night to Edinburgh this August. A month before her first Fringe date, the nerves are kicking in.

“When people say ‘is your show any good?’ all I can say is ‘I don’t know.’ I’m hoping it’s entertaining, I guess. Who knows? I could be terrible.”

Explaining the substance of her debut hour—mainly a collection of aptly “weird” anecdotes designed to shatter misconceptions of supposedly glamorous showbiz life—her speech is peppered with ‘maybe’s and ‘hopefully’s, but despite pre-festival jitters, she’s not flying completely blind. A background in improvised comedy predates Coolidge’s screen successes, and her time with celebrated stage troupe The Groundlings—which counts Will Ferrell and Lisa Kudrow among its alumni—means she’s able to take comfort in her belief that “stand-up isn’t all that different.”

Early shows have been well received by the American press—though Coolidge, who refrains from reading her reviews, wouldn’t know—but even if her festival run proves disastrous, she insists the experience of touring life will be ample reward.

“You get to hang out with normal people – it’s just amazing how refreshing that is, that you’re not hanging out with people in show business. My life is so concentrated on that, and that’s all I really meet, living in LA. But you go on the road and you meet everybody. It’s pretty cool – and the dating life is way better on the road.”

Edinburgh, particularly, will be a playground for an excited Coolidge, who has never set foot in Scotland. “Maybe it’s presumptuous, but I expect to have a full-on relationship with somebody there,” she reveals, and for a moment it’s impossible not to associate her with that cougar character, which she still bears as if it were some horny, inebriated albatross. But romance is far from the only thing on what turns out to be a wildly varied agenda: apart from celebrating her birthday in the capital, Coolidge throws up such random suggestions as hiking with the Scouts, judging beauty contests and “eating dinner with anyone who would invite me into their home.”

“I have a short attention span and I’m up for some cheap thrills,” she laughs. Edinburgh, be prepared.

Jennifer Coolidge is performing in the Assembly@George Street at 8.15pm for the duration of the festival. (Not 16th)

Des Bishop has little time for macho men but he tells Jay Richardson from ‘The List’ how his dad came close to nabbing the role of the silver screen’s iconic state assassin

Des Bishop has wanted to tell his father’s story for a long time. The former model and actor, who had bit parts in Zulu and Day of the Triffids, narrowly lost out to George Lazenby for the role of James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. After quitting acting to raise a family in New York, his father’s regrets were ‘ridiculous’, thought the comic. But when Bishop Snr had terminal cancer diagnosed, his eldest son realised that he finally knew he would share that story and it soon became the only thing on his mind.

We’re chatting just a few hours after Bishop completed his first skydive and a couple of days after recreating his debut threesome onstage, graphically, and somewhat horrifically, with Dara O’Briain and Jason Byrne. But the Irish-American has little time for the ‘macho bullshit’ of 007 and one of his current favourite routines is one in which he discusses male impotency. As someone who recovered from testicular cancer himself and who considers it less of a personal issue than his adolescent battles with drink and drugs or the gregarious outsider personality he developed when he left the family roost at 14 for the land of his forefathers, Bishop nevertheless doesn’t know if he’d be able to do this show now, ‘except for the fact that I’ve had the experience of joking about cancer before. It helps people to realise it’s not coming from a bad or exploitative place’.

Acclaimed at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in April, My Dad Was Nearly James Bond attracted comparisons to Jason Cook’s My Confessions for its honest portrayal of living with a dying father. But with Bishop Snr still alive at the time of writing, it’s a show that’s changing every day, with snapshots of the Edinburgh run likely to feature in an accompanying documentary being made by Irish broadcaster RTE.

‘As a comedian, you always feel the obligation to be funny,’ Bishop reasons. ‘But there’s an opportunity here to stay more honest, for something that’s pretty profound. The father-son relationship, the imminence of death, these things are worth joking about, because we’re all going to have to deal with them. At the same time, it’s worth not being overly flippant just for the sake of laughs. Every night I’ve reported to him how it’s going, so even when I’m away, our little project is still in existence. He’s been involved 100%.’

Des Bishop, Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, 7–29 Aug (not 16, 23), 8.05pm, £12–£14 (£11–£13). Previews 5 & 6 Aug, £5.