The Fry Chronicles (47 page)

‘Do you think,’ I yelled in his ear, flaunting my theatrical jargon, ‘that we will transfer?’

‘Sure of it,’ said Richard. ‘Thank you, m’dear. My father is looking down and winking.’

I turned away, a tear in my eye. I knew how important it is for men to feel that they have finally earned the approval of their fathers.

Back in London, the run of
Forty Years On
continued through Christmas and the New Year. I had started to cross off the days on a chart in the dressing-room like a prisoner scratching on the wall of his cell. There is something quite dreadful about what enforced repetition of action and speech does to the brain. Experienced stage actors all know how common it is to suffer a kind of out-of-body experience on stage where you look down and helplessly watch yourself from above. The moment comes to speak your lines and you will either freeze and dry up or say the same speech three or four times in a row without noticing. Only a pinch or a kick from a fellow actor can save you.

There was one scene in
Forty Years On
in which I had to tick a boy off for something or other. I would strike the corner of a desk hard with my index finger in time to the rhythms of my reprimand. One half-empty matinee I looked down and saw that the varnish on the desk had been worn away by the striking of my finger. For some reason this upset me greatly, and I resolved that evening to strike another part of the desk. When the moment came I raised my hand, aimed a good six inches to the left of the scuff mark and brought my finger down with a bang
on exactly the usual place
. For the next few days I tried again and again, but some form of extreme and insane muscle-memory insisted that my finger had always to hit the same spot. This disturbed me deeply, and I began to look upon the two or three weeks remaining as a hideous incarceration from
which I would never escape. I didn’t share this sense of suffocating torment with David, Phyllida or Paul, as they seemed, with their greater experience, serene and at ease.

Doris Hare, who was eighty by this time, had more energy than the rest of us put together. She was the only principal in the cast who didn’t go straight home as soon as the show ended. She and I would go most nights to Joe Allen’s. Doris had a way of entering the restaurant that made one convinced that it was not a woollen shawl about her neck, but a fox fur fastened with an emerald clasp, and that her companion was not a gawky and self-conscious young actor but a sleek compound of Noël Coward, Ivor Novello and Binkie Beaumont.

‘The secret, dear,’ she would tell me, ‘is to enjoy yourself. Why would we be in the theatre if we didn’t love every minute of it? Casting, rehearsals, matinees, touring … it’s all
marvellous.
’ And she meant it.

Joe Allen’s, an American diner-style restaurant, is a popular hangout for actors, dancers, agents, producers and playwrights. The famously rude waiters and waitresses are often drawn from the ranks of showbusiness themselves. An American producer is notorious for once having got impatient at the slow service. He clicked his fingers for a waiter, calling out, ‘Actor! Oh, Actor!’

I sat there in Joe Allen’s one evening with Russell Harty, Alan Bennett and Alan Bates. All eyes were upon our table until suddenly heads swung towards the door. Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman walked in. Our table no longer existed.

‘Well, that’s us told,’ said Russell.

Olivier walked past, beaming at everyone in a general way.

‘Why don’t you go and say hello to him?’ Alan Bennett said to Russell. ‘You know him well.’

‘I couldn’t do that. Everyone would say, “Look there goes that odious Russell Harty sucking up to Larry Olivier.”’

Harty and Bennett were very good friends. They each had a house in North Yorkshire. Alan would drive them up in his car at weekends. On one such journey, so the story goes, Alan said, ‘Why don’t we play a game of some kind to beguile the hours?’

‘What about Botticelli?’ said Russell.

‘Ooh no! That’s too competitive.’

They thought for a while, then Alan piped up, ‘I know. We each have to think of the person whose underpants we would least like to have to wear on our head.’

‘Colin Welland,’ said Russell without a moment’s hesitation.

‘Ooh, that’s not fair,’ said Alan, ‘you’ve won already.’

On another occasion, as they were driving through Leeds, Russell wound down the window and called out to a morose-looking woman waiting for a bus in the pelting rain, ‘Hello, love! All right?’

As she looked up in bewilderment he wound the window back up, leant back and said with great satisfaction, ‘The privilege of being able to cast a golden ray of sunshine into an otherwise dull and unremarkable existence.’

As soon as I was free from the fetters of
Forty Years On
my life seemed to triple in speed and intensity. I moved out of the Bloomsbury flat and into a large furnished house in Southgate Road on the fringes of the de Beauvoir Estate between Islington and the Balls Pond Road. Nick Symons,
Hugh, Katie and I shared this excellently eccentric house for the better part of a year. It looked, to Hugh’s approving eye, like the kind of house the Rolling Stones might have rented in 1968. It was crammed to every corner with Benares brass trays, alabaster lamps, buhl cabinets, stuffed birds and waxed flowers in glass domes, lacquer screens, papier-mâché bowls, mahogany chiffoniers, oil paintings of varying quality in chipped gilt plaster frames, indecipherable objects of sinister Dutch treen, impossible silvered wallpaper and madly tarnished mirrors. Our landlord, who dropped by only occasionally, was a spongey-nosed individual by the name of Stanley. He seemed very relaxed and unconcerned about a group of what were little more than students living their disordered lives amongst his antique bibelots and whatnots.

The second series of
Alfresco
had been aired nationally by this time, making not the slightest dent upon the public consciousness. I was busy enough with the
Listener
, radio, tweaks for
Me and My Girl
’s West End transfer and my first proper film role. Directed by Mike Newell, the picture was called
The Good Father
, adapted from a Peter Prince novel by Christopher Hampton.

At the read-through I glanced nervously around and tried to look as if I belonged at the table. There was Simon Callow, whose controversial new book
Being An Actor
had served as the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of tyrannical stage directors; next to him sat one of my favourite actresses, Harriet Walter; next to her, Joanne Whalley, who was just about to make a name and earn enduring teenage-fantasy status for herself bringing Michael Gambon off in
The Singing Detective
; and next to her sat one half of the National
Theatre of Brent, Jim Broadbent. And finally there was the film’s star, Anthony Hopkins, a man from whom charisma, power and virility radiated with a force that was frankly frightening. I had been faintly obsessed with him ever since his blue eyes burnt out of the screen at me in Richard Attenborough’s
Young Winston
.

Too late for the preliminary introductions, Miriam Margolyes had burst in like a beaming pinball just in time for the start of the read. When it was over she approached me.

‘How do you do? I’m Mir …’ She stopped and plucked at her tongue with her thumb and forefinger, ‘… Miriam Margolyes. Sorry about that, I was licking my girlfriend out last night and I’ve still got some cunt hairs in my mouth.’ Miriam is perhaps the kindest, most loyal and incorruptibly decent person on the whole Equity roll, but she is certainly not someone to take out to tea with the archdeacon.

In the film I played a man called Creighton, divorced and beaten down by the crushing weight of life, children and alimony. I had only one scene, but since it was with Hopkins himself it was in my mind as good a role as Michael Corleone and Rhett Butler combined. The plot required me to have been at school with Simon Callow, which wounded me a little, as I knew he was a good eight years older than me. To someone in their twenties, eight years is a lifetime. I knew that I was not the type ever to be asked to play lissom youths or handsome lovers, but it did seem a little hard to be plunged into middle age for my first-ever film role.

People are strange about casting.

We hold a party at Southgate Road about this time. I go
around with a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne topping up the guests and trying not to breathe in the fumes myself being well aware of what my allergy to champagne might bring on. As I pass by, an actor friend asks what I am up to and I mention
The Good Father
.

‘What sort of role?’

‘Oh, I play this rather defeated father and husband who’s going through a divorce.’

‘You!’ the actor is unable or unwilling to hide the contempt, outrage and disapproval in his voice. ‘What the hell would
you
know about that?’

I grin tightly and move on. So I should be playing nothing but celibate gay men? Is that how acting works? I suppose the actor, who is married, with a second child on the way and not very much in demand, is peeved that he should be out of work while juicy parts are going to lucky buggers like me: his savage titter of disbelief must be his way of coping. People who didn’t go to drama school, have enormous holes in their Chekhov technique and are given parts that they cannot possibly play out of any true experience must be excessively aggravating to proper actors. I can see that, but I am still a little hurt.

We are rather excited tonight to have Kate Bush at the party. Hugh has just been in a video of her newest song. Two Nebuchadnezzars of champagne last the evening perfectly, and for those, like me, who don’t drink it, we are all still of an age where guests bring bottles and there is enough red wine to keep us merry too. Talking of red wine, parked in the street outside the house is my new pride and joy, a claret-coloured Daimler Sovereign. How perfect is my life. I want to weep when I look back. Enough money to keep me in cigarettes, shirts and a nice new car, but
not so much as to isolate me from this charmed studenty existence of Bohemian house-sharing and irresponsible fun. Experiences are still new and exciting, my palate is not jaded, life is not stale.

We were happy and lucky, but this was Thatcher’s Britain, and we did not let a moment pass without giving Thatcher’s Britain a searing indictment. Forgive the phrase. We were still children really and Thatcher’s Britain seemed to us to be something that needed searingly to be indicted, the searinglier the better. You might imagine that it had treated us so well that we should be on our knees thanking it for the film roles, job opportunities, affordable property prices, Daimler Sovereigns and burgeoning prosperity that had come our way with a minimum of effort. We certainly did not see it that way. Firstly, our educations and upbringings had been received under Labour and Edward Heath’s more liberal and consensus-based dispensations. The new callousness and combative certainty of Thatcher and her cabinet of vulgar curiosities were alien to the values we grew up with, and it smelt all wrong. I know that if you are flourishing in a regime you are supposed not to bellyache about it. Seems ungrateful. Cake and eat it. Biting the hand that feeds. The moral high ground is easy to perch on if you’re in a cashmere sweater. Chattering classes. Trendy liberals. Bah. I do see that. Bad enough from someone in an ordinary job, but to hear searing indictments of Thatcher’s Britain from an
actor
…

The world finds it difficult to credit the breed with enough brains or the qualities of seriousness, understanding and worldly experience required for a political statement to which they can attach the slightest value. Daffy airheaded
twazzocks, every one of them, is more or less the accepted view; one from which it is hard to dissent, and I speak as a fully paid-up member of Equity and the Screen Actors Guild myself. This is partly because, love them/us as I do – hard to find a kinder, funnier, more loyal bunch, etc., etc. – there are probably more embarrassing featherheads and ludicrous naifs in the acting profession than in any other. Perhaps because to penetrate a role properly you first have to empty the brain of all cynicism and self-awareness and such irrelevant impedimenta as logic, reason and empirical sense. Certainly some, but not all, of the very best actors I have known are innocent of any such encumbrances. I have noticed that, whenever I have made the mistake of getting myself embroiled in some public controversy or other, the side that holds the opposing view will always refer to me as an actor. It successfully devalues whatever it is I might have said. I have spent more time writing than acting, but ‘After all, he’s only a writer,’ doesn’t have quite the same sneering finality as ‘Why should we pay any attention to the views of an
actor
?’ I am not always such an imbecile as to be surprised by that, or even aggrieved. We all choose whatever weapons are at hand in a fight and when we get close in we jab and kick at the weakest and most vulnerable parts.