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i n t e r v i e w

spotlight december 2000

In the Company of Actors

by Carole Zucker
A & C Black (Publishers) Limited, 1999 ISBN 0-878-30109-7

Derbyshire What would I call myself? Middle class, I suppose. I don't quite know what all these denominations and categorisations mean. I was a child in the war years, so I just remember the strictness, the rations. It was a very simple life, really, that I lived. My father was a cellist and my mother was a pianist, and they were both very fine players, and had a huge love of music, so I grew up in a house where music was played and heard a great deal. That was a subtle influence of some kind, I'm sure. My brothers and I all resisted -- as children wilfully and sometimes wrongly do -- to follow them into it, but then my brothers were both rather gifted artistically. One is a painter now, and an art lecturer. My other brother began in art direction but gave it up, and I became an actor. We almost deliberately did something else, which sounds a bit perverse. I suppose it's not; if that's what we wanted to do. Hopefully, people in life do what they either want to do, or are good at. As a child, I listened to the radio. My mother, when I was 9 or 10, started taking me to the local theatre, and I started going to the local cinema. I became infatuated; I had to go every week. I realised, about the age of 11, that the reason I was going was that I'd found out what I wanted to do, and what I thought I could do. I admired certain films, and certain actors. I wanted to be me, I didn't want to be them, but I think actors do influence you. I will always remember James Mason, from the day I started going to see films, as absolutely one of the finest movie actors perhaps who's ever been. He somehow resonated with me. And I think, later in my teens, I was influenced by all sorts of people: Gerard Phillipe, and then a bit later on, Mastroianni, and Swedish actors, and American actors like Spencer Tracy and Montgomery Clift, and others. You don't want to be like them, but you like what they do, so therefore they are, to some extent, influencing you. My parents supported my decision to become an actor. They filled me with all the warnings, you know. They said 'If you haven't done it by the time you're 26, then think about stopping', but they were basically very encouraging. My father got me into a class with a marvellous voice teacher, and my mother got me into the local Shakespeare society, so they both took a very positive stand towards me doing what I wanted to do. RADA I applied for RADA, just that one place, and got it. I don't think I knew about the others. And I got it because of a brilliant teacher in Derbyshire, called Claude Gibson, who was absolutely terrific. He really knew how to get hold of somebody with talent, and draw something out of you, he knew that you had to learn how to speak first. He got you to really articulate, to breathe properly. I went really quite prepared for RADA, from this great teacher. - A terrifically good year - I was there in the last years of a wonderful character called Sir Kenneth Barnes, who was really at the end of his powers. He was running the place, and he was the brother of two famous actresses -- Irene and Violet Vanbrugh, which is why the theatre at RADA is called the Vanbrugh Theatre. It was very technically based; it was based on diction, on movement. The teachers were varying degrees of good and not so good. Clifford Turner was a wonderful teacher. He wrote a great book on voice, which is a classic. So we did have some very good people. There was a highly competitive feeling to it, which was quite good training, although not really what drama schools are meant to be about. For the wrong reasons, perhaps, it got you quite used to the rat race. I mean, there was a rat race right there, or the beginnings of one, anyway: trying to get into the public show, trying to get jobs. You were a little bit aware of the favourites. I wasn't one to start, but I became one of them. I really knew both sides of that; I knew what it was like to be just a student, and then suddenly I was chosen for something and did it well. And you could just feel the change in the attention of the teachers if that spotlight suddenly falls on you a bit. When you've got a hundred people there, training, some are bound to stand out. Perhaps it's inevitable. It was a terrifically good year; I don't think they've really had a year like it. I don't quite know how it happened, but you will know a lot of these names: Richard Briers, John Vernon, Brian Bedford, John Stride, Albert Finney, Peter Bowles, Peter O'Toole, Roy Kinnear, myself, Keith Baxter, Rosemary Leach, James Booth; it was really quite astonishing. And we were always competing with each other perhaps without knowing it. It was a real great clutch of people. The outside world: talent and luck But of course the world outside was waiting, was ready, and we fell into the theatre just as it was coming into a very powerful time with a lot of astonishing young writers -- Wesker, Osborne and Pinter. People like Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre. So they were there to grab us, you know. It was a very lucky time, quite apart from however good we all were, or not, or whatever has happened to all of us. Whatever we actually were, we were also lucky. Of course you've got to be able to do it, you can't just be lucky. At the beginning of my career, I took what job I could get, which was with the Midland Theatre Company, and it happened to be Frank Dunlop who was running it. I went into a company that he was directing in Coventry, which was a very, very strong and well-thought-of company. In a way, I was slightly better off, because if you went to Stratford, you walked on, you were the crowd, you might have a line or two, then you would graduate. It could take years, if Stratford got hold of you in those days. They would keep you for a very long time before they let you begin to emerge. In the other companies, like Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol, Nottingham or Dundee, all these places, you went and played big parts, or at least parts with substance, if not big ones. But friends who got into Stratford weren't learning anything by experience. They were learning by apprenticing, but they weren't actually functioning as well as you were if you were in one of the other regional theatres. Even at the National, in much later days, it took you a long time to get what Olivier once said to somebody, was his 'turn', which is an awful phrase, really: your 'turn', I suppose, practically speaking, that's what it amounts to. - I was following a path. I can't describe it to you - Another pure bit of luck was the Royal Court. For me, that was better than going to Stratford and waiting five years to get a speaking part. At the Midland Theatre Company, in the middle of my contract, I heard about the Royal Court from a wonderful actress called Sheila Ballantyne. She said 'You really ought to go and audition for it', which I did, and got in. I didn't really know what I was going into. It was London, it was a step further on; I'd not heard of this new theatre which was to be a writers' theatre. I went into it quite innocently, but I got in. And then three or four of us auditioned for this part in "Look Back in Anger," quite soon after getting there. I think it was the third or fourth production, and I got the part of Cliff, so the luck really followed me through the end of RADA, into Frank Dunlop's season, and then into the Royal Court, with "Look Back in Anger." That's the sort of thing where people say, 'I should be so lucky'. I was following a path. I can't describe it to you; it was intuition, and I suppose, being aware of opportunities and taking them, and it was very much to do with me, the actor. I became aware of where I was when I got there, what it was all about, and considered myself very fortunate. The American actors -- like Brando and Montgomery Clift -- were a huge influence; they were very much admired. I would think that the individuals that came out of the Method, what James Dean and Julie Harris, and others were doing, were all powerful images, beautiful work to go and watch. European films were very much admired, too, in those days. And also, of course, our own older actors; the whole range of people such as Olivier, and Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave. We had various pools of influence to respond to. And of course it was all discussed, everything was always discussed. © Carole Zucker, 1999 PART TWO: Inspiration and Technique: crawling up to a role Staying open: 'no decisions' On directors Remarkable writers and outrageous characters PART THREE: The value of research Working on stage and in film Playing with Shakespeare The current state of British Theatre The job of acting Identifying with a part: emotional effect