That's Another Story: The Autobiography (31 page)

For just a few seconds the place went deadly silent, all of us, actors and audience alike, reeling from being yanked out of Leigh world and plunged shockingly and confusingly into the real one. Sheila Kelly then stood up and said, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ About twenty-nine people put their hands up. It was Hampstead after all. There ensued a polite discussion:

‘Well, you go then . . .’

‘No, please, you go . . .’

‘No, really, I think this is more your sort of thing . . .’

Finally one of them came backstage and tended to poor Jim, who was by now lying flat out on the floor of one of the dressing rooms, in extreme discomfort. It turned out to be a very nasty virus from which he recovered in a few days, but more importantly, it was something for us all to dine out on for months - did I say months? no, years - to come.

During the play the characters spent a lot of their time drinking and on the last night, the prop drinks, which were supposed to be vodka and tonic, beer and bottled Guinness, were replaced by the real thing. I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Rea who was responsible, as I seem to remember him confiding in me before the show and swearing me to secrecy lest Mike should find out. But what I remember clearly was the mutual private glee we shared as Sheila and Jim discovered that their normal beverage was rather more warming than usual and that it went straight to the spot. A great deal of near-corpsing took place as Stephen, with the devil in him, insisted on constantly filling up everyone’s glass, with Sheila, ever the professional, realising she was fast getting drunk and trying to stop him, and all of it conducted whilst remaining steadfastly in character. All I can say for my own part is that Dawn liked a drink and Julie was well and truly plastered by the end of the show.

In the spring of 1970, whilst appearing in Victoria Wood’s play
Good Fun
at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre (which was set in an arts centre up north, where a group of its employees prepare for a cystitis sufferers’ rally), I was sent a script of a new stage play titled
Educating Rita
by Willy Russell. It had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Mike Ockrent set to direct, and was to be put on in their studio theatre, which at that time was the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden.

I was immediately attracted to the character of Rita, a working-class hairdresser who realises there is more to life than the narrow horizon she sees before her. She wants it broadened, and she wants an education, so she embarks on an Open University course. During the course of the play she finds herself marooned between her own working-class roots and family, on the one hand feeling that she has somehow left them behind, and the middle-class life she craves on the other, sensing that in essence she is an outsider. Although her marriage to her husband Denny breaks down because he does not understand and is threatened by her aspirations, all comes good in the end when she grasps that, through education, the most important thing she has gained is choice. There was not a scene in the play that I didn’t identify with and, without wanting to sound like a complete pill, just like
Talent
before it, it felt a little like destiny.

At the time
Good Fun
was rumoured to be going into the West End and I really couldn’t face a long run, even though every night was a riot on stage and my character, Betty, a cosmetics saleswoman, brought the house down. Her opening line after knocking on the door and being told to come in was: ‘I’m sorry . . . I never lay my hand on a strange knob.’ One night the hysteria grew to such a pitch that we simply couldn’t continue with the scene and everyone, the cast included, just collapsed with laughter that went on and on. Nevertheless a nice, short, three-month run, in repertoire, which meant playing only half the week, with another production taking the other half, was a far more attractive deal than a run in the West End with eight shows a week for nine months, even though the difference in money would be huge. So I plumped for
Educating Rita
, thinking it would be all over by the autumn . . . How wrong could I be? I’m glad to say it was never to be over.

In the summer of 1980 I was renting a room in the flat of my friend, the actress Rosalind March, in Oakmead Road, Balham, along with Babs, my Jack Russell terrier. We had both come out of long relationships - that is, Ros and me as opposed to Babs and me - and we spent a lot of evenings, armed with a bottle of wine, vindicating ourselves of any blame, while heaping it instead on the hapless men involved, and celebrating our freedom. We had met originally through the acting agency, Actorum, a couple of years earlier.

Actorum was an agency run by and for actors, with a tiny office in Tower Street, and when members were unemployed they were expected to come into the office to man the phones, ring round for work and negotiate contracts. Although it worked in principle, in practice some members were rarely, if ever, in the office and others were never out of it, which at times gave rise to a degree of, shall we say, bitterness. Whilst there were people who were wonderfully efficient in the office, there were others who put only themselves up for parts, plus one or two who suggested themselves for parts that were completely wrong for them. One such individual, who at this time was most certainly middle aged and not what a girl would describe as good-looking, put himself forward to play Romeo in a production of
Romeo and Juliet
at the Royal Shakespeare Company, no less, when actually, were it being cast at the time,
The Hobbit
would have been more appropriate. Needless to say he wasn’t called for an audition. Also problematic was the fact that no deal could really be negotiated without close consultation at every stage with the actor for whom the deal was being struck. This resulted in situations such as the one that occurred when I was filming
Nearly a Happy Ending
.

It was our last evening in the studio and for some reason we were very behind with the recording. It may have had something to do with the director coming down and saying, ‘What’s happened? You were funny in rehearsal . . . Be funny!’ This, as any actor will tell you, is the kiss of death. Anyway, in those days if you hadn’t finished in a television studio by ten-thirty they would simply pull the plug, so the pressure and tension were already fairly high when suddenly I was summoned up into the director’s gallery to take an urgent phone call. I couldn’t imagine what it was; thoughts of my flat burning to the ground or my mother being ill or worse shot into my head as I picked up the receiver. To my surprise, on the other end was the chirpy voice of a fellow actor.

‘Julie! Good news! I think I’ve got Sheffield Crucible over a barrel! Shall I go for the extra fiver?’

Just before rehearsals for
Educating Rita
were to start I decided to take a little holiday. Ros was about to do a commercial in Amsterdam. The filming would be spread out over five days or so, with quite a bit of free time, and we thought it would be fun if I went along too. We checked into a hotel that had been booked by the production company. It was on the Heerengracht, one of the three main canals that run through the centre of the city. The name means Gentleman’s Canal, the appropriateness of which was completely lost on us, at least to begin with. The hotel, one of those ornate-looking, tall, thin houses, was cosy and friendly. After unpacking in our respective rooms, which were at the top of a narrow creaky staircase, we went down to the little bar for a drink. The bartender, a good-looking chap with bright blond hair, was wearing a kilt. He was chatty and friendly, speaking very good English, but he was definitely not Scottish. We spent the evening talking to him and another rather dapper man in his fifties who had just checked in and who, it turned out, was a consultant neurologist from Canada. Both of us being tired and Ros having to get up at some unearthly hour, we decided to get an early night.

The next evening we ended up again in the little hotel bar. This time, there were just two or three young men, standing around quietly having a drink. As the evening went on and the bar started to fill up, we began to notice a distinct lack of women. It was only later, around midnight, when the consultant came back into the bar after a night on the town, that we began to cotton on as to what kind of hotel it was. With him was a huge and very beautiful black man dressed from head to toe as a cowboy, including leather chaps and spurs. I innocently asked whether they’d been to a fancy-dress party, a question that was mysteriously met with peals of laughter from the assembled group.

As the night crept on towards the small hours, the cowboy, enlivened by drink, began to remove his clothes and show us his piercings. I thought I was daring, having two in one earlobe, but these were simply eye-watering to behold; there were little rings and studs glinting and gleaming from folds and crevices that a person simply does not associate with jewellery, and all I could think at the time was what a terribly uncomfortable impediment some of them would be to certain activities.

Anyway, dear reader, as you may have guessed long before I did, it was a gay hotel and the production company presumably thought it was a nice safe place for a woman on her own, as Ros was initially going to be. It was either that or, when she asked them whether they would also book a room for her friend, they got the wrong end of the stick. I really don’t know which it was but it was all very educational and, more importantly, it made us laugh, starting a friendship that has lasted to this day.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned a play from Willy Russell, apparently they were expecting a big modern musical like
John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert
, which had enjoyed a massive success, here and in the States. What they got was a two-handed play with one set and no idea how to cast it. It remained on the shelf for some time, after which it was decided to cast it from outside the company, leaving Willy and Mike Ockrent to their own devices. So we started rehearsals in June 1980.

Mark Kingston was to play Frank, the Open University lecturer, and the two of us hit it off immediately. Although I had identified with the character of Rita on just about every level, when it came to act her I had real difficulty in finding her core and agonised through rehearsals about who she was, trying different approaches and using different characters from my own life as inspiration. At one point Willy suggested that if I wanted, I could play her as a Brummie. That night when I went through the script I was fascinated to find that the timing and rhythm of Rita’s one-liners were at odds with the Birmingham accent and its kind of dry, downbeat music, which has utterly different cadences and humour. It simply did not fit the sparky Liverpool tempo. I never truly found Rita until the first preview at the Donmar where somehow, through sheer terror and the life-or-death need to survive in front of an audience, she clicked gawkily into place. I thought that I would most certainly fall flat on my face as soon as I stepped out on to the stage. On that first night Mark and I stood holding hands in the darkness backstage, waiting to go on, shaking with fear, both feeling that the critics would dump on us from a great height and that a blanket of humiliation was waiting to smother us.

How wrong could we be? I remember during the first-night interval Mike whooshing through the dressing rooms, making an O with his thumb and forefinger, kissing it, thrusting it into the air and calling to the gods with a huge smile on his face, ‘Prima! Prima! Prima! Prima!’ whilst Mark and I just stared at one another, thinking: Is he deluded? No, he was right; the next day the papers were full of praise and you couldn’t get a seat. After its three-month run we transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre, a great barn of a place, made more intimate by shutting off the upper tiers.

One day during the course of the run I received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as Lewis Gilbert. He told me that he was a film director and that on the recommendation of his wife he had come to see the play and had absolutely loved both it and me. He was going to make a film of it and said that he wanted me for the part but could not offer it to me just then as he had yet to raise the money. He would be in touch.

Approximately three months later he rang again. He had been in America where potential investors had talked of Paul Newman and Dolly Parton in the roles of Frank and Rita. Well, I could think of two very good reasons why I couldn’t compete with her. It seems that because I was an unknown I would be required to do a screen test, the very thought of which sent me into paroxysms of panic. I would have to prove myself all over again to people who knew nothing about me.

It seemed an exhausting task, in which the stakes felt ridiculously astronomical: a tiny unreliable pivot on which my life might turn and move into another league, where I was to star in a major motion picture or, alternatively, where I would fail to make the grade and then have to live with that and the rejection therein - not an easy one for me (remember the fiasco of the walking race? And the hoohah over eleven-plus, where failure was just about equal to death?) - and I would then have to watch someone else take the part that I had created. I would be too nervous! I wouldn’t be relaxed enough to be really inside the character, and what if I was just too nervous to perform at all? The Americans wouldn’t think that I was good-looking enough and what if, what if, what if . . . It felt like a test to see whether I was good enough to be on this earth instead of right for a part in a film and a part that I knew inside out at that.