What a creep or ungrateful beast you would have to be not to be moved by the cries of those on the outside who clamour for admission. If you have been lucky enough to advance in the profession surely the least you can do is offer a hand, or a word of helpful advice to those who would emulate you? Absolutely right, but one must be honest too. I can only advise from experience. If someone asks me to how to do something, I cannot answer in the abstract, I can only answer according to my own history. I have absolutely no idea how to become an actor, I can only tell you how I became one. Or at least, how I became a sort of actor who is also a sort of writer who is also a sort of comedian who is also a sort of broadcaster who is also a sort of all sorts of all sorts sort. Sort of. That is the best I can do. I cannot pronounce on whether it is better to go to drama school or not to go, I cannot advise on whether to do rep or street theatre before attempting film or television. I cannot tell you whether it is deleterious or beneficial to the career to take on extra work or accept a part in a soap opera. I simply do not know the answer to these questions because they have never arisen in my life. It would be reckless and irresponsible of me to push someone towards or away from courses of action or inaction of which I know nothing.
So here is how I became an actor.
At prep school the school play was always a musical, so the best casting I could ever hope for would be in the non-singing roles: Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady was an especial triumph ('Would grace any drawing-room' being my first published critical notice). At Uppingham I wrote and performed with my friend Richard Fawcett in comedy sketches for House Suppers, as Christmas entertainments were called there. I also made a mark as a witch in Macbeth. I say 'made a mark' because the director - in a burst of creative licence which he must have regretted ever afterwards - thought we should devise our own characters, costumes and props. I went to the butcher's in Uppingham and procured a bucket of pigs' guts to pull out of the cauldron for the 'Eye of toad and ear of newt' scene. My dear, the smell ...
The next time I appeared on stage was at the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King's Lynn. NORCAT's lecturer in charge of drama was called Bob Pols, and he cast me first as Creon, in a double bill of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone, and then as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was camp and wore a cricket pullover, as Lysander, that is, not as Creon. My only other dramatic experience took place in a local church performance of Charles Williams's Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, a verse play by the 'other' member of the Inklings (i.e. the one who wasn't J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis). That was the sum total of my dramatic experience, nativity plays aside, when I arrived at Cambridge. Yet I had it in my head that I was a natural actor, that I knew how to speak lines, that I would have a presence on stage, a weight, a heft, an ability to draw focus when required. I think this was because I was always confident about my voice and my ability to speak verse and to inflect and balance speech properly, without the misplaced emphases and false stresses that I could hear so clearly in the voices of prefects and other amateurs when they read lessons in chapel or recited verse or dramatic lines on stage. The few prizes I had won at school were for poetry reading or recitation of one kind or another. In the same way as one might wince at a discord I would wince at incompetent intonation and wish that I could get up and correct them. Such a point of view now strikes me as arrogance and insolent presumption, but I suppose a conviction that one can do better is a necessary part of the self-belief that is itself a necessary part of pursuing a calling. Heroes matter too. Everyone I've ever met whom I have admired has grown up with their own pantheon of heroes. I listened to, watched and admired Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier (of course), Orson Welles, Maggie Smith, James Stewart, Bette Davis, Alistair Sim, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando (natch), James Mason, Anton Walbrook, Patrick Stewart, Michael Bryant, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and John Wood. There were many others, but those I especially remember. I had not seen a great deal of theatre, but John Wood and Patrick Stewart at the Royal Shakespeare Company had made an enormous impression. I did impersonations of Stewart's Enobarbus and Cassius in the coach on the way back to school. The others in my list are fairly obvious choices for someone of my background and generation I suppose.
When I was about twelve my parents took me to the Theatre Royal in Norwich with the promise of Sir Laurence Olivier. The play was Somerset Maugham's Home and Beauty, at least I think it was: memory can conflate different productions and evenings, maybe it was something else. When I settled in my seat and opened the programme I saw that the production was directed by Laurence Olivier. My heart sank. I had so hoped that I would see the theatrical legend in person.
When the play was over my mother asked how I had liked it.
'It was fine,' I said, 'but the best bit was the man who came on as the lawyer at the end. I mean, even the way he took off his hat was extraordinary. Who was he?'
'But that was Olivier!' said my mother. 'Didn't you realize?'
I can still picture exactly the way he stood on stage, the angle of his head, the extraordinary ability he had to make you all look at each of his fingers one after the other as he tugged off his gloves with aching deliberation. He played a dry-as-dust solicitor in a small comic turn in the play's last scene, but it was astounding. Shameless exhibitionism, of course. A far cry from the honest gutsy endeavours of a thousand hard-working actors mining for the psychological and emotional truths of their characters in theatres and studios up and down the land, but damn, it was fun. I was pleased at least that I found it amazing even without knowing who the actor was.
So, at Cambridge, although I loved the art and idea of acting, I had no theories about theatre as an agent of social or political change, and no ambition for it as a future career. If I had faith in my potential I certainly had no particular sense that it would be on comic roles that I should concentrate. Quite the reverse. Theatre to me meant, first and foremost, Shakespeare, and the comic roles in the canon - fools, jesters, clowns and mechanicals - didn't really suit me at all. I was more a Theseus or Oberon than a Bottom or Quince, more a Duke or Jaques than a Touchstone. But first there was the question of whether I would even dare put myself forward for consideration.
Cambridge had dozens and dozens of drama clubs. Each college had its own, and there were others that were university-wide. The major ones, like the Marlowe Society, the Footlights and the Amateur Dramatic Club, had long histories: the Marlowe was started by Justin Brooke and Dadie Rylands a hundred years ago; the ADC and Footlights were older still. Other were more recent - the Mummers had been founded by Alistair Cooke and Michael Redgrave in the early 1930s and clung to a more progressive and avant-garde identity.
Many at Cambridge will tell you that the drama world there is filled with ambitious, pretentious, bitchy wannabes and that the atmosphere of backbiting, jealousy and greasy-pole rivalry is suffocating and unbearable. The people who tell you this are cut from the same cloth as those who grow up these days to become trollers on internet sites and who specialize in posting barbarous, mean, abusive, look-at-me, listen-to-me anonymous comments on YouTube and BBC 'Have Your Say' pages and other websites and blogs foolish enough to allow space for their poison. Such swine specialize in second-guessing the motives of those who are brave enough to commit to the risk of making fools of themselves in public and they are a blight on the face of the earth. 'Oh, but a thick skin is surely necessary in the acting profession. Actors and theatre people should get used to it.' Well if you want to be in a profession which accesses emotion and attempts to penetrate the mind and soul of man, I should have thought that what is more necessary is a thin skin. Sensitivity. But I am wandering off the point.
I thought, as I settled into my first term, that I should at least go to see some plays and decide whether or not I would be completely outclassed and out of my league. No point in going to auditions if I didn't have a hope of doing anything more than carry a spear.
I should point out for th
ose unfamiliar with the world of British university drama, that none of this had anything to do with grown-ups - with dons, lecturers, officials or the university departments and faculties. This was all as extra-curricular as drink, sex or sport. I know that in American universities a lot of these activities actually give you points towards your degree, 'credits' I believe they are called. Not in Britain. Universities that offer drama courses do exist here - Manchester and Bristol, for example. But not the majority and certainly not Cambridge. Drama and activities of that sort have nothing to do with your academic work, you find your own time to do them. As a result, such pursuits flower, fruit and flourish as nowhere else. If I had had to submit to some drama teacher casting me in plays, directing me or telling me how it was done I should have withered on the vine. The beauty of our way was that everyone was learning as they went along. The actors and directors were all students, as were the lighting, sound, set construction, costume, stage management, production crew, front of house and administration. All were undergraduates saying, 'Oh, this looks like fun.'
How did they learn? Well, that's the beauty of university life. You learn on the job and you learn from the second-years and third-years above you, who in turn learned on the job and from those above them. My God, but it is exciting. As exciting as I should find official drama training dull, numbing, embarrassing and humiliating. All you need is enthusiasm, passion, tirelessness and the will, the hunger and the need to do it. But within that range there is plenty of room for the amiable rugger player who thinks it will be larky to be in the chorus of a musical, or the nervous scholarly type who wouldn't mind a shot at a one-line role in a Shakespeare tragedy just for the sensation of experiencing a play from the inside. You don't have to be a professional in the making at all.
Where did the money come from to build sets and make costumes? From previous productions. Every drama club had a committee, mostly second- and third-years, and someone on that committee looked after the budgets and the money. It was not just a way of learning about drama, it was a way of learning about committee life, diligence, accounting and all the perils and pitfalls of business and management. Sometimes a don would be asked to sit on the board of a club to help oversee financial matters, but they had no more power over the committee than any other individual member of it. The Footlights, it was rumoured, was the only Cambridge club, in any field, big and profitable enough to have to pay corporation tax. I don't know if that was true, but the fact that such a rumour could have got about tells you something of the scale of some of these enterprises. The momentum of continuity was a huge part of it. These clubs had been running for so long that it was relatively simple to keep them going.
The first production I went to see was of Tom Stoppard's Travesties. The play is set in Zurich and somehow combines in a farcical whirl Lenin, who had been exiled there for a while, Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist, the novelist James Joyce and an English consul called Henry Carr who is in the process of mounting a production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
The production was co-directed by Brigid Larmour, now artistic director of the Watford Palace Theatre, and Annabelle Arden, who directs opera around the world. At the time they were very smart first-years who had hit the ground running. The others in the cast will forgive me, I hope, if I fail to recount their own admirable contributions to the success of the evening. Although it was a truly excellent production in and of itself, what stood out for me above all else was the performance of just one of the actresses. The girl who played Gwendolen stood out like a good deed in a naughty world.
She seemed, like Athene, to have arrived in the world fully armed. Her voice, her movement, her clarity, ease, poise, wit ... well, you had to be there. One of the best things any performer on stage can do, whether stand-up comic, torch singer, ballet dancer, character actor or tragedian, is to relax an audience. To let them know that everything is going to be all right and that they can lean back in their seats happy in the knowledge that the evening won't be a disaster. Of course, another of the best things a performer can do is provoke a feeling of excitement, danger, unpredictability and instability. To let the audience know that the evening might fail at any moment and that they need to lean forward in their seats and watch intently. If you can manage both at once then you are really something. This girl was really something. Medium height with a perfect English complexion, she was gravely beautiful, extraordinarily funny and commandingly assured beyond her years. Her name, the programme told me, was Emma Thompson. In the interval I heard someone say that she was the daughter of Eric Thompson, the voice of The Magic Roundabout.
Emma.
Fast forward to March 1992. For her performance as Margaret Schlegel in Howards End Emma has won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Journalists are ringing round all her old friends to find out what they think of this. Now, it is a kind of unwritten rule that when the press ask you to speak about someone else you never say a word unless that person has cleared it with you beforehand. If one wants to talk about oneself to a journalist that is fine, but it really isn't on to blather about a third party without their permission. One persistent journalist, having been more or less rebuffed by all of Emma's old friends, somehow gets hold of Kim Harris's number.
'Hello?'
'Hi, I'm from the Post. I understand you're an old university friend of Emma Thompson's?'
'Ye-e-es ...'
'I wonder if you've anything to say about her Oscar? Are you surprised? Do you think she deserves it?'
'I have to come right out and tell you,' says Kim, 'that I feel betrayed, let down and most disappointed by Emma Thompson.'
The journalist almost drops his phone. Kim can hear the sound of a pencil being sucked and then, he later swears, of drool hitting the carpet.
'Betrayed? Really? Yes? Go on.'
'Anyone who ever saw Emma Thompson at university,' says Kim, 'would have laid substantial money on her getting an Oscar before she was thirty. She is now just over thirty. It's a crushing disappointment.'
Not as crushing a disappointment as that felt by the journalist who for one second thought he had a story. Kim, as he so often does, put it perfectly. That really was all there was to say. Plenty of other students were talented, some prodigiously so, and one might guess that with a fair following wind, the right opportunities and a measure of guidance and growth, they would have decent, or even brilliant, careers. With Emma you just saw her once and you knew. Stardom. Oscar. Damehood. That last is up to her of course but you can guarantee it will be offered.
Men like their actresses, if they are superb, to be air-headed, ditzy and charmingly foolish. Emma is certainly capable of ... refreshingly different approaches to logical thought ... but air-headed, ditzy or foolish she is not: she is one of the most clear-minded and intelligent people I have met. The fact that her second Oscar, two years after the first, was awarded for a screenplay, tells you all you need to know about her ability to concentrate, think and work. If it is tempting to be cross with people for having so many gifts lavished on them at birth, she has an abundance of kindness, openness and sweetness of nature that makes envy or resentment difficult. I am aware that we have entered the treacly territory of 'darling she's lovely and gorgeous' here, but that is the risk a book like this was always going to run. I did warn you. For those of you who would rather take away some other view of the woman, I can tell you definitively that she is a talentless mad bitch sow who wanders the streets of north London in nothing but a pair of ill-matched wellington boots. She only gets parts in films because she sleeps with the producers' animals. Plus she smells. She never wrote a screenplay in her life. She chains up a writer she drugged at a party twenty years ago, and he is responsible for everything published under her name. Her so-called liberal humanitarian principles are as false as her breasts: she is a member of the Gestapo and regrets the passing of Apartheid. That's Emma Thompson for you: the darling of fools and the fool of darlings.
Despite or because of this we got to know
each other. She was at the all-women's college Newnham, where, like me, she read English. She was funny. Very funny. Also extreme with her fashion sense. The day came when she decided to shave her head: I blame the influence of Annie Lennox. Emma and I were both in the same seminar group at the English faculty and one morning, after a stimulating discussion of A Winter's Tale, we walked together down Sidgwick Avenue towards the centre of town. She pulled off her woolly hat so that I could feel the texture of her bare pate. In those days it was unlikely that anyone would have seen a woman as bald as an egg. A boy riding past on a bicycle turned to stare and, his panic-stricken eyes never leaving Emma's shining scalp, rode straight into a tree. I never thought such things took place outside silent movies, but it happened and it made me happy.
Emma Thompson's hair is starting to grow back.
The first term came and went without my daring once to attend an audition. I had seen that there could be actors, or one at least, as astonishing as Emma, but there had been plenty getting parts that I felt I could have played better, or at least no worse. Nonetheless I held back.
For the most part my life in college and in the wider university followed a blandly traditional course. I joined the Cambridge Union, which is nothing to do with students' unions, but a debating society with its own chamber, a kind of miniature House of Commons, all wood and leather and stained glass, complete with a gallery and doors marked 'Aye' and 'No' through which you file to vote after the 'Speaker' has put the motion to the 'House'. All a little pompous really, but ancient and traditional. Many in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet had been Cambridge Union hacks in the early sixties: Norman Fowler, Cecil Parkinson, John Selwyn Gummer, Ken Clarke, Norman Lamont, Geoffrey Howe ... that bunch. I was not politically inclined enough to want to speak or attempt to work my way into the inner circle of the Union, nor was I interested in asking questions from the floor of the house or contributing to debates in any other way. I watched a few - Bernard Levin, Lord Lever, Enoch Powell and a handful of others came to argue about the great issues of the day, whatever they were back then. War, terrorism, poverty, injustice, as I recall ... problems that have now all been solved but which at the time seemed most pressing. There was also a 'comedy' debate once a term, usually with a fanciful motion like 'This House Believes in Trousers' or 'This House Would Rather Be a Sparrow Than a Snail'. I went to one where the handlebar-mustachioed comedian Jimmy Edwards, drunk as a skunk, played the tuba, told excellent jokes and afterwards - so I was told - fondled the thighs of all the comely young men at the dinner. I have since been invited many times to debate at Cambridge, Oxford and other universities and shiningly comely and shudderingly handsome have been some of the young men who have hosted the evenings. I never quite got the hang of the getting drunk and fondling the thigh business though. Whether that makes me a gallant and proper gentleman, a cowardly wuss or an unadventurous prude I cannot quite make out. Thighs appear to be safe around me. Perhaps this will change as I enter the autumn of my life and I cease to care so much about how I am judged.