The Two of Us (20 page)

It’s hard for people outside the business to understand this habit of corpsing, as it is called. It is a dreaded disease for
actors. It can be triggered by something not particularly funny, and is I suspect a sort of hysteria that springs from the
heightened state you have to be in to go on stage. It is usually not enjoyable and can dog you in a long run of a play so
that you dread certain passages coming up, having completely forgotten what made you laugh in the first place. It’s like laughing
at funerals and giggles when the boss sacks you and your heart is breaking.

One day Jack Watling was ill, but agreed to perform. He was in the wings feeling sick and muttered to John, ‘Oh Lord, I feel
a bit funny.’

John hissed back, ‘Well, for God’s sake get on before it wears off.’

That entrance became another recurring giggle hurdle for them all.

Working with Peter was a delight and John wanted to repeat the experience. Richard Wilson, the director, and John invited
Peter to play one of the two homosexual hairdressers in a play by Charles Dyer called
Staircase
. John’s character suffered from alopecia. Peter’s response was the following letter:

Dearest John,

The only reason that you can have for wanting us to act in Ding Dong Dyer’s ‘Staircase’ is one of pure malice. We would never
get through the first scene. You would be prinking about in a fucking turban and every time you get hysterics, which will
be every other line, there is the stock room for you to prance in, while I am left clutching the curling irons, all alone
on stage, where I will probably get Aids. Piss off. I love you. Kiss to Sheila and the kids. You can do the second act all
by yourself. Piss off.

Peter

Most actors look for the sublime in a role. John looked for the common touch. I too noticed that at Stratford, put a crown
on an actor’s head and a sword in his hand and he swaggers around, justifying the most appalling behaviour. When I played
Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Mrs Goth) in
Titus
Andronicus
, who ends up eating her children in a pie – bodies in pies having become my speciality since
Sweeney Todd
– I had to fight hard to justify her behaviour to a cast full of avenging male actors, set upon being noble. Similarly, Paulina
in
The Winter’s Tale
was usually played as a strident nag and it took a lot of unacademic argument on my part to persuade them that she was right
and that all the men in the play may be royal, but they were extremely silly and needed telling off. This sexist approach
in all the plays began to be contested by the women. We formed support groups, including Harriet Walter and Juliet Stevenson,
to give one another courage to stand up to the male hierarchy.

6 March

Started the day forcing myself to be positive. Long chat to
Clare V.
*
helped. She is so wise. No sentiment, no bullshit
but deep understanding. Felt a lot better, then suddenly out
of the blue, totally doubled up with grief. Agonising pain
in my chest and heart. OK. A heart attack? Good. Come
on then. Let’s be havin’ you.

Trevor Nunn got his revenge for this female bonding by awarding me the artistic directorship of the small-scale tour. I was
deeply honoured until I realised no one else in their right mind would take it on. My right mind had been perverted by my
new obsession with Willy the Bard. I couldn’t wait to take his glory to Scunthorpe Baths. There had only been one woman director
at the RSC and that was ten years before. It was an uphill battle about which I have already written in another book, so suffice
it to say that the whole brilliant company that I gathered round me for the adventure remember it with great affection. Dan
Day-Lewis, who does not stick with things he does not like, was one of the most enthusiastic at building and dismantling our
travelling auditorium, doing workshops and enchanting legions of Shakespeare converts in the backwaters of Britain.

During our travels in 1983 and 1984, we were well placed to see the state of the country under Thatcherism. It was riddled
with discord. The industrial base was being dismantled and with it whole communities, whose cohesion was dependent on the
local mine, factory or shipyard. Coal miners and teachers were striking. Everyone was fighting savagely. Phrases like ‘the
enemy within’ and ‘not one of us’ were alienating whole sections of the community. Three million were unemployed, with all
the implication of isolation and disaffection that that implies. Thatcher believed implacably that she was right. ‘The lady’s
not for turning,’ she said and, ‘I am extremely patient as long as I get my own way in the end.’ The bulk of the electorate
loved her for it. Something was being done. She had courage too. When an IRA bomb nearly killed her at a hotel in Brighton
she dusted herself down and carried on as if nothing had happened. She made the refusal of Oxford University to give her an
honorary degree look petty.

7 March

John would have appreciated this letter:
‘I met John on numerous occasions as indeed I met your
good self when you came to the NCP to park your car
(opposite his theatre). The thing that struck me most about
him was his ability to treat me and other staff with a certain
dignity that was certainly lacking in a lot of our customers.
I found him to be a genuinely nice man who would pass
the time of day with you. The huge star that he will always
be, was just a normal decent human being. I returned and
live in Ireland now so I very much doubt I will meet you
again to tell you how very sorry I am for your loss in
person, but I will say a prayer for you and light a candle
for you in our local church. God bless you and give you
the strength to carry you through.

Yours,

Mickey (with the patch)’

When we took the RSC tour to Belfast I was appalled by the wall. I hadn’t imagined there actually was this hideous physical
barrier, covered in hateful graffiti, between the communities, cutting streets in half and separating children from their
friends. The slums and dereliction depressed me, but the ecstatic audiences were thrilling. I went round talking to people,
trying to fathom this intransigence on both sides. Back in London an IRA bomb went off, killing horses and men in Hyde Park.
Especially grievous to me, a bomb killed musicians and destroyed the bandstand in St James’s Park which had given John and
me such peaceful pleasure. During the tour, I managed to visit Greenham when 20,000 women embraced the base containing cruise
missiles. The silence broken only by eerie keening flummoxed the soldiers on the other side of the wire. Peaceful protest
felt very powerful. The healing power of Shakespeare in these troubled times was potent too. My company’s performances of
the
Dream
and
Romeo and Juliet
in sports halls and community centres were some of the most beautiful I have seen.

12 March

Found a tape made by John presumably from a broadcast,
of the Elgar Quintet. It was in the key basket in London.
It fell on the floor as I came back from Lucky. How the
hell it got there I don’t know. It was one of our absolute
favourites. So guttingly lovely. I had to play it. The second
movement seems to express profound sorrow. It transforms
human despair into something beautiful and makes you
realise you are bound to others by the experience. The
whole world knows grief. I am not alone in this. It’s part
of life. Anyway, as John kept saying about his suffering: ‘I
have no choice.’

My passionate involvement in the RSC made me neglectful of my family. Ellie Jane had left home. She was pursuing her own RADA
and acting career, as was Abigail, but ten-year-old Jo was dragged from pillar to post with me on the tour, as most of it
fell during her school holidays. Some of the audiences had never seen a play, let alone Shakespeare, so it was vital to me
that we should have no off nights. The company came to dread me accosting them after a performance, brandishing my pad with
pages of notes. I couldn’t leave them alone, which meant I did John. I popped back home occasionally but I was putting my
job first and my marriage nowhere. John began to call me Muriel, his mistress, rather than his wife. Beneath the quips he
was growing quite angry. We had a big party for one of Jo’s birthdays. He had become curiously unhappy about having people
in the house, especially those he didn’t know. He and Dennis Waterman got very drunk in the basement and he started haranguing
me every time I went down to get supplies. It was like an Ayckbourn farce. All gracious smiles for the guests upstairs, and
spitting venom in the basement. We had always had rows but they were becoming more bitter though as yet the making up was
still delightful.

While I was enjoying myself in Walsall John was mouldering in Margate. Peter O’Toole had been right to turn the play down.
Staircase
, with the author playing the other lead role with an unsure grip of his own words, was not a success. The only person who
seemed to enjoy himself was the young ASM in his first job, Ross Kemp. He hero-worshipped John, watching in awe the way he
worked. Ross enjoyed his nightly task of wetting John’s coat with a watering can to make him look rain-soaked. They had time
for a little chat as he sprinkled. He told John that he had been shocked to read that Marlon Brando had insulted his profession
by saying that an actor was a person who’s not listening if no one is talking about him.

‘Pardon?’ said John as he made his entrance.

John also taught Ross how to deal with aggressive fans, which would stand him in good stead in his own later tough guy roles
in
EastEnders
and the like. He went to a café in Margate with John for tea. It was virtually empty, but one man came in demanding that they
move as he had booked the table where they were sitting. John looked him in the eye and said overly politely, ‘You want this
table? OK, is it all right if we move over there? That OK with you? Are you sure now?’

As they moved, he winked sympathetically at the man’s girlfriend. The couple spent their time at their chosen table having
a hideous row. John could use his walking away from trouble to cause it and increasingly did so.

14 March

It seems every time I turn on the TV or read a paper there’s
a picture of John. I can’t face it yet. The public reaction
to his death would have astounded him and it disturbs me.
I have spent a long while in the public eye and I know
what is expected of me – at least by the media. After all I
have been a ‘brave’ widow before as well as a ‘brave’ cancer
‘victim’. I know the ropes. Be an inspiration. Be brave.
Tragic Sheila. The letters are full of comforting ideas many
of which I appreciate but cannot aspire to. For me belief
in an afterlife seems simplistic and self-deluding although
I would be happy, God would I, to be proved wrong. I
feel insane. I walk around muttering – come back, please,
please come back. And I do expect him to walk in. How
can someone be there one moment and then completely
gone?

John hated being away from home and he did a couple of jobs where the locations upset him.
The Grass Is Singing
, set in Africa, was filmed in sweltering heat in the Zambian bush. More maddening than the mosquitoes was Karen Black, who
played opposite John and drove him insane with her Californian gobbledygook. The three months away from home were hell, although
the film earned him a rave review from Margaret Hinksman, respected film critic: ‘A superb unstinting performance’. In 1985
he went to Belfast to play the devastated father of a soldier killed by the IRA. Like me, he was poleaxed by what he saw.
We’ll Support You Ever More
was a superb television play by Douglas Livingstone. It was about an ordinary man trying to understand the hatreds that had
led to his son’s death, so in acting it, John had to do the same. It is one of his best performances but the part affected
him deeply. I could understand why he was depressed when he came home. At other times his depression seemed less explicable.

We had been married for over ten years. We had successful careers and two lovely homes, but our frequent separations were
stunting the growth of our marriage. Problems got shelved rather than discussed. There was still plenty of frantic sex but
very little tenderness. I was aware he was unhappy but hadn’t got time or patience to find out why. I knew we were working
too hard, but in our profession you have to take it when it’s there because it often isn’t. John in particular was wretched
if he was unemployed and his drive to make sure it didn’t happen was turning him into a workaholic. What I had not detected
was that being away on location or alone at home was fuelling another more serious addiction.