And Furthermore (21 page)

After a string of films in period costume I went back to my role as ‘M’ in
Casino Royale
, this time with a new James Bond, played by Daniel Craig. He is very different from Pierce Brosnan, but both are very good actors with an enormous sense of humour, and that is really important. I think you have got to be a bit self-deprecating as Bond; if you take yourself too seriously in it, or in anything really, it isn’t good. Daniel is hugely good fun to work with, and he does most of his stunts himself.

I had always complained before that I never got to any of the foreign locations, and now I went twice – to Prague and then to Panama. When we arrived in Panama we were given an information pack, and when it was translated it said, ‘the name of the street where you are filming means “get out of here if you can”.’ Somebody got shot, then there was a riot the next day when some policemen got kneecapped, and everybody threw a lot of bricks.

So we were all told to stay in for a day, then we were back there filming again. After a week they said, ‘That’s Judi wrapped, she’s going home,’ and everyone else said, ‘Can I go home too?’ It was terrible to feel right there on the edge of South America and not go on to explore the rest of it. I was very pleased to come home, but at the same time I thought it would have been wonderful to go on and visit lots of marvellous places I would have loved to see.

THE YEAR
2006
WAS A
strenuous one for me both on film and on stage.
Notes on a Scandal
was physically demanding as well as quite emotionally draining. My knee was giving me trouble, and some of the location shots were up several flights of stairs. I was playing this terrifying schoolteacher, Barbara Covett, and I have always had a terrible fear of a mass of schoolchildren together, which I just had to get over, as the first day’s shooting was in a school in North London. Fortunately the children all turned out to be lovely, both interesting and interested, and very enthusiastic.

I had read the book some time before, and found the story fascinating. Patrick Marber did a very sensitive adaptation for the screen, but I did have a big argument with him about one scene, when the young schoolteacher Sheba was going through Barbara’s drawers looking for the diaries, and it said ‘she goes through her grey bras and pants’. I said that, just because Barbara was this rather dodgy character, somebody you might not like to ask round to tea, she doesn’t have grey bras and pants, she doesn’t necessarily have to live in a dingy flat. I was concerned that she looked right, and we tried lots of different looks for her. In the end, I thought that what we did get was absolutely right.

Barbara is attracted to the new teacher played by Cate Blanchett, who she discovers is having an affair with one of the boys. Her jealousy prompts her to expose the relationship, which shocks the school, the boy’s parents and the teacher’s husband, played by Bill Nighy. She is deeply attached to her cat, Portia, and I had lots of scenes with it. One day I was sitting there, waiting to do something, and looked down and saw another cat basket. I said, ‘That’s not my cat’s, what’s that basket there?’ They said, ‘That’s the stunt cat.’ The stunt cat looked nothing like the cat I was using, it was a huge big chap.

I was shooting one scene and Richard Eyre said to me, ‘You can probably go and have a sit down for twenty minutes because the next scene is just the cat running to the door, pausing, looking back at you, startled, and then running off.’ I said, ‘Then I’ll take a couple of months off.’ But the stunt cat never got a chance, the ordinary cat did it. Then after all that, you didn’t see much of the ordinary cat either in the end.

The young actor playing the boy who has the affair had a difficult part, but he did it with the most enormous charm, and his father was with him all the time. Andrew Simpson was sixteen, and he had just got five A-levels, and one felt one ought to say, ‘Don’t be an actor, stay with going to law school.’ But he was such a good actor, and Cate and he worked fantastically well together, because it was quite uncomfortable for her, they had some quite explicit scenes, which I thought were really delicately done.

After that, it was a great relief to return to Noël Coward, and go back to John Gielgud’s old dressing room at the beautifully kept Haymarket Theatre again too. We all had a glorious time doing
Hay Fever
– his plays are such fun to do. Back in the Sixties, doing
Private Lives
with Edward Woodward had been like going to a marvellous party every night, and I felt exactly the same about playing Judith Bliss in
Hay Fever
forty years later, even though Coward’s lines are as difficult to learn as Oscar Wilde’s or David Hare’s. This very theatrical family behave so badly to the guests they invite down to the country that it was an invitation I found irresistible.

Edith Evans had preceded me in this part too, at the National Theatre in the Sixties, and the actress who had created the part of Judith Bliss in the theatre was the formidable Marie Tempest. I have a lovely letter framed at home which her grand-daughter wrote to me, in which she said that Marie Tempest always paused at the door at her first entrance in each act, until there was huge applause. Then she would come on and get on with the play. She would do another little scene and have another entrance, and do it again, to huge applause. She said her brother used to slide to the floor in embarrassment.

Noël Coward was always a stickler for having his lines spoken exactly as he had written them, and I think he was absolutely right, you should respect the author’s creativity. So when Greg Doran asked me to play Mistress Quickly in a musical version of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
I was a little anxious, until I found to my relief that it was all Shakespeare’s text that had been set to music. Nothing was added, just a few things subtracted, and Paul Englishby wrote the most beautiful score.

One of the most rewarding things about that show was that it brought in a whole new audience for Shakespeare because it was a musical, just as Trevor Nunn had done with his musical version of
The Comedy of Errors
. At the stage door there would be really young people saying that they had never been there before, and that they had had a lovely time. If it didn’t have quite the same appeal to some of the older traditionalists, it certainly seemed to for that younger generation. I hope it brought them in to see plays without music in them, other Shakespeare plays.

We all had a very larky time. We did it in a straight run all over the Christmas period, we had a ball, and I think the audience did too. Mistress Quickly did a series of amazing cartwheels across the front at one point, though some people had the temerity to suggest it wasn’t me in that costume. Greg had another brilliant sight gag for me. The set was a line of houses diminishing in size to give perspective, which created the right illusion until I walked on from the back of the stage and looked down on the rooftops. It is the first time I have ever felt really tall. It was almost hallucinogenic, and I had this sudden thought that Mistress Quickly had been at the mushrooms.

The cast included Haydn Gwynne as Mistress Page, Alexandra Gilbreath as Mistress Ford, my brother Jeff as Robert Shallow, and my regular cabaret partner Brendan O’Hea as Pistol. Desmond Barrit was playing Falstaff, but after about four weeks of rehearsal and learning all the songs, he had to have an operation on his toe, which meant giving up the part. So Simon Callow took over at almost the last minute. He told us that he was filming on a beach in Greece when he got the phone call from Greg. He thought he heard him ask if he would come to Stratford to take over the RSC, so he had said yes before he realised what the offer really was. It was hard for him, because there were only about ten days’ rehearsal left, but he did a remarkable job in such a short time.

I like working with directors I know and trust, such as Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre, but I also enjoy working for the first time with the younger directors like Sam Mendes, and one of the main reasons I agreed to be in
Madame de Sade
in 2008 was for the chance to work with Michael Grandage. He had made such a success of running the Donmar that he took over the much bigger Wyndham’s Theatre for a season of
Ivanov
with Kenneth Branagh,
Twelfth Night
with Derek Jacobi,
Hamlet
with Jude Law, and the
de Sade
play.

Michael had asked me to be in it a long time before, he very much wanted to do the play, and I wanted to do it for him. It was fiendishly difficult. Indeed it was without doubt the most difficult play I have ever done – and do I regret it? No, not a single day of it, because if there is such a thing as a learning curve, my goodness I learnt it through those few months at Wyndham’s.

I thought it was a terribly difficult story to tell: difficult language, difficult translation from the Japanese, beautiful clothes – but we couldn’t get into the dressing rooms in them, never off the stage. There were so many really difficult things, and actually to capture the audience in that play was like scaling Everest every night, and sometimes scaling Everest twice a day. But I wouldn’t have missed it, because it required the most incredible discipline.

Brendan O’Hea came to it and said to me afterwards, ‘Well, you just come on apologising for the play. Do stop that,’ and it made a big difference to me. I thought, Yes, that’s exactly what I am doing.

Madame de Sade
had an all-female cast of six – the other five were Rosamund Pike, Frances Barber, Deborah Findlay, Jenny Galloway and Fiona Button. We happened to be rehearsing in the same building as the all-male cast of
Waiting for Godot
– Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup, all of whom I knew, so the opportunity of sending them up seemed irresistible. The very first day that we were there, when they had been rehearsing for some time, we opened their door and looked in appalled, shut the door again and ran away. Then, because of the nature of our play, we just found a very rude word every day to write on a piece of paper and slip under their door – words that I have never heard before, and I don’t expect ever to hear again.

The production was beautifully designed, and Michael Grandage was a joy to work with, but the script was difficult to learn, and on the first night I cut a page and a half. Actors are so kind when you do something like that, and Frances and Deborah said afterwards, ‘You see, it didn’t matter at all, they’re all told the story anyway.’ But you just feel as if you are falling backwards into a black hole, because the audience never go so quiet as when they know an actor has dried; the silence is deadly.

That is quite different from the stillness when an audience is held, where the company and the audience can completely become one thing. That is more difficult now, because people watch more television, and I think that an audience doesn’t realise how amazingly restless it can be. What drives me mad are those digital watches, where I can tell during the run if I am doing it quicker or not, and I start to wonder if I am going to beat the watches on this one. You also know exactly where the coughers are.

I am so often asked, ‘Does the audience make any difference?’ Of course! It is the only reason you bother to be in the theatre, in order that tonight it can be better than last night, that you can crack something that you haven’t yet, that this audience will be quieter, that this audience really will at the end think they have had a marvellous experience, and you have told the author’s story. I always get that very depressed feeling at the end, and then miraculously a night’s sleep somehow prepares you for doing it a step up the next day.

My Michael loved to quote Ralph Richardson, who said to him when they were shooting a scene in
Eagle in a Cage
, a film about Napoleon on St Helena: ‘Acting is a strange business, my boy. One day it’s there, and the next day nowhere to be seen.’ None of us really knows the recipe for the marvellous thing that can happen on very rare occasions, but I know what the recipe isn’t. The recipe isn’t to have a long night’s sleep, get up and have a bath, do something in the morning, eat a very light lunch, go to bed for an hour and a half in the afternoon, go to the theatre feeling like it, put on your make-up, go on and then find that you just fall a thousand feet, when you simply can’t do anything right.

I also know that the recipe can be that you work all day on another play, you arrive at the theatre exhausted or tired, you try and sleep and you can’t, you get up, you put the make-up on, you think, I don’t know how I am going to get through it…And something happens.

We didn’t get very good notices for
Madame de Sade
, which I usually try to shrug off and forget, but I was very cross with the critic of the
Daily Telegraph
who used his review not just to attack that play, but launched into a criticism of me in several previous parts. I broke the habit of a lifetime and wrote to him: ‘I used to admire you, but now I realise you are a C. S., Charles Spencer – Complete Shit.’ He wrote back to say he was not a complete shit: ‘I love my wife and I’m kind to my cat.’

But despite our reviews the whole Donmar season at the Wyndham’s Theatre was virtually sold out, with a huge advance booking, so it was a great success for Michael Grandage.

After the decadence that was the subject of that play, I found myself in the very different nineteenth-century moral atmosphere portrayed by Mrs Gaskell in
Cranford
, whose novels were adapted for television by Heidi Thomas. This BBC series contained a formidable cast of ladies, including Eileen Atkins, Francesca Annis, Emma Fielding, Deborah Findlay, Barbara Flynn, Lesley Manville, Julia McKenzie and Imelda Staunton. The men were a quite impressive lot too, including Jim Carter, Michael Gambon, Philip Glenister, Alex Jennings, Martin Shaw and Greg Wise. It seemed like a cast of thousands.

It was a five-part series, and we had an unbelievably tight schedule for the filming. I worked out that in the last three weeks I was doing an average of seven scenes a day. For the cinema, one scene would take at least a day, or if it was a very complicated scene it would take more than a day. But these days, in television, things have to get faster and faster, because there isn’t the money. So you are very conscious of the fact that if you don’t know your lines you are wasting money. But everyone did arrive word-perfect. I had an hour’s car journey each way, and that is a great time to learn lines.