Over the years, television has brought us Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, Mary and Rhoda. But in 1992 it spawned *Absolutely Fabulous’*s Patsy and Eddy, arguably the most hilariously despicable comedienne duo of all time. Relentlessly drunk, self-obsessed fashion slaves, Joanna Lumley’s magazine editor, Patsy Stone, and Jennifer Saunders’s publicist, Edina “Eddy” Monsoon, took madcap satire to giddy heights and sleazy lows. They are two “ludicrous” creatures, says Lumley—a 1960s-era model turned actress who first became a household name as Purdey in The New Avengers in the mid-70s. Yet the role of Patsy turned her into an international star: “After that, I didn’t have to explain who I was,” she says. “People knew.” The series ran sporadically through the 90s and into the 21st century, and this month Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (written by Saunders) is being unleashed upon us all. (Cameos include everyone from Stella McCartney to Joan Collins to Jerry Hall.) Yet if Patsy is sublimely soul-less, Lumley is her antithesis: a beloved activist (principally on behalf of retired Gurkha soldiers seeking the right to settle in Great Britain), a global traveler, and a wise soul; at 70, she is considered a national treasure in at least two countries. That said, she isn’t exactly vice-free, as she explains below.

ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: The Movie has been in the works for 20 years, but Lumley and Saunders decided last year that it was time to make it: “We said, ‘We need to do it now; after all, we’re practically only just still alive.’ ”

THE ON-SET highlight: “I got to kiss Jon Hamm. Of course, he tried to escape, but I got to him anyway.”

SHE THINKS that social media has made everyone thin-skinned: “Back in the 90s, you could poke fun at everybody. These days, people are very quick to take offense at things. The world has changed, gotten a bit darker.”

SHE IS occasionally implored to run for mayor of London, and politely demurs: “I’d be thrilled for about five days and then I’d be impatient that everyone wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted.” (But she is civically inclined: She conceived the mammoth, ongoing project to build the Thomas Heatherwick-designed Garden Bridge over the Thames.)

LIKE PATSY, she smokes and drinks (“But not as much, for heaven’s sake: Patsy had her insides removed”), and she’s a scant eater (“Eating lunch just takes up so much time and makes me tired”).

UNLIKE PATSY, a relentless bachelorette, Lumley has been happily married to the British conductor Stephen Barlow for 30 years and is now a grandmother. She says her granddaughters find Patsy “terrifyingly vile.”

HER CHILDHOOD resembles a Somerset Maugham novel. Her father was born in India and was a major in the Gurkha Rifles; her mother was brought up in Tibet. “I was born in Kashmir,” she says, “and came back to England by ship for boarding school. It took a month to travel from Singapore to Southampton. It feels like it all happened two centuries ago.”

ALL OF the moving around steeled her for the unpredictability of acting: “I have never feared the unknown; rather, I fear the known, if that doesn’t sound too mad.”

SHE BEGAN her acting career as a drama-school rejectee. “I was only 16 at the time,” she says, “and hadn’t prepared anything for my audition”—at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. “I was completely hopeless.”

EVENTUALLY SHE broke into the industry the old-fashioned way, by “lying and cheating and pretending.” In auditions, “I’d tell them, ‘Oh, I’ve done three movies and they haven’t been released yet.’ You couldn’t do that today: people can check you out in a nano-second.”

HER MOST embarrassing modeling assignment entailed “wearing a nylon suit, which wouldn’t look good on a dog, and being made to laugh giddily at a bowl of fruit.”

HER ADVICE to other actors is “Go on the Tube; take the bus; walk around. The life’s blood of acting is observation of other people.”

SHE PREFERS to do her own makeup. For her 1996 role as Aunt Spiker in James and the Giant Peach, she says, “I took over and made a thin, ratty little mouth. It looked divine.”

SHE IS phobic about masks: “I don’t like to wear them or see people in them. My heart skips a beat.”

SUPERSTITIONS RULE her world: “Oh, you know, the ordinary ones, like if you see a magpie, you must salute it. If you don’t, it can be bad luck.”

THAT SAID, she allows herself only one talisman. “I get depressed if I can’t find my bottle of YSL’s Rive Gauche,” she says. “It comes with me everywhere.”

HER ANTHEM is Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” “I am besotted by him; the whole thing is magic. It’s almost unbelievable to think that someone could dump Elvis. He was obviously thinking of me when he sang it.”

SHE SEEMS hardwired for contentedness: “I tend to love everything, actually.”

THE BEST advice she was ever given came courtesy of her father: “ ‘Never, never give up.’ That used to ring in my head. ‘When times get tough, stay in the boat.’ ”

YET HER real mantra, she says, is “Keep dancing until the lights go out.”