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11 things we learned about Olivia Colman

Multi-award winning actress Oliver Colman spoke to Victoria Coren Mitchell about smacking policemen and boasting about her father owning a bike for Radio 4's Women Talking About Cars. This is what she revealed.

Olivia Colman and Victoria Coren Mitchell

1. She lived in a remote area of Norfolk and learned to drive in a field at the age of 12.

2. She’s intimidated by her own fame - she misses going to the pub because it’s odd when “they know your face but you don’t know theirs”.

3. The first car she remembers was her mum’s Mini. Her mum was a district nurse and during the school holidays the young Olivia would nestle in a bed her mum had made up in the back while she visited her patients.

In the year 2000 with David Michell in the sketch show Bruiser

4. As her father was a car enthusiast, the loo was full of driving magazines. So she learned a lot while she was… occupied.

5. She had a Morris Minor called Moomin, with a raspberry coloured grille “like lipstick”, when she was at teacher training college in Cambridge. She’d have long confessional chats with Moomin on her way home to Norfolk.

7. “I don’t ever get a map wrong,” she says proudly. Olivia and her husband have NEVER rowed in a car.

8. Olivia had a rally licence when she was 16.

Colman in Twenty Twelve in, err, 2012

8. She describes getting dressed for award ceremonies as “thrush from your armpits to your knees”.

9. Her beloved grandad had a Volvo with the number plate YYY so he called it Delilah.

10. Her dog is called Alfred, Lord Waggyson.

11. She keeps biscuits in the car’s glove compartment.

Alfred, Lord Waggyson and biccies in the glove compartment? Olivia, you are our kind of woman.

Listen to Olivia Colman on Women Talking About Cars online now.

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