And Furthermore (19 page)

TOWARDS THE END OF THE
run of
Amy’s View
in New York Michael became ill, so when I came home I didn’t work at all from July to October 1999. Then I continued to turn down all the theatre work I was offered in favour of a few short spells of filming, so that I could be at home with him most of the time.

The first of these was
The Last of the Blonde Bombshells
, for BBC Television, and it had the most brilliant and funny script by Alan Plater. I played the youngest member of a wartime girls’ band, who decide to get back together years later for one last concert. The others were Leslie Caron, Olympia Dukakis, Cleo Laine, Joan Sims, Billie Whitelaw, June Whitfield, and Ian Holm who was dodging the Army so was forced to play in drag. None of us were musicians, of course, so we had to have lessons in how to finger our instruments convincingly, even though the actual music would be dubbed in later. I had to play the saxophone, and my teacher was Kathy Stobart, a member of Humphrey Lyttelton’s Band.

Kathy was marvellous. I learned how to play a scale on the saxophone, even though I found it very hard to make it look authentic. The family were all hugely relieved when I had finished the film, and stopped practising on the saxophone at home. Everyone used to go out of the house when I did it, including the cats, who just took off, they absolutely hated it.

I had to play the tenor sax, and Billie Whitelaw was on the alto sax, and there was one scene with all of us on the school stage with our instruments beside us. Somebody said, ‘Now we’ll play for you,’ and we had to pick them up and play. But Billie had picked up the one on her left instead of her right, so she was playing mine, and I had no instrument to play. We laughed so much about that, but it was easy to tell that we weren’t really professional musicians. Alan Plater later adapted his screenplay for a stage musical, but then of course they had to find people who could actually play the instruments as well as act. I have met people who saw it and had a lovely evening, so it must have come together very well.

I played a much less happy-go-lucky character in my next film,
Chocolat
, as a very grim-faced grandmother, who is charmed by the arrival in a French village of a young chocolate maker, played by Juliet Binoche. All my scenes were shot here, because I couldn’t go away to France, and the reconstruction was wonderful, but in my big birthday party scene we had the most torrential rain you could imagine. There was a great big blue canopy over us outside, and we kept shooting bits of the scene whenever there was a lull in the rain. The crew had to come with big poles every few minutes and push at the canvas, to shake off the great pools of water which had accumulated. I kept thinking this was ridiculous, we were meant to be in this idyllic wonderfully sunny place in France. However, I did get to dance with Johnny Depp, and when it was cut out of the film I was very miffed.

I couldn’t be mad with the director for very long. Lasse Hallström was Sweden’s equivalent of John Madden. I had exactly the same feeling of somebody in total control on the set, yet very laid-back with time for a joke, and time to talk to you. I trusted Lasse in the same way that I trusted John, or Trevor Nunn, or Richard Eyre, or Peter Hall, or Anthony Page. So I was thrilled when he asked me to be in his next film,
The Shipping News
, to be shot in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. But that had to be put on hold until the following year.

Michael had got progressively weaker. The original diagnosis of pleurisy had been wrong, and it was discovered that he had lung cancer, which was now inoperable. He tried to carry on working for a while, mostly in radio, recording more of the Conan Doyle mysteries, playing Dr Watson to Clive Merrison’s Sherlock Holmes, but then he had to give that up.

One thing that especially pleased us both was his appointment in November 2000 to the Order of St Gregory, the Papal equivalent of a knighthood. He wanted to receive it in Westminster Cathedral, but he could no longer face the journey to London, so it was conferred at home in Surrey, on 10 January 2001. Afterwards Michael said to me, ‘I wish we could have a rerun of today.’ I said, ‘I wish we could too.’ It was a huge honour, and very rare, so it was terrific that that happened.

Michael died the next day, and Finty and some close friends took the burden off me of telling everybody. Our churchgoing had always been very ecumenical: Michael went to Mass and I went to my Quaker Meeting, but we often attended our local Anglican church together, so that was where we held the funeral, with four priests sharing the prayers. To begin with, we had thought of only having a small family funeral, but so many friends rang up and said that they wanted to come, that in the end the church was packed to overflowing, with standing-room only at the back. The readings were by Clive Merrison, Richard Henders, and Roger Rees, who flew in specially that morning from New York.

If a funeral is to be a wonderful farewell, that is what it was, and I believe it was exactly what Michael would have wanted. Trevor Nunn delivered the most beautiful and touching address, part of which I would like to quote here:

I was so moved by this that I asked Trevor to give it again at Michael’s Memorial Service six months later at the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden. We held it on 9 July, Michael’s birthday, and the speakers this time included John Moffatt, Kenneth Branagh and Ned Sherrin. Patrick Doyle sang two of his songs for Ken’s film of
Henry V
, in which both Michael and I had appeared.

I had spent several months nursing Michael at home after my brief stint in
Chocolat
, which was my longest time off work since giving birth to Finty, and it was Michael who had urged me to go back to work after she was born. After he died, I felt that he was again influencing me to pick up the strands of my career. During that long break my agent had refused to commit to any offers, and there were only three films that I was at all keen to do –
The Shipping News
,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, and
Iris
.

Tor had kept them all on hold, but about a month after Michael died she rang me to say that by some miracle of scheduling it looked as if I could just manage to do all three, though the timing would be very tight. There was only a day between finishing one and starting the next, and at one point I was alternating between the shooting of two of them. The fact that the powerful American film producer Harvey Weinstein was involved in the production of all of them obviously helped to synchronise the schedules.

Some people may have thought that I was running away from the fact of Michael dying, but then I had a lot of letters telling me, ‘Do work, it’s the best thing,’ from people who had shared my experience. It certainly left me no time to dwell on things. There were two separate periods of filming in Canada, and in the five-week gap I filmed
Iris
. As soon as we had finished the second lot of filming on
The Shipping News
I flew back and went straight to West Wycombe, to start shooting on
The Importance of Being Earnest
. I naturally began this marathon in a rather fragile state, and when Lasse said to me on arrival, ‘I can’t imagine what you must be going through, it must be ghastly for you,’ I completely went to pieces. But then I pulled myself together, and I was fine after that.

The first thing I did in Nova Scotia was to work with a voice coach, because the Newfoundland accent was very, very difficult. The good thing was that some of the crew were from Newfoundland, and they told me whenever I got anything wrong. So I was not best pleased when one film critic said that my accent was simply appalling. I long to meet Andrew O’Hagan to ask him how long he was in Newfoundland, and how well he knows it, because I was actually pulled up on every word if it was not right.

Kevin Spacey was cast as my nephew, and we had met during my time on Broadway when he was playing the lead in
The Iceman Cometh
. I had got him to deliver the black glove to Tim Pigott-Smith onstage with President Clinton in the audience, so he already knew all about that game. Tim airmailed the glove to Kevin, and got him to return the compliment on camera. He chose the moment of maximum embarrassment. Agnis Hamm hated her late brother, so she dumped his ashes in an outhouse and peed on them. Naturally this shot was being delicately filmed, until Kevin reached in from below with the glove on a long stick and tickled my bottom with it. I leapt into the air screaming, and it was some while before we could complete the scene.

Kevin was terrific in the film. He is a big joker and a brilliant mimic, he has a good ear for other actors’ voices. When we were on the Parkinson show together later, he did a wicked impersonation of Ian McKellen. He made me laugh incredibly from the very first day. He is a remarkable actor, and we just had a marvellously funny time. There was a running joke in Newfoundland that everybody but me kept seeing the whales offshore, and I was dying to see them. Kevin and I were in the middle of shooting a scene facing each other, and there was a low window behind me. I had to say my line and then turn and walk away. Just at that moment I heard somebody shout, ‘A whale,’ and I ducked down to peer out of the window. He never let me forget that impulse – in the middle of a scene! Well, it wasn’t quite right, was it?

During the second period of shooting we had a three-day break one weekend when we were at Port Rex, and Kevin said, ‘Why don’t you come to New York?’ I had to have a photograph taken for a magazine, and they were coming up to the location, so I rang them in New York and suggested I went to them instead. All the crew who were going home went to St John’s airport, where it had been foggy for three days. When the fog lifted, which it finally did that morning, there were four hundred moose all over the airfield. They fired shots in the air, they tried everything, but nothing would move the moose, so none of the crew got away, they spent the entire weekend at St John’s.

Luckily, we had gone to Gander Airport, where the five of us flew to New York: Lasse, Julianne Moore, Kevin, his make-up artist Tania, and myself. We had the most incredibly enjoyable weekend, we saw
The Producers
and
Proof
on Broadway, and I learnt to ride a motor-scooter. Kevin was staying at the Trump Tower, and my hotel, the St Regis, was just round the corner. I went to see him one morning and he said, ‘Right, we’ve got to have a rehearsal.’ So we had a rehearsal on this Zappy power-assisted scooter, and I drove straight down a corridor into a lady carrying a great pile of sheets and towels. Kevin said, ‘This is no good, we’ll take it down to the park.’ So off we went to Central Park. I suddenly got the hang of it and raced off to Central Park West; it was absolutely thrilling. Luckily there were no paparazzi around in the park, or I shudder to think what the headline would have been. Then we had to go back to start work again, but it was a wonderful break.

Since he took over as Director of the Old Vic, Kevin has tried several times to get me to join his company, and I would have loved to, but we haven’t been able to get the dates to work yet. I still want to go back there, I think it is just admirable the way he has stuck at it, even though he has been given a really rough time by the London critics. It is our gain that he is running the Vic, and I hope everybody realises it soon, because he really loves that theatre, he cares for it, and wants to make it a real success.

I was grateful that they split my filming schedule on
The Shipping News
to allow me to play Iris Murdoch in between, but it was occasionally difficult to concentrate totally on the character I was playing. I emailed Kevin when I came back the first time, and wailed, ‘I don’t know whether I am Agnis Murdoch or Iris Hamm, I don’t know
who
I am!’

Fortunately I had Richard Eyre and Jim Broadbent to keep me on the right track. Both their mothers had died of Alzheimer’s, so I was always able to check with them on how they behaved in those last months. Iris Murdoch was my heroine anyway, because I had read all her books, and I watched television interviews with her. Kate Winslet was playing the young Iris, and she watched the same interviews, which was terribly helpful to both of us. But it was hard to make, because of the number of people who knew her and were friends of hers, and she had died so comparatively recently. It had been a bit easier with Queen Victoria, and even easier with Elizabeth I.