And Furthermore (22 page)

Fortunately, we did have rehearsal time for
Cranford
; we had dance rehearsals, and we were taught a lot about the etiquette of the time. The historian Jenny Uglow gave us a wonderful lecture about the 1840s and the coming of the Industrial Revolution, she told us what that little town of Knutsford would have been like then, which was absolutely invaluable to us. Unlike the weather we endured on the filming of
Mrs Brown
and
Iris
, we had the most gloriously hot sunshine in April.

I had not acted with Eileen Atkins since we had been together in
Hilda Lessways
, an adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s
Clayhanger
, in 1959 – live TV, if you have been through that, you have been through fire. In
Cranford
I had a lifesize cutout figure made of her, which we used to bring out every now and again, in scenes after her character had died, and stand her amongst us, to see if anyone would notice. The director Simon Curtis never noticed the first time we did it on a railway station. The producer, Sue Birtwistle, arranged to have photographs taken every time we got it out, and we sent them to Eileen. I think she got the cutout in the end, I do hope she did, and that she kept it.

The locations were in Lacock in Wiltshire and Ashridge in Hertfordshire, and then I was back in West Wycombe again. Most of the interiors were shot in the studio, when Sue Birtwistle came to my aid; she went to such great lengths to ensure that we were all well looked after. Following all the exertions in
The Merry Wives
I had to have a knee operation, and just two weeks after I had had it done I fell over the dog’s bone at home and cracked something in my other ankle. I was limping about everywhere, holding on to two people on every possible occasion.

So Sue got me a motorised scooter, which was absolute heaven, and much envied, because we had so many changes and I had a little way to go to my dressing room. I whizzed back and forth, but I wasn’t allowed to do more than eight miles an hour. The crew thought I might have done, so when no one was looking they put fines on it, and parking notices, and I had
Hell’s Angels
written on the back. But I couldn’t have done it otherwise, because I was in a lot of pain.

The calls were early; I was up at 5.15 a.m., and not back home until 8 or 9 p.m. Of course, you get used to that kind of schedule, but that is why it is so much nicer filming in the summer than the winter, when sometimes you never actually see daylight at all. You go out in the dark, you come home in the dark, and you are inside all the time, like a house plant; but in the summer it is much easier to get up on a beautiful morning.

The series was so popular with the audience that the BBC decided to make two more ninety-minute specials for Christmas 2009. It took some while to plan, as it was difficult to sort out the availability of all the original cast at the same time. I had another unfortunate accident during the filming of the
Cranford
sequel too. On my way home one evening a fox suddenly ran across the road, and as my driver stamped on the brake I was thrown forward and banged my head on the seat in front. It gave me the most enormous black eye, and the director took one look at it and sent me home for a week to recover. After all, it would have been distinctly out of character for the respectable Miss Matty suddenly to appear on screen looking as if she had been in a fight.

THE TWO FILMS IN WHICH
I appeared in 2009 could hardly have been more different in scale or approach. The first was
Nine
, a musical based on Fellini’s film
8
, which was originally done on stage on Broadway in 1982 with Raul Julia, and here at the Donmar in 1996. That production was then revived on Broadway in 2003 with Antonio Banderas and Chita Rivera. The film was directed by Rob Marshall, who previously made
Chicago
. We started working on it in August 2008, and we had a hugely good time, but it had its frightening moments. There were great musical numbers in it that we had to learn, and then go out on to the set and rehearse with a lot of dancers, who were all beautiful, stick-thin, and Italian. Daniel Day-Lewis played the character based on Fellini, and all the women in his life were played by an international cast – Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard, Fergie the American rock-singer with the Black-Eyed Peas, and me.

We worked on the songs and everything else in the rehearsal room, and the studio set for the first day’s shooting was a wonderful stage with seats for an audience. We were setting the scene with me singing it for Rob, with some of the dancers. We had been rehearsing for about four weeks, so I knew the song and the moves, and we were just about to start when Rob looked up and said, ‘Oh, Sophia’s arrived, you must come and meet her.’ She is an absolute heroine of mine, and I said I would love to. After we met, Dan came in, and several of the others, and we all had a coffee together, it was a great thrill, and a feeling of excitement.

Then Rob said, ‘We must go and do this work.’ We walked away, and just as we were about to begin I looked up, and Sophia had walked in and sat in the front row with Dan Day-Lewis and stayed there. I said to Rob, ‘It can never be more frightening than this moment, actually filming it can’t be more frightening than this moment.’ But it seemed to go well, and actually the most wearing part was the promotion we all had to do for it when it came out in December 2009. It now seems to be a standard requirement with a big-budget movie for the cast to have to go to America and talk about it. Nicole Kidman and I were doing a string of interviews together, one after the other, and one young man said to me, ‘So it’s mothers’ parts now, is it?’ I snapped back, ‘Well, perhaps that’s better than grandmother’s parts!’ Then he said to Nicole, ‘You’re very tall in this film.’ She didn’t answer anything at all to that, and then the publicity assistant said, ‘I think it’s time you left.’ I came home for a week, then had to fly back out for the premiere. After all that promotion, the film didn’t seem to make much of an impression with either the critics or the cinema-going public, rather to my surprise.

The second film,
Rage
, was virtually shot on a shoestring, but the director was Sally Potter, who is no slouch when it comes to filming. It was a series of monologues, shot in a tiny room against a coloured screen, and Sally just sat opposite us with the camera. I had to roll a joint in it, and Sally got this wonderful boy in from university, who showed me how to do it with just one hand. I only did two or three days’ filming, and I never met any of the others in the cast, which included Eddie Izzard and Jude Law.
Rage
had what must be one of the strangest premieres ever – it was projected on to the outside of the British Film Institute on the South Bank on 24 September 2009, but I think it also had a few normal screenings in cinemas.

In early 2010 I returned to one of my very favourite parts, which I had last played forty-five years ago – Titania in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– and for the same director, Peter Hall. The attraction for me was that it went back to 1962 and my association with Peter. He said, ‘Look, I’m going to be eighty that year, can we do this?’ It was extraordinary, I did remember every single word of the whole play. I was exhausted at the end of the evening, because not only was I saying my part, but I found myself saying everybody else’s parts too.

It was produced at the new Kingston Rose Theatre, where the stage design replicated the one from Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre. Peter’s idea was that I should play Titania as Queen Elizabeth I, with her distinctive red wig and white ruff, because the play was likely to have been performed at her court, and was part of a repertoire of plays she would have seen.

We did a kind of dumb-show at the beginning, and tried it first with Elizabeth on her throne, and Oberon as the Earl of Essex, but I thought it was essential to show just a group of actors getting ready. At first I used to take the scroll with the script from somebody who didn’t play anything in it, as if Elizabeth came on and actually edged somebody aside, but then I realised that tells another story. So we all thought up the eventual opening together.

Because I was still word-perfect in the part, I started rehearsals a week after the rest of the cast. What was so uncanny for me was hearing Rachael Stirling as Helena, the part her mother Diana Rigg had played with the RSC when we did it before. She was different of course, but sometimes she sounded so like Diana. It brought back other memories of that 1962 production – when John Gielgud brought Peggy Ashcroft to see it, and I hadn’t known he was there until he sent me the most huge bouquet of beautiful white flowers, with a note, ‘I felt I could fly away with you.’

This time I played some scenes quite differently. When Bottom was wearing the ass’s head, he laughed with a hee-haw, so I hee-hawed back. That just happened one day in rehearsal. I thought, If she loves him so much she wants to try and speak like him too, why ever not? I thought at the end we ought to have had a very small fairy with an ass’s head run across the stage, I was frightfully keen on that idea, but there was no money to do that, and of course that too would have told another story.

It is only now that I have realised what it is about
The Dream
which always appeals to people. It is because an audience loves to know something that the cast doesn’t know, just before it happens, and of course in this play Shakespeare sets it all up. He tells you everything, so the audience are always one step ahead, and I am sure that is part of the delight of it.

We did a special children’s matinee at the Rose, and they just loved it. At the Coutts Sponsors’ reception afterwards, somebody said to me, ‘Oh, you all look as if you are having such fun.’ I thought that proved that when we all enjoy each other’s company it transmits itself to an audience. It is not that we are going out there thinking what fun we are all having, but doing it to convey this glorious story. It was a really happy, good company, and it was great being at the Rose too, it is such a lovely theatre, and I just want it to go from strength to strength.

I am always saying that I want each job to be as different from the last one as possible, and in my ideal world I would like to alternate regularly between working on stage and on film, either for television or the cinema. But it rarely seems to work out like that, and in recent years I have spent more time in front of the camera than in the theatre. I am more comfortable with the discipline and routine of live theatre, and am grateful that that is where I learnt my trade.

When I was at Central I had a problem with projection, and one of the teachers, Oliver Reynolds, said to me, ‘Maybe it’s because you’re such a small girl that you have a small voice,’ so that set up a real challenge for me. But first Michael Benthall at the Old Vic, and later Frank Hauser at Oxford, certainly cured me of that vocal shortcoming.

Today a lot of young actors have no intention of going on the stage. What they want to do is make a hit in television, or make a film, and have that kind of life. But I think those of us who have had a theatre training are very lucky, because the biggest projection you have got to do is in the theatre, then comes television, and then comes film. If you want to shrug your shoulders on a film you can just think it, and it would be picked up in your eyes. But actors who have only ever done television or film can get caught out by not projecting enough if then they come to do a play in the theatre.

Some young actors write to me, and others come to see me, and that is lovely, though I can’t ever think what parallel lines they draw with me. I find I learn so much from people who are much younger now. I am always flattered when a young director asks me to work for them, and if young actors want to know things it is rather rewarding, because then I feel I am passing something on. I don’t want to impose it on them, but if they are interested and want to know about verse-speaking or whatever it is, that I can do.

I do think it is a terrible pity that so many of them don’t know who Peggy Ashcroft was, or Ralph Richardson; I feel it is so important that we keep the memories of our predecessors alive, and know about the work of David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Alec Guinness and Sid Field. We should all have a curiosity about the profession, and what we have come from. Those great figures of my early years do seem now of Mount Rushmore proportions, but maybe that’s just to us who learnt at their knees. I love that mystery surrounding certain actors, and of course we don’t have that any more. When you walk on to a stage in the theatre now, and it says clearly in the programme ‘Definitely no photographs’, you are faced with a hundred little red lights, and you know that they are taking your picture on a camcorder or a mobile phone.

On a film you have to sit and answer questions about what you think of the part, why you wanted to play the part, and I think that’s none of the public’s business. Why should you know the ins and outs of everything? You don’t say to a dress designer like Betty Jackson, ‘Why have you made a dress like that? Why did you cut the dress like that?’ Why should the public know everything? The joy of the theatre is not really going and knowing that somebody had terrible difficulty playing this part, or why they did it; it is to go and be told a story, the author’s story, through the best means possible. In any case, I never know why I’ve done something, it’s for lots of reasons. I want to keep a quiet portion inside that is my own business, and not anybody else’s.

To those who are just starting out on their careers, I advise them not to do it at all if there is anything else they want to do. I also advise them that they mustn’t do it if they haven’t got great reserves of energy, because there is no point if you are a tired person. As I have got older I am conscious that I take more care to conserve my energy, and I have a routine when I am in a play that hardly varies.

I get up at about 8.15, almost on the dot, and I pad about in a dressing gown a lot. When you have a performance that day, you are conscious of it from the moment you open your eyes. Then I do all the things I have to do – shop, make lunch, do the washing, though I no longer do the ironing, someone does that for me, which is the greatest luxury. If I am being driven in, I sleep in the car, but I always get there early; Michael used to say that that was because I am so nosy, I have to know about everybody. I like to know that people are all right, and I like to catch up with what has been going on while I am not there. We have to be there by the half, but I get in at about 5.30. I just have to be there, and I have to shed off home, and stop worrying about all the things I haven’t done.

If the play is in repertoire, and we haven’t done it for several days, then we have to do a word-run, which is essential, but can be very tedious. Rehearsing it after we have opened is such agony. We are all so pleased to see each other, but then we have to sit there and go right through the whole play – oh, that is so tedious.

I find that I always have to do the same things before a performance. My dresser makes me a cup of tea without any milk, but with honey in it, and then I steam my voice, which is something I have always done since
A Little Night Music
. A steamer is like a teapot, with a spout but no handle, it has a cork and a long tube. You fill it half full of boiling water, put your mouth to the spout and breathe in and out without taking your mouth away. It is just wonderful, and lots of singers do it. Then I take a phial of ginseng and royal jelly, which is just like drinking pure honey. I always have one before each performance, matinee and evening, I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t have that. I do vocal exercises, such as chanting ‘hip-bath, hip-bath’, and I have the tannoy on all the time, unless I am sharing a dressing room with Anna Massey, who can’t bear to hear the audience coming in, and we compromise on just the last five minutes before curtain-up.