Biggins (3 page)

I always thought of that recruitment scene in
Oh! What A Lovely War
when the prospective soldiers are mesmerised by the radiant image of Maggie Smith. They all rush forward and find that when they got up close and personal she was a hideous, ravaged old hag. Salisbury Rep was my Maggie Smith. I rushed towards her with all the passion and idealism of youth. But I never ran away
again when I saw the ugly truth. I loved her close up just as I had loved her from afar. I wasn’t going to let a little bit of reality get in my way. I never have. It was clear from day one at Salisbury that I was so much younger than everyone else in the company. But for me, of all people, that wasn’t a problem. I’d been around older people all my life. It suited me.

So did my role. As a student assistant stage manager, I was everyone’s general dogsbody. I helped research, track down and collect the props. I was on the book, ready to prompt at each performance. I swept floors, picked up rubbish, even cleaned the toilets in the auditorium. And I barely had time to think. We worked on a fast, tough regime, putting on new plays every second week. Cast, read through, rehearse, perform, repeat. It was relentless. It was intoxicating.

My parents came to most of the shows, especially when I had a role. And we had fun. It was like a little game to see how many items from around their home they would see on stage in each production.

And my magpie tendencies were only one part of my poor mother’s problems. If I wasn’t ‘borrowing’ things for my latest production, Dad was still selling them to make a quick buck and enjoy the fun of the deal. No wonder Mum always had to check before she sat down in her own front room. We’d both take the chair from underneath her given half a chance.

‘Excuse me, son. Do your parents know you’re out in the middle of the night?’

Being stopped by the local bobbies at 2am was another
regular part of my new routine. At the end of each play’s short run, I got lumbered with much of the get-in and get-out process. I would start packing up the props and pulling the scenery apart in the wings while the actors were still on stage out front. Then I would put down the screwdrivers and join them for the curtain call before getting on with the job. Most times the clear-up took well into the early hours, hence my moonlit walks home.

What an innocent age that those walks should attract the attention of the police. How grown-up I felt when I told them about my job.

‘I work in the theatre,’ I would say. What a wonderful phrase. I wasn’t even 17 but I had already found my calling.

At the Rep I wasn’t just learning how to put on plays. I was getting a master class in the whole theatrical experience. I loved it. Lesson one came when our passionate stage manager, Jan Booth, told me off for the way I had addressed our star, the marvellous Stephanie Cole, who is a dear friend to this day.

‘Here’s your script, Stephanie,’ I had said as I bounded on to the stage.

‘It’s Miss Cole to you,’ Jan told me in a fierce whisper afterwards. And so it was – at least during working hours. I liked the hierarchy. I could see that luvviness only lasts so long. Being in rep taught me that theatre is a business and that, if something goes wrong, backstage or on stage, then someone has to be held accountable. Everyone needs to know what their roles and responsibilities are.

Unfortunately, I didn’t always get to grips with all of mine.

One of our early plays was a murder mystery set in
deepest Devon. When the curtain rose, the first thing the audience heard was a carriage clock (from my parents’ house) strike midnight. The second thing they should have heard was the ringing of a phone. I was on props one night and was watching from the wings as the sole actor on stage listened to the clock and then froze. I froze with him. I had forgotten to put the phone on the table. And I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Once again Jan showed me the way.

She picked up the phone from the top of a pile of boxes backstage, walked to the back of the set and knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’ our lead actor asked, with no idea what might be coming next.

‘I’m here to install your telephone,’ replied Jan.

‘Do come in.’

‘I’ll put it here.’ On stage, in her ordinary clothes, Jan walked to the table, placed the phone on top, tucked the wire under the carpet and turned to leave.

‘Goodnight, sir.’

‘Goodnight.’

Then the phone rang and the play began. What class.

Fortunately I wasn’t the only one to mess up occasionally. Dear Jane Quy, one of our assistant stage managers, was ‘on the book’ in my place one night. For us this meant raising and lowering the curtain as well as being ready to prompt. It’s not the most exciting job in the business, so you really need a hobby to help pass the time. Jane’s hobby was to knit. She was a champion knitter and would work away – fortunately in total silence – while the
performance went on to her left. She never once missed her place in the script.

But it did all go wrong one night when she was finishing a stitch as the end of the first act approached. Her knitting, her needles and two balls of bright-green wool all got caught in the curtain’s pulley system. For some reason this short-circuited the whole contraption. The curtain itself barely moved. But Jane’s colourful knitting made a slow procession all the way around our makeshift proscenium arch and all the way back again.

It got us the biggest round of applause of the night.

I don’t think I could have stayed an actor for the next 50 years if I hadn’t had that grounding backstage in Salisbury. I don’t think my love affair with theatre would have survived if I hadn’t seen all its warts from the start. But at the time the props, the curtains and the book weren’t enough.

I wanted to learn how to act. And fortunately I was in very good company. Stephanie – sorry, Miss Cole – was an inspiration. I would watch her in rehearsal, and from the wings in a performance. She could grab an audience. She made bad writing sound good. And, oh God, did she make us all laugh.

She became a true pal, despite her lofty position at the top of the Salisbury tree. I think I first fell in love with her when she was in rehearsal for Mrs Hardcastle in that first production of
She Stoops To Conquer
when I was still a nervous little new boy in the company. She had to go down three steps while reciting three key lines. But that first rehearsal she tripped. ‘Oh, f**k, c**t, shit,’ she spluttered as she tried to regain her balance. I was such a
little baby I barely knew what the words meant. I certainly didn’t know that a woman could use them.

But I think I realised that Stephanie would be great company in the years ahead. I was certainly right about that.

Stephanie wasn’t my only teacher, of course. Oliver Gordon, the Rep’s director, gave me some tough love lessons from the start. His message was pretty simple: ‘Don’t muck about. Go on stage left, say your lines, then piss off stage right.’ That was pretty much the way he saw it. In rep there was no faffing around, no rocket science and no method-acting silliness. Oliver’s message was that if you’re good you get re-hired. If not, try working in a shop. It was sink or swim. Oliver was a real Arthur Askey type and he was also a perfect pantomime dame. His Widow Twankey in
Aladdin
was a template of mine for years. And we were such a close, tight ship in Salisbury. Oliver’s brother wrote lots of our pantomimes, was married to Stephanie and was another big influence on me.

Everything we did in Salisbury was on a shoestring, but the audiences would never have known it. If she had been asked, I swear that our wardrobe mistress, Barbara Wilson, could quite literally have made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. In fact, she could probably have made six. We pulled together and it all felt fantastic. For me, the lonely boy who had always felt just a little bit different, it was a revelation. I was in the world I had dreamed of. I was in my element.

For pretty much the only time in my life I also felt as if I was in the money. My £2 a week was pretty paltry. But I was living at home and in my second year at Salisbury my
wage rose to £8 a week. After a few more months I hit £12 a week when I was made a full stage manager, while still living at home and paying next to nothing to my parents. Dad’s garages were all doing well and he was always giving me cars and vans to drive. Life was just wonderful.

Staying at home protected me from a lot. It stopped me from growing up too fast and from getting into trouble. But it didn’t entirely shield me from reality.

My sexuality was still pretty much a mystery to me in the late 1960s. I wasn’t in denial and I wasn’t tortured by any sort of sexual angst. I simply had too many other things whizzing around my mind to think about that side of life. But it seemed that plenty of people were prepared to think about it for me.

The wonderfully outrageous Raymond Bowers was clearly one of them. ‘There’s that Christopher Biggins. He’s so queer he could be a lesbian,’ he roared out above the crowd as I walked into the coffee shop at the Playhouse one afternoon. Robin Ellis, who would one day be Ross Poldark to my Reverend Ossie Whitworth, was in the coffee shop with Ralph Watson and his girlfriend Caroline Moody, who died so tragically young. The whole room seemed to fall about laughing at Raymond’s words. I blushed so deeply I nearly fainted. Queer? Lesbian? I didn’t know what any of the words meant, let alone understand the overall sentiment.

But, public embarrassment aside, Raymond turned from someone who could – and indeed did – scare me, into a close pal. He also proved to be a useful role model in an age when visibly gay people seemed few and far between. He lived in The Close in Salisbury with a chic older man
called Geoffrey Larkin. Their big town house had a room painted entirely in yellow and contained nothing but a black grand piano. I thought it was the peak of sophistication. Maybe it was.

Raymond and Geoffrey upgraded Great-Aunt Vi’s table manners for me. Serviettes became napkins and the living room itself became a drawing room. The pair were top-notch entertainers and threw the most wonderful dinner parties – or was I supposed to call them supper parties? I forget. Either way I would head home from the events reeling that such stylish and elegant people existed, let alone existed in Salisbury. I was just thrilled to be part of that world. While Geoffrey has sadly died, Raymond is still very much here, working at the National Theatre. I still smile every time I think of him.

Back at the theatre we put on so many productions. We had so many different directors, who all taught me new skills. I was 17½ when I got my Equity card, which was essential back then. It was only a simple piece of cardboard. There was no photograph on it and it wasn’t even laminated. But it had my vital Equity number. It was easily the most precious object I had ever owned. After two amazing years I felt I was doing all the right things. But was I learning enough? Was I going in the right direction?

‘You need to go to drama school,’ said Stephanie one day – and I do hope that she meant it in a nice way.

‘You mean in London?’

Something about that scared me. I was too young. Too confused about who I was.

‘It doesn’t have to be there. You should try the Bristol
Old Vic Theatre School. They’re as good as anywhere in London but you won’t be distracted by being in the big city and we’ll still be able to see you. Try Bristol,’ she said.

And so I did. But would I get in?

‘Auditions will take place over the course of a weekend and you should be prepared to take part in a variety of exercises throughout your time with us.’ I was floored by the first word of the instruction on the application form and don’t think I ever made it to the end of the page. Auditions? Plural? These would be the first formal auditions I had ever done. A weekend of them would be a little different to collaring dear Mr Salsberg in the foyer of his theatre and saying I wanted to join his company. I feared auditions back then and I loathe them to this day. Do they ever really work? Can’t you spend years perfecting one four-minute piece but be lousy at everything else you are called upon to do? Maybe that’s why Bristol did ask so much more of us all.

Over the two-day assessment we all danced, sang, did our key audition piece and any number of other readings. Six or seven of the theatre school’s people were watching us all the time, scratching things down on note pads, building up the tension with each stroke of the pen. I think it was the first time I’d ever been really nervous. My subconscious must have known how important this was. But after a few weeks of agony I got the acceptance letter. I’d made it past dozens of other keen candidates. I was on my way.

‘I will never, ever experience anything as good as this again.’ Excuse the drama, but that was what I felt. It was
what I kept saying, through a ridiculous amount of tears, when I said my goodbyes at an end-of-season party at Salisbury Rep. I remember a few moments when everyone else left me alone in the back of the stalls – a sensible move on their part. I looked around. Yes, it was only a converted church hall. It wasn’t the West End, it wasn’t Broadway. But it had been so good to me.

I would even miss the damp and the smell of all the mildew. I blubbered so much that night I probably added quite a bit to the problem. I left my mark on that place in tears, if nothing else.

But more seriously I was right about it being the end of an era. Actors starting out today miss out enormously now that the old repertory system has passed. I needed that place where I learned so much from other people’s experience. I needed a refuge where I could fall in love with drama. Putting on a new show every few weeks isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s a hard slog. But it’s worth it. In Salisbury I found out that in the theatre anything can happen, and it usually does. A bit like my life, as I had just discovered.

‘
C
hristopher, I need to talk to you. I’m pregnant.’ No, it wasn’t a girlfriend talking to me – that really would have been a story. It was my mother. But bearing in mind that I was 18 and my mother was 40 it was still a pretty newsworthy event.

‘How can you be pregnant?’

And why did I ask that question? Obviously I wasn’t
that
naive. Though the thought of my mother and father still at it wasn’t something I liked to dwell on.

Maybe what I meant to ask was: ‘Why are you pregnant?’ Although that didn’t really sum up my feelings either. All told, it was all something of a shock. Mum and Dad had called me into the living room in my final few months at Salisbury Rep.

‘You’re going to have a baby brother or sister,’ my
mother added. Yes, thanks for clearing up what ‘I’m pregnant’ means, Mother.

Of course, if I was in shock, you can imagine what my poor parents themselves thought. With me getting ready to go to Bristol they had probably been looking forward to having the house to themselves. I know Dad was particularly stunned by Mum’s news. But he had a second surprise coming.

‘Can Pam really be pregnant? It’s been 18 years since she had Christopher,’ he asked our long-time doctor, the still wonderful Jim Drummond.

‘She certainly can be pregnant, and she’s not the only one,’ Jim said. It turned out that his wife was having a baby 19 years after her last. There must have been something in Wiltshire’s water supply back then.

All things considered, it was probably a good thing that I was ready to fly the nest just as the new chick arrived. I like my sleep. And like most teenage boys I wasn’t keen on the idea of changing any nappies. I was also a bit of a worrier – and I didn’t like worrying about my mother’s health. Giving birth after such a long gap wasn’t easy for her. And this birth wasn’t an easy one. It turned out that my mother had a fibroid as big as a grapefruit that needed to be removed. She had a Caesarean section to deliver her baby and the surgeon threw in a hysterectomy for good measure.

But she and my baby brother both came back from hospital safe and well. Little Sean was soon the new prince of Sidney Street. And he’s turned out to be a real treasure. With an 18-year age gap, he and I were never going to be like ordinary brothers. Technically speaking I was easily
old enough to be his father – when we were out in the street together I think a lot of strangers assumed that’s what I was. Fortunately, as we hardly ever lived in the same house at the same time we never had any sibling rivalries either. And today I’m proud to say that we’ve always been good friends.

I cried on my first night at theatre school. I moved into digs in Bristol, for a taste of the full theatrical experience. I had a room high up in an attic in a house shared with half a dozen or so other students.

My mother and father had dropped me off, I had offered shy greetings to some of my fellow residents and then, upstairs and alone, the tears had begun to fall. This was the first time I had ever been on my own and everything felt so alien. All the confidence I had built up with all those talented, older people in Salisbury faded away. How would I cope on my own? More importantly, how would I cope among people of my own age?

Until I got to Bristol I think my peers had scared me. No, I’d never been bullied in school. Yes, I had dear John Brown and a handful of other pals from my various classes. But in the main I felt more comfortable with adults. I think it’s because of that nagging feeling that I was different. Not having a sense of belonging can be quite horrible. If you’re different you always worry that you might come under attack at any time. My thinking had always been that older people were less likely to lash out at me. I wanted them wrapped around me, just like the cotton wool that had made me itch all those years ago as a baby.

Bristol taught me so much. But the first lesson was that no one lashed out at anyone. Being different was fine – in fact, it was something to be applauded if not actually encouraged. Within weeks I realised that I loved being with my own age group. And maybe that’s because we were the most extraordinary group in the theatre school’s history.

Jeremy Irons was one of the first of my fellow students to say hello. Then I met the others. There was Simon Cadell, who came from a real dynasty of actors, Tim Pigott-Smith, Ian Gelder, John Caird, Tony Falkingham, the fantastic Gillian Morgan, who became Gillian Eton, Sheila Ferris, now married to Poirot himself David Suchet, the lovely mad girl Hazel Clyne and so many more. We were a fantastic group and we were in a fantastic place.

The theatre school – opened just after the war by none other than Laurence Olivier – was in a big old Victorian house right on the edge of Clifton Downs at the end of Blackboy Hill. You got to it by sweeping up a grand driveway – it was all very
Brideshead Revisited
, so Jeremy had a head start when he got into his role as Charles Ryder all those years later.

There were probably only about two dozen students in a year and a couple of years of students at the school at any one time. But the building was always buzzing. Groups were constantly rushing around – and unlike at an ordinary school we were all desperate to learn. We had a focus. We wanted to perform.

Best of all was the fact that we were all pretty much able to concentrate on our classes. Forget part-time jobs. These were the best of times to be students. I got a grant, as did
almost everyone else. And my parents were always ready to top things up if I ran short some months, bless them. So I often did run short some months. That, too, has been a story of my life.

Our principal was a marvellous man called Nat Brenner. He was thin, wiry and hairy with a striking face and a good line in smart sports jackets. He and his lovely wife Joan lived in the flat on the top floor of the house and beneath them a warren of ten or so rooms were converted into different types of rehearsal studios and performance spaces.

Dear Nat was a hugely talented and wonderful character. It was because of him that we were so young in 1967. It was an experimental year at the theatre school, with so many of us aged just 18 and 19. They had never gambled on young talent like this before. But look where so many of us got to. And I think we all grew to be one of Nat’s favourite intakes. He was incredibly supportive and I found him very approachable – so approach him I did. He knew theatre. Peter O’Toole was one of his best pals. So I guessed he might be good for a gossip and I was right.

Maybe not every 18-year-old newcomer would have been comfortable spending so much time with their principal. But it didn’t seem strange to me. I also bonded with Nat’s wife, Joan. I sensed that she could feel a bit excluded because Nat was so dedicated to his school and his students. So Joan and I would have coffee together and gossip in their flat. Again, I never thought for a minute that there was anything unusual about a new student sitting having coffee with the principal’s wife in her drawing room. I never saw why some people were
supposed to be off limits to others. If two people want to become friends, why shouldn’t they? I didn’t see why age, status, wealth, looks or anything else should get in the way. That’s why I’ve had so many wonderful friends. And why they’ve all been such a fabulously mixed bunch.

‘All right, class. Imagine you’re squeezing a lemon between your buttocks. Now walk around the room without letting it go.’ Rudi Shelley boomed out the instruction in his rich and wonderfully exotic accent from somewhere out in middle or Eastern Europe. Rudi was a small man with big presence. He had long hair, an extraordinarily rubbery face and, of course, perfect posture. He taught us all to stand tall and to walk properly. I’m six foot one and I do still stand and walk properly. I’m proud of that. It’s kept me in good stead and it’s largely thanks to Rudi. His deportment lessons were only the start of our background education. The lovely Lynn Britt, with her scraped-back black hair and angular dancer’s face, gave us two hours of classical ballet instruction every week. It may seem ridiculous, really, to teach us all that. And even then I was no sylph-like ballerina. But ballet is a surprisingly useful skill. So much stems from all that training, all the breadth and depth I acquired in Bristol. It meant I could turn my hand to anything in the years ahead. Just as well, the way my feast-and-famine career would turn out.

But squeezing a lemon between my buttocks and doing a bit of ballet lost their thrill after a while. What I wanted to do most was act. Central to everything at the school was, of course, the dream of playing in the Bristol Old Vic
itself. The theatre, a couple of miles away on King Street, is a most wonderful Georgian building. It had it all – an incredibly rich history, a cast list of almost all the greats you could care to name. It even had a theatre ghost, though my booming voice must have scared her away as she never turned up when I was around.

The first time I walked into the theatre I felt its embrace. It was so different to Salisbury Rep. This was a proper theatre, not a converted church hall. This was the real thing, with deep colours, rich brocades and row upon row of seats. But the place didn’t fool me. I loved the fact that backstage everything was just as crowded and chaotic as it had been in my home town. Maybe that’s what I like about theatre: the gap between artifice and reality. The different roles that theatres themselves can play. The magic we can make.

Of course I also liked the outrageous characters I met in them. And the Bristol Old Vic certainly provided them. It had a great front-of-house manager, a fittingly camp and theatrical man called Rodney West who loved the enthusiasm of all us young students. It was just as well because he ended up seeing an awful lot of us.

The marvellous Jacqueline Stanbury and I got the ball rolling. We decided to organise first-nighters for each new performance. Our gang would dress up, the boys in black tie, the girls in long dresses. Most of us might have had to rely on charity shops for our finery. But we made it look a million dollars. Rodney helped make sure we always got the seats we wanted. The theatre has a horseshoe gallery where you sit in a narrow row of seats on the side edge of the balcony. They’re not the best seats
in the house by any measure – the view was badly restricted and you had to lean at a worryingly wide angle to see the whole of the stage. But they were where we loved to be. When you sat there you were almost on display yourself – I could always sense it when people in the posh seats of the stalls were looking our way. We loved the attention.

It was in those seats that it dawned on me that theatre itself would be one of the great loves of my life. The company was extraordinary in those years, great plays, wonderful performances. Thelma Barlow, still a dear friend, was at the Bristol Old Vic back then and I remember being dazzled by her performances – she was like a lovely china doll. A lovely china doll who could set the stage on fire when her play demanded it. And leading the company was the marvellous Peggy Ann Wood, the first person I ever saw to get an entrance round when they walked on stage. I was stunned by the thrill of it as I joined that applause. Now, whenever I get an entrance round, I thank Peggy for showing how it’s done.

Today I’m known as an avid first-nighter and I’m sad that it’s often misconstrued. It’s not about being at the opening of an envelope – though I’ve done my fair share of that as well. No, my first nights are about the love of theatre, of the excitement, nerves and magic of an opening. It’s important to me to keep seeing more actors in more plays. I don’t understand some other actors who seem proud of the fact that they never go to the theatre. Shouldn’t they be ashamed of it instead? To me, the theatre is where we learn. It’s where we find new passions. That was instilled in me in Bristol.

So I was a worthy, hard-working, theatre-obsessed pupil, then? Well, not quite. I loved the life of a drama student just as much as I loved the drama itself. I loved the camaraderie, the in-jokes, the tricks we played and the stupid things we all did. Tim Pigott-Smith and Simon Cadell were in the serious set, they were dedicated to the craft, and I respected that. But I had fallen for the whole ambience, the joking, the laughing that went on when the audience wasn’t looking.

Maybe that was my downfall: not to be seen as a serious actor. I ultimately beat a lot of those serious players into the Royal Shakespeare Company. But I never quite made it stick.

Funnily enough, Jeremy Irons was the other person in our year who was widely seen as insufficiently serious for the classic roles. He was so handsome, a clear leading man with extraordinary presence. He was so social, so gregarious, and that’s why we got on so well. He was also very sporty, and he loved his horses and country life. Academically speaking, neither of us was exactly the brightest of people at Bristol. But we laughed the most. Jeremy’s reputation today is far more serious. At the time, though, we both just wanted to have fun.

He and I sat in the Blackboy Cafe once to have a laugh over the latest industry gossip, the way we always did. The Australian Coral Browne, Vincent Price’s wife and surely the world’s campest actress, was a heroine of ours. We had just heard the probably apocryphal story of her hailing a cab one rainy night outside the Haymarket Theatre in London. As she climbed in through one door, another soaking-wet passenger climbed through the other.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid the lady is first,’ said the cabbie.

‘Which lady?’ asked the man.

‘This fucking lady,’ she snapped.

Jeremy and I just knew that she was our type of girl.

‘We should write to her. Just be honest and say we’re two drama students out in Bristol and that we’d like to have lunch with her,’ I said.

‘Do you really think she would come?’

‘I think she will. She’ll be a hoot.’

Shame on the two of us for chickening out. Coral’s no longer with us. But I’m still convinced she would have joined us if we’d ever had the guts to post the letter.