The Celebrity Traitors star on overcoming serious illness, embracing life’s surprises and why she loves to travel by ship and train.
The mischief on her face was what made it so funny. Celia Imrie, elegant star of stage and screen, smirking like a guilty schoolgirl after letting rip. “I didn’t realise it was going to blow up like it did,” she says, remembering the reaction to the moment when tension got the better of her, shall we say, on The Celebrity Traitors.
Celia and her fellow contestants were lined up to face a challenge at the gothic Scottish castle when their nervous silence was interrupted by an unexpected noise. “What just happened?” asked host Claudia Winkleman, knowing full well. “I just farted,” said Celia, with a look of innocence and guilt. “It’s nerves, but I always own up.” Cue roars of laughter from the likes of Kate Garraway and Alan Carr, who would eventually “murder” Celia.
She was one of the most popular contestants on the biggest television show for years, not least because this quintessentially classy English woman was so unexpectedly earthy and playful.
“The reaction was quite something,” she says. Did she know her flatulence would go viral? “No, not at all. The producer rang me beforehand asking if it was OK to show it.
“That was when I realised it might be something.”
The Elegant Hustler, by Celia Imrie (Sphere) RRP: £25, published on 8 October 2026
We're at The Dixon hotel, near the Thames, not far from Celia’s London home, where the actor is magnificent in a cream trouser suit, her red hair in an elfin crop. She gets stopped on the street more than ever now. “The Traitors brought me a whole new audience.”
New fans eager for more will love her book The Elegant Hustler, an entertaining new memoir about her travels for work and pleasure. In this, as in most things, Celia goes her own way. “I suppose my way of travel is a bit different, simply because I don’t fly and I love going on ships and trains.”
For an acting job in Los Angeles she will cross the Atlantic on a cruise ship, then take the train from New York to the west coast. “People don’t believe it when I tell them I do this. It’s not an affectation: I don’t fly because I had two pulmonary embolisms, which has to be mentioned otherwise people will think I’m a green goddess, or that I’m just making a fuss, neither of which is true. I’m not preaching to anyone.”
Celia was first hospitalised by the blood clots on her lungs back in 2005, which she says led to some of her darkest times.
“I liken my life to a game of snakes and ladders. It’s wonderful to go up the ladders, but there are snakes around the place and they come upon you sometimes when you’re not looking. I was on a snake at the time.”
Not being able to work affected her mental health. “Churchill used to call it the black dog.”
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