I was thrilled by my visits to the Old Vic, where Michael Benthall ran from 1953 onwards his five-year plan of presenting every Shakespeare play. Richard Burton’s Hamlet, with Claire Bloom as Ophelia, was for me the summit of what I aspired to be, thrilling at every twist and turn of the ascent. Harsh, ruggedly handsome, full of wild bursts of recognition, Burton was far from the romantic prince of tradition. Especially eerie and spine-chilling was his confrontation with his father’s ghost: ‘Angel and ministers of grace, defend us!’
I was now in my penultimate year at school. As I grew older my appearance pursued me and dogged me like a curse. When was it going to improve? I was never comfortable at that age as I had terrible acne, which deeply embarrassed me – and I still have the scars. We had a cabinet with glass doors in the front room. I could see my outline in them, but not the texture. With my carrot-red hair and loads of freckles I hated looking at myself; but facing this dark ‘window’ backed by books I’d comb my hair or do up my tie. To this day I can’t look directly in the mirror. When I make up in the theatre I have a magnifying glass that I bring up close to my face: I do the lips and I do one eye at a time.
Mum used to wash my hair. I was very hair-conscious, for the good strong hair, my crowning glory, was a compensation for my ugly face. If it didn’t fall in the right way I’d get angry. She was always calming, she never slapped me down, or said, ‘I’m trying to help you.’ She’d take the rough reply and she was placid, although less placid than Dad.
Placidity – that’s the word that describes them perfectly. I never once heard them row, and they were together in each other’s company twenty-four hours a day. It was calming.
But not on every occasion. As a teenager I found the acne worsened and it got really bad. Mum and Dad made me an appointment to see a skin man, a dermatologist whose practice was in Wimpole Street. We three set out for the West End, and while I went in they sat outside. The dermatologist shot this tube-shaped instrument with a nozzle at my forehead, then with his hands went over my face squeezing it, and finally said, ‘You can go!’ He didn’t clean me up so I walked out of his consulting room covered in blood and pus. Seeing my state, Mum and Dad became so incensed that they walked straight in to protest. They were so angry I thought they’d kill him.
Nothing improved and everything remained awful. Everything about me was wrong. The fatty cheeks, the stubby nose, while to top it all I had no profile. Oh, I so wished to have a face like Paul Scofield! That God-given face! If I were asked who I would like to look like, if I could push a button, it would be Scofield. Handsome, rugged, pitted: a strong, sensitive face. It has got a life on it – it has lived.
And to add to this I was miserable and shy.
My first, entirely chaste passion was for a French penpal from the Vendée; we did an exchange when he came to stay with us in Essex Road. His name was Joël Pauvereau and from the moment I set eyes on him I was bowled over.
He was extraordinarily handsome and wore eau de cologne – something that to me seemed so foreign and exotic. At this time scent on a man was unknown, and the fragrance, that perfume which emanated from him, was my idea of heaven. But naturally, in spite of my crush on him, nothing happened between us, and I am sure he had no inkling of how I felt. He did not stay long and in the end became a school teacher.
With the success of this visit, Mum arranged through the school an exchange with a German boy, Fritz. The Western Allies still occupied West Germany militarily and Leyton School fixed up these Anglo-German exchanges on the basis of ‘Now is the time to be friendly with the Boche,’ so off I set to Frankfurt for a week to stay with Fritz and his family. But they didn’t take to me at all and were very cold, very distant. For my part I hated them, and had such a rotten time that the other half of the exchange didn’t happen.
As a result of the Spanish Conquistador de Soto, my acting prospects suddenly caught fire when Michael Croft, an English teacher at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, visited Leytonstone and auditioned me. For a year or two Croft, sailor, boxer and author of the semi-autobiographical novel Spare the Rod, had been enterprisingly directing plays with local public school boys for what he grandiosely called ‘The Youth Theatre’. He was now looking for a boy to play the part of Prince Hal for his second production, that of Henry IV Part II.
Mainly he took his casts from Alleyn’s, and some from Dulwich College. Richard Hampton, who was later head of OUDS (the Oxford University Dramatic Society), had been playing Prince Hal, but had to drop out for National Service. John Stride, another possibility at his school for Hal, was unavailable. Croft had to cast his net wider, which is how he came to our patch. As I wanted to be an actor I auditioned and got the part, a step up the ladder for me, but one which caused great unease as I surveyed those around me from a new and different vantage point.
Right from the start I was definitely not a Croft favourite. He thought I was a bit namby-pamby, for he had a footballer image of actors as ‘the lads of life’, into which category John Stride fitted, but I didn’t.
My fellow lads of life were Ken Farrington as Poins, Paul Hill as Doll Tearsheet and David Weston as Falstaff. David was the son of parents who ran a fish shop in the Brixton Market, and he had a gutsy approach to Falstaff, with turned-up nose and a way of saying, ‘I was a Cockney kid at thirteen,’ as if he were confessing an addiction. All four of us were destined to be professionals, and later David acted with me when I ran the Chichester Festival Theatre, where he was my understudy as Tattle in Love for Love, and much later even understudy to Ian McKellen’s Lear, about which he wrote a book.
The other three called me ‘Strawberry bloke’, for reasons unknown except perhaps the straw hair and pink complexion. Besides the three I was with now, a lot of people started on the lowest rung of the theatrical ladder with Michael Croft, such as John Stride, Julian Glover, David Suchet, Martin Jarvis and Ian McShane.
The company had a very strong, all-male exclusiveness and ethos. This came to a head when they were going to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director of this production, Paul Hill, came to Croft because they could not find the right two boys to play Helena and Hermia. But they did have two volunteer girls who were scrubbing floors and helping in the wardrobe: the menial stuff. Their names were Helen Mirren and Diana Quick.
‘With your permission I’ve found two girls to play Helena and Hermia,’ Hill told Croft.
‘Then on your head be it!’ grumbled Croft, who wasn’t exactly enamoured of young ladies in his company, and was the robust, bachelor type. Later Helen played Cleopatra which the Youth Theatre put on at the Old Vic, but she would decline to speak of Croft beyond saying ‘that silly old fart’ – I don’t think she liked him much!
To rehearse Prince Hal I had to come all the way from Leytonstone to Dulwich. It was a marathon bus journey from one side of London to the other, involving six buses and twenty-seven stops. Those Sunday rehearsals in Lordship Lane didn’t exactly inspire me, and I don’t remember them with any fondness. Everybody was very jokey, very camp, giggling all over the place, and I was very much an outsider. The others all knew each other, had worked together before, communicated in that kind of shorthand camaraderie that long-time friends acquire. I never felt comfortable.
At first,
