And Furthermore (18 page)

Various parts of my life seemed to converge during that run. I was told that one night forty-two members of the
As Time Goes By
Internet Fan Club were coming to the play. So they were kept in the theatre after the performance, and I took them a tray of custard tarts from Mr and Mrs Lionel Hardcastle. When their chairman said, ‘Shall I write to Mr Hardcastle?’ I replied, ‘That’s not Mr Hardcastle, that’s Geoffrey Palmer.’ When I got back to the apartment there was a note awaiting me from Geoffrey, saying, ‘I know that this is the night that I would be mobbed by the Internet crowd.’ I think he would have been mobbed too, if he had been there. They were a very nice group. They had come from all over the country to see it, and most of them had not met each other before.
As Time Goes By
seems to be much better loved there than in England.

The American Shakespeare Guild has created the John Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, known for short by the award itself – the Golden Quill. This is given alternately for performances in America and Britain, and previous winners have included Derek Jacobi, Kevin Kline, Ian McKellen, and Zoe Caldwell, so I was thrilled when they gave it to me during the run on Broadway. Several people in the company took part in the event.

David Hare reminded me of a letter that I had quite forgotten, when he had written to me before we ever met about one of my early performances. He read out my reply with great relish: ‘You call me beautiful, you call me brilliant, I notice you don’t call me tall.’ Christopher Plummer recalled our times together with the RSC in the Sixties, and Keith Baxter read out a sweet note from John Gielgud himself, whose name made this award so very special. The previous winner, Zoe Caldwell, presented me with the hugely heavy Quill, and said to the film people in the audience, ‘You can
lease
her now and then, but just remember: she
belongs
to the theatre.’ I could hardly think of what to say after all this, but I was anxious to pay tribute to Sir John himself, and how he had restored my confidence all those years ago in
The Cherry Orchard
. (The following year, when the Shakespeare Guild gave the award to Kenneth Branagh, I stepped into Zoe’s shoes and presented him with the Quill in the Middle Temple in London.)

Because
Amy’s View
was such a success, the Barrymore management wanted to extend the run, but I refused, saying I had to get home to be a wife and a mother again. Oddly enough, I have not been offered any more theatre work in America, only films, a couple of which I accepted.

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER MADE MY
life seem more planned than it ever really is, but for clarity it seemed best to follow on the filming of
Shakespeare in Love
with the subsequent Oscars ceremony and my time on Broadway. In reality there was a gap of something like a year between finishing the film and going to America, during which I did another play and a couple of films.

The play was
Filumena
by the Italian Eduardo de Filippo, directed by Peter Hall. My co-star once again was Michael Pennington, who had been agitating for ages for us to do it together. I hadn’t seen Joan Plowright in the part in 1977, but I knew that she had been a great success. Filumena is a former Neapolitan whore who has borne three sons and never told her lover Domenico which one is his. She tricks him into marriage at last by pretending to be on her deathbed, a trick he has just discovered as the play opens. So Michael had to storm on to the stage in a towering fury, shouting at me for deceiving him. We used to wind up for that opening by shouting and chasing each other up and down in the wings before we went on.

I can’t think of another play that opens with an outburst of such intensity, and it took me a while to get used to it. At first I thought the play was very slight, but after I had done it for a while I realised that it wasn’t slight at all. John Gunter had designed a brilliant set, which I didn’t really understand until halfway through. Then I thought that of course this was an Italian story, and here was a table in an Italian house which everybody sits round but is never used, everyone walks past it. The more we did it, the more I reckoned the play, and we had a hugely good time doing it.

But the first night was nearly a disaster. I completely dried on my line: ‘I don’t suppose you know those hovels in San Giuvanniello, in Virgene, in Furcella, Tribunale, Palunetto…’ I can hardly believe that I can still rattle them off now, but that night I couldn’t remember a single Italian place-name. So instead I said every kind of pasta I could think of, fusilli and vermicelli, and valpolicella – a lot of Italian food and wine, because I had been having it for three months filming in Italy.

Also on the first night I jumped from Act I to Act III, I skipped a whole amount of plot; that gave me such a fright. Michael steadied me, he cleverly and imperceptibly moved me from Act III back to Act I again. He is so cool-headed inside, even if I did see the whites of his eyes when I did it. But I really thought I had blown it on the first night. I was terribly depressed afterwards. We fully expected the worst from the reviews, but they were very enthusiastic, so we must have got away with our improvisations. The box office was besieged, and they had to schedule some extra matinee performances to meet the demand. By then, we didn’t mind that, we were so enjoying it. I remember saying to Michael one night, ‘I’ve never been so happy on stage,’ and he said, ‘Well, neither have I, oddly enough.’

Whereas I could not, in all honesty, say quite the same for my previous filming experience in Italy, just before
Filumena
.
Tea with Mussolini
should have been just as wonderful. Franco Zeffirelli was directing, and the others in the cast included Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Paula Jacobs, Lily Tomlin and Cher. We were playing an assorted group of expatriates living in Italy just before Mussolini entered the war, and my Michael played the English Consul who tries to persuade us all to leave before we were interned. The locations were in Florence, San Gimignano and Rome, which could hardly have been nicer, and Franco seemed to have as much boundless energy as I remembered from
Romeo and Juliet
forty years earlier. He was charming, entertaining and funny, and part of the story was based on his own early life. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, working with Maggie again after such a long time, and also making a friend of Joan, whom I had not really known properly before.

When Franco was directing, he had this wonderful old dog that was carried behind him in a box. We were going to do a scene in a garage one morning in Rome, and there were Maggie, Joan, Lily, Paula and myself, all made up with our wigs and costumes, and then suddenly Franco changed his mind about the scene. He said he didn’t want to do it then, he would do another scene. He said to Joan and Maggie and me, ‘Why don’t you go to the villa and swim?’

So we went to his villa, and we were all swimming very carefully, with nobody daring to get wet hair. Then we heard a lot of barking, and Franco had come back for lunch with three of the actors playing carabinieri, so we all had to race out and dry ourselves, and rush back to the dingy garage. It was far from the best-managed film schedule I have experienced, and the crew kept changing.

I was this rather scatty bohemian art-lover, and some of my scenes in the script never got filmed at all. Some of those that were shot never made it into the final film, but that is the nature of the film business; they can’t do that to you in the theatre. There was one line from Cher that I doubted would ever hit the screen. She was supposed to say, ‘Do I know Hester? I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.’ She obviously thought that was a bit weak, so she said instead, ‘Do I know Hester? I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw Musso’s fat ass across the room.’ Unsurprisingly that got cut too.

We even had disputes about the hotels booked for us, until Joan Plowright put her foot down. When we got to Rome we went to the hotel, and were sent up in a lift with a porter. He just said to me, ‘That’s your landing,’ so I said, ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ and got out to find my room. It was a very dark room, and the air-conditioning didn’t work. It was appalling, but I hadn’t been in it for five minutes before the phone rang, and it was Joan. ‘Darling, we’re leaving here, it’s a knocking-shop, I’ve heard two at it on my way up.’ So we walked around Rome looking for a hotel. We went to the Majestic, and she insisted on seeing the rooms. She was so wonderful; she said, ‘Lady Olivier would like a suite of rooms, we want at least three, because Maggie won’t want to go to that knocking-shop.’

In the end we went to the Eden Hotel, and she said, ‘Have you got three nice suites here? We only had rooms at the other hotel.’ They said they did, so she said, ‘We’ll have them. Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench, and Lady Olivier, we’ll have the lot.’ But they were not available until the next day, so we had to go back for just one night, which was awful. The dining room was underground, and it was all self-service.

Maggie had gone home for the weekend, so she had a terrible time when she got back, trying to find us. First she went to the original hotel, where they told her we had checked out, and as Joan had booked us in at several hotels before we found the Eden, poor Maggie had done the scenic journey round Rome before she finally found us at the Eden.

The three of us spent a lot of time on their lovely roof terrace. To begin with, they told us that we couldn’t eat out on the terrace, we could only eat in the restaurant. But after a while, I think they were so ashamed of us that they said we could eat round the corner, they hid us from the public. So we ate there every evening when we came in. The film company said they wouldn’t pay for the Eden, we would have to pay the extra ourselves. But since we were doing publicity interviews at the Eden for the film, Joan and Maggie both said, ‘We’re sorry, but if we’re being interviewed there, we’re not paying for it, and we’re not going to be interviewed any more unless you pay for it.’ So in the end they did.

I remember Maggie and I having the most extraordinary experience when we went to see the Pantheon. It was brilliant sunshine outside, and when we came in out of the sunshine the whole place was very misty. Round the dome two white gulls were circling, they didn’t even flap their wings, they were just cooling off in there for about ten minutes, and we couldn’t take our eyes off them.

Next I had my third stint as ‘M’ in
The World Is Not Enough
, directed by Michael Apted this time, who I thought was brilliant, and it was a very good script. I had complained that I never got taken to any of the exotic locations in the film, so this time they said they were going to take me to Scotland, and to Turkey. The nearest I got to either was a painted background of Loch Lomond, and a Winnebago trailer with Innsbruck stuck on it, so I could say I had been in Innsbruck. It is only recently that I have been taken to locations in Prague and Nassau.

What I enjoyed most was the day at Swindon when ‘M’ had to go up in a little glass helicopter, which looked like a see-through insect. It was a very blustery day, and up we went, with my assistant Colin Salmon in the back, and a whole lot of bodyguards for ‘M’. We had to wait for the action and then come swooping down; we did that three times to get the shot, and it was thrilling, I loved it. That took the whole day, and when I got home I happened to look at the call sheet. On the list was ‘M’s stunt-double’. So I guessed that they must have thought I was going to say, No, I won’t go up in a helicopter. I was really pleased that it hadn’t come to the crunch.

Sophie Marceau was brilliant in the film, and in the scene I was doing with her I was riveted by the coat she was wearing, and thought I must draw it, so that perhaps I could get it copied. I asked our costume designer, Lindy Hemming, where it had come from, and she said, ‘Oh, they’re in Beauchamp Place, do you want to see if they’ve got a coat like that?’ and I said, ‘Yes, please.’

My agent, Tor, came to see me at lunchtime and asked me, ‘Who do you want to do your clothes for the Oscars?’

‘I don’t know, Sophie Marceau’s clothes in this are absolutely beautiful.’

‘Well, I’ll go to them and ask if they would like to supply some stuff, or would they like to see you about fitting something.’

About ten minutes after Tor had left, Lindy came in to say, ‘Those people are very keen that they should do some clothes for the Oscars.’ So I had already asked her, and they had already offered, and we hadn’t known. By sheer serendipity, the Bond film provided the clothes I needed for going to the Oscars with
Shakespeare in Love
.

If 1999 was a watershed year for me, it was not because of the Oscar and my time on Broadway, but because of something far more important in my family life. That was when we first learned of Michael’s illness, and I came home to nurse him.