That's Another Story: The Autobiography (34 page)

Nothing on the tour quite compared to this, although there were highlights: in Denver, we were taken on a special plane ride over the Rockies and through the Grand Canyon; in Sydney, I was put up in a penthouse suite looking out over the famous harbour, complete with a sunken bath and its own butler, the very suite that the Queen had occupied only weeks before; there we spent a day on a yacht, sailing around the harbour and going out to sea. Everywhere we went, we flew first class, which still epitomises luxury for me, and we stayed in the most exclusive of hotels.

In every city of every country that we visited, there was a Rita waiting to meet me: that is, an actress playing the part in a theatre somewhere. Today I still get people coming up to me in the street or writing to me to say how
Educating Rita
has influenced them, giving them the impetus to try further education and to make changes in their lives. I have often been asked whether I get fed up with being so associated with this part and I always answer that I am proud to be remembered for it, and that I would be thrilled to be remembered for anything, but to be remembered for this is a privilege.

Throughout my career I have continued to make a steady stream of films, good, bad and indifferent, since
Rita
, many of which I am very proud of and many that have been arguably more accomplished in the acting stakes, but none has matched that film or been met with the same warmth and recognition.

Mrs Weasley, in the Harry Potter films, probably comes close and does, of course, add a whole new audience, that of children, and I must confess I love to see the look of wonder on their faces when they discover that the woman fondling the vegetables at the supermarket, or trying to park her car on the High Street, is none other than Mrs Weasley. It’s usually their parents who point me out and there is very often a fierce discussion as to how this person could possibly be Mrs Weasley, who as everyone knows is a rotund redhead. In the film, of course, I wear a red wig and padding; in fact my substantial bosoms were, for the first couple of films, stuffed with birdseed, which became a little worrying whilst filming at King’s Cross station with the number of pigeons that there were pecking around on the platforms, and even more worrying when I thought I clocked an owl looking interested. I pictured the scene where I see Harry and the boys off on the Hogwarts Express turning into something out of Hitchcock’s
The Birds
. However, without
Rita
I probably would never have been considered for the Harry Potter films, because it was
Rita
that got me recognition in the film world and, more importantly, in Hollywood.

I won my first film BAFTA for
Educating Rita
at a ceremony during which I got increasingly drunk. I was sat at a table separated from my friends with a group of people that I didn’t know. I had no idea how much I had drunk, as waiters never allowed your glass to be empty, constantly hovering with a refill, and I was too nervous to eat the dinner provided. I had no real expectations of winning so when my name was called out by Michael Aspel who was hosting the evening, as usual I was unprepared. I tottered up on to the stage and by this time I was totally plastered. I stood there for several seconds, staring my BAFTA in the face, and then I said, ‘Has anyone got a carrier bag? I can’t go home on the tube with this.’

Muted laughter.

‘Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you . . . No, really ... thank you . . . No, honestly . . . thank you . . . No, thank you . . . Thank you . . . Thanks.’

Then as I left the stage, thinking my speech to be cleverly ironic, Michael turned and said to a quietly embarrassed audience, ‘Well, she might at least have said, “Thank you”,’ and brought the house down.

After the ceremony I, along with fellow winners, was meant to be presented to the Princess Royal but this proved impossible as I could not be found. This was no wonder because I was, in fact, under the table, literally, discussing the state of the film industry with an actor who was quite clearly as drunk as me but whose identity has now been completely obliterated from my memory. Should he wish to make himself known and put me out of my misery, he can contact the publishers at any time.

Having played Rita on stage as well as film, I am often asked which of the two media I prefer and I have to say that the live theatre wins hands down. Nothing can compare with the adrenalin-fuelled excitement of theatre, where the actor tells the story and pulls the focus, and each performance is unique, as is the relationship with each audience. Film is much more technical, where the story is told more by the director and his editor. It is shot out of sequence in tiny segments lasting only a matter of minutes and once shot is set in aspic. It is not possible in film for the actor to experience the thrill of a story unfolding, in the way that the cinema audience does whilst watching the film, but in theatre the actor shares this with them. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy film; it is far less stressful than theatre. You get a chance to do lines over and over again and you don’t have to artificially project the character out over the stalls.

Even so I have had the good fortune to be involved in two great productions at the Cottesloe Theatre at the National: the first one being Sam Shepard’s
Fool for Love
in 1985 and the second, more recent one, Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons
in 2000. Because of the intimacy of the space in which they were performed, these two experiences, along with
Rita
at the Donmar Warehouse, managed to combine the intimacy of film with the heart-pumping excitement and shared experience of live performance. Also, if a film turns out to be a flop, unlike a bad stage production you don’t have to keep acting in it until the end of the run; it’s either straight to DVD or you keep your head down when you pass the only cinema for two hundred miles that is showing it.

In the spring of 1982 I was offered a part in a BBC film written by Alan Bennett, titled
Intensive Care
. Unfortunately the actor playing the lead role was taken ill at the last minute and so Alan himself was drafted in to play the partly autobiographical role.

In the piece I was to play the part of a nurse who becomes sexually involved with his character and when the day of the read-through arrived we were issued with new scripts that contained certain changes. The chief one was during the bed scene. The two characters are about to get undressed and in the original they did so with some gusto. However, in the new script the lines had been changed; I now had to say how much I liked Alan’s character’s shirt: ‘That’s a nice shirt . . . keep it on.’ When we actually came to shoot it, Alan was so nervous that Gavin Millar, the director, brought down a bottle of whisky to calm his nerves. After much ribbing on my part, with Alan standing there, pink from giggling, and me running around the set, screaming at him not to come into the bedroom yet while I mimed catching a just-lubricated Dutch cap that kept slipping from my grip like a wet bar of soap in a bathtub, all of which he endured with an excruciatingly embarrassed glee, we finally shot the scene. Afterwards, due to the release we both felt at the scene being completed, there was such a sense of post-coital relief that the two of us sat up in bed together and had a cigarette.

I have had the immense privilege and good fortune to work with Alan Bennett on five different occasions, including both
Talking Heads
series and a BBC play titled
Say Something Happened
with Thora Hird and Hugh Lloyd, and each production has had that familiar feeling of somehow coming home. The two
Talking Heads
that I did were another sort of acting heaven and the whole idea of talking directly to the camera appealed enormously to the storyteller in me. The volume of words was daunting, however, and although I had learnt both the scripts back to front, I elected to have a monitor on set with autocue, in case of a sudden loss of concentration or lapse of memory. It was more of a security blanket than anything else, because if I did feel wobbly on the lines it would mean that, however briefly, I was not in character, and I would therefore have to stop and go back anyway.

For my performance in
Say Something Happened
- where I played the part of a rookie social worker investigating an aged couple (Thora Hird and Hugh Lloyd ) who had been put on the ‘At Risk’ register but ultimately finding that she, the social worker, was the one who was most at risk - I was nominated for my first BA FTA. The nomination was split between that and my performance in 1982 of Angie in Alan Bleasdale’s
The Boys from the Blackstuff
.

This was the first time that I had played such a dramatic role, and the first time that I had voiced, or at least recognised that I was voicing, my own angst through the angst of the character. I found Angie’s outpouring of anger and pain powerfully cathartic and we all experienced the old Everyman feeling that we were involved in something ground-breaking and important. It is still a performance that is close to my heart. No one writes about the chaos and madness that runs through ordinary life like Alan Bleasdale.

As a writer he is a total maverick; who else would cast me in the role of Robert Lindsay’s mother in a television drama series? But that’s just what he did for the series
GBH
in 1991. It was a role I relished: an Irish grandmother! To begin with, we tried all sorts of prosthetics to age my face, including having a full cast of it made. This covering the whole of my face, including my eyes and mouth, with plaster of Paris, with a straw inserted up each nostril so that I could breathe. I am not a particularly claustrophobic person but came close to understanding what that condition is like during this procedure.

It took me back to when we made Greek masks back in my Manchester Poly days, where the plaster of Paris didn’t cover our eyes, nose and mouth, and someone had to rip off the plaster halfway through in a frenzied fit. I can see it now, the student’s arms flailing and strips of the stuff flying through the air, one piece landing comically on someone else’s head, another sticking to the mirror, and tiny encrusted spots of it staying on the teacher’s glasses for the rest of the academic year.

Well, that didn’t happen to me, but the scene played itself over and over in my mind as I sat there waiting for the plaster of Paris to dry. In the end we decided that all the prosthetics looked artificial, creating a barrier between me and the audience, and becoming more of a distraction than anything else so that the viewer would be thinking: Oh, how did they do that?

I can recall saying at the time that everyone knows I’m forty and not seventy, and if we have to go through all that, with goodness knows how many hours in the make-up chair each day, to make me look the right age, you might just as well get an actress who is the right age; so let’s just allow the wig, costumes and body language to do their stuff. And the excellent make-up artist - who could have had a field day with latex wrinkling and the like, the BA FTA Craft Awards flashing neon in her mind’s eye - was the first to say it has got to be done through acting; no one is going to be fooled. And so that is what we did.

Inside my own head I was definitely the character but I still can’t judge whether I got away with it or not. Who cares: I got to work with Robert Lindsay, who has got to be one of the funniest, most inventive, generous and versatile of actors, and someone for whom I not only had huge respect but with whom I felt an instant bond. For me, he was one of those people with whom, from the first moment you meet them, you feel a comfortable familiarity. We worked together again in 1994 on Alan’s next project, the epic
Jake’s Progress
, this time, more appropriately, playing husband and wife. We had a glorious seven months in Ireland, ending every week with a breakneck dash to Dublin airport on a Friday night, along roads that in those days made our Sussex farm track feel like the M1, in order to get home.