Old Rage, page 11
Although I confess I really have no idea what makes a star, I do pride myself on being able to spot that special quality in colleagues, like David, that I’ve worked with.
The company I carefully chose when I was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company small-scale tour (which led to my first book, Ramblings of an Actress), have all gone on to have successful careers. Roger Allam, whom I drove insane with my constant notes, has become the versatile, brilliant star I knew he would be. His voice and body are very male but when he laughs or shows emotion Ken Tynan’s ambivalence can be glimpsed. The shy young man in my company who played both Romeo and Flute the bellows-mender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had a mysterious, fragile intensity that made it impossible to take your eyes off him. Daniel Day-Lewis portraying Flute trying to act Thisbe in the ridiculous amateur dramatics the mechanicals put on for the toffs in the Dream captured the fear, the excitement and the embarrassment of a working man forced to play a woman, at one point dissolving into suppressed giggles, that every night had me and the audience aching with laughter. He just simply was that man – in a part that can become a comedy cliché. The complete immersion in his varied roles that has characterised his meteoric career was there then, and is how I knew, without a shadow of doubt, despite disagreement from the other RSC directors (his Romeo was unconventional), that he would eventually be a huge star. He has now decided to retire and, although I am sad that I will see no more of his work, I am glad he is conducting his life as he chooses. Our profession can be cruel in its discarding of artists, if they begin to weaken, in favour of the new. Dan has made sure he will never suffer that. He has always thrown himself 100 per cent into the parts he is playing, and for him, I suspect, that has been sometimes damagingly demanding. Certainly it leaves little room for a private life. It is understandable that he should now wish to cherish his time, his privacy, his family, and all the other interests he has.
I believe performances like those of David, Roger and Dan will not date because they are unmannered and utterly truthful, but, alas, even huge success is soon forgotten, certainly in theatre, although films too can date and disappear. These days we do not hear much of James Mason, Kenneth More, Eric Portman, Margaret Lockwood, Gracie Fields or my particular heart-throb Stewart Granger, all of whom were huge stars in their day. When I was young we got our gallery stools and queued all day to see the latest performances of Dames Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndike, Wendy Hillier, Peggy Ashcroft and the elegant Margaret Leighton. Young actors nowadays, let alone the public, do not know their names, but they were venerated in their day. Sic transit gloria.
July 2019
In old age I see more of my friends than my family. My two grannies lived with my mum and dad until the day they died, squashed together in one room – they fought like cat and dog and must have driven my parents insane. I am independent, and my daughters have busy family units to which I am an occasional visitor. They, especially Ellie Jane, are there if I need them, but up till now I seldom have. It is part of Nature that animals leave the nest when they are mature and set up new nests, but the deserted parent birds still fly or float around with their mates. As do I.
During my marriages I neglected my friends. I had needy husbands, the first because of the damage wrought on a very young man by active war service, and the other because of a difficult childhood. John was not a very social animal anyway – and nor indeed was I. Being on display in our work made us almost reclusive in our private lives. For me, my work, the family and keeping John happy in our all-consuming relationship was a full-time occupation that left little time for friends.
When we both had time off, we did not want to share it with others. We were not good hosts. As children, neither of us came from backgrounds that understood the concept of dinner or cocktail parties. ‘Dinner’ was what we called lunch anyway, and parties were just rather spartan dos for children’s birthdays – junket and pass the parcel, with the prize being a gobstopper, quite a bonanza during sweet rationing. I never remember my parents entertaining guests. So, as grown-ups, for John and me the idea of inviting people in for a meal was a scary enterprise. John was a good basic cook but didn’t feel confident about cooking for anyone other than the family. After his mother left them when he was seven, his father was often away, so he had to provide food for his little brother. He would rustle up something usually involving jam, bread and baked beans. HP Sauce remained an essential ingredient. My mother had neither the time, doing a nine-to-five, six-day-a-week job, nor the means, with scant ingredients during and for a long while after the war, to teach me to cook. I did domestic science at school during rationing, so potatoes in their jackets are still my speciality, and I am good at beating butter, margarine and milk together to make them spread thinly and go further.
To this day entertaining guests is an ordeal for me, taking days of planning and near nervous breakdown when cooking the meal. I am a member of a lovely book club where we take it in turns to host the meeting. The others conjure up gastronomic feasts whilst I sneakily spend a fortune at Ottolenghi’s. I so envy the women and men who make holding a dinner party into an art form. To visit the home of my friend and neighbour Delena is sheer delight. Ellie Jane often stayed with her and her husband, Gary, when I was working away, and when she returned home she would tell me, awestruck, of sit-down teas with tablecloths and serviettes and home-made cake and jam.
Delena’s table, with mixed antique plates and dishes, and garden flowers, is a feast for the eyes, and one’s taste buds are blessed with flavoursome invented dishes and a perfect cheese from the little shop in Chiswick. Even as a vegan, eating at Gary and Delena’s is a joy. It all seems to go so smoothly but must have taken painstaking effort to present such a gift to their friends. What amazes me is that she actually seems to enjoy it, always perfectly coiffed and clad. I would be sweaty and anxious that the vegetables didn’t go cold because the meat took longer to cook than the recipe said. Always a recipe for me – God bless Delia – whereas my good cook friends spurn such plebeian aids. It is all creative artistry for them. Over the dinner table they discuss what special process or ingredient they have used, and I sit there like Banquo’s ghost, saying nothing, trying to follow a complicated foreign language.
My friend Helen has the hostess gene as well. She has never married and has now abandoned her colourful love life to concentrate on enjoying herself, writing and painting. Part of that pleasure is from sharing her skill at making the most of life with others. She has a perfect small house and an adored pug dog, she chooses her guests for dinner carefully so that they will maybe make new friends, and her food and wine is perfect. She inherited money and uses it generously to take friends on treats and imaginative trips abroad. Just after John died we had a family holiday booked in Barcelona; we decided to still go, and Helen agreed to take his place. She is an inveterate traveller, and rallied us into excursions and restaurants. Whenever we go away together, she has a tradition of bringing some corny self-help book, from which she reads out improving advice at bedtime. Even as a distraught new widow she had me howling with laughter. She makes every aspect of life as enjoyable as she can. Even when on her own, she cooks a proper meal, sets the table and changes her frock. When she stayed with me in France I was horrified when she came down in the evening, elegantly dressed, to eat my pathetic broken omelette and salad. It is not affectation or conformity; she likes dressing up. She relishes the small details. No wonder so many men fell in love with her. Still do at eighty, but they would get in the way of her idyllic lifestyle. And they say spinsters are sad.
When I first went on a diet for my rheumatoid arthritis, which meant no gluten, no dairy, no meat or fish and very little oil, my dear friend Neil and his husband James asked me round for dinner one night. When I explained my regime and suggested we just have a drink, he paused a mere nanosecond before saying, ‘No, it’ll be a wonderful challenge’ – and of course concocted a banquet of buckwheat, quinoa, seaweed, spices, exotic vegetables and God knows what other fabulous exotic ingredients.
Entertaining well is a generous and loving act, and with all my heart I wish I could do it. I’ve done courses, watched television programmes, practised on my own – the kitchen always ends up looking like the Somme and I bitterly fail to produce anything really tasty. I just about manage my weekly delivery from Mindful Chef of measured-out ingredients for a simple vegan recipe, but it takes me much longer than they say it will, and in the end I don’t enjoy it much because I know I’m cheating. I so want to entertain my friends as they do me, with love and care.
July 2019
Boris Johnson has become prime minister. The world’s gone mad. Trump? Johnson? I have got to get out of here. I need to calm down or I will have a heart attack.
August 2019
For nearly thirty years my home in France has been a place of refuge from the turmoil of my life in London. My normally ricocheting blood pressure steadies here, as life slows down to a peaceful calm. I feel at ease. But now, with the government edict about residential expansion in our commune still being fiercely contested, even here I can’t relax properly.
The decision by some bureaucrat in Paris has jettisoned me, and my neighbours, into a whirlpool of confusion about the future of our hameau. That, and not knowing the outcome of negotiations regarding movement around Europe, and shared healthcare, in this Brexit transition time, has left me in limbo.
Limbo in the Catholic Church, which is not renowned for its protection of children, was where babies who died before being baptised were condemned to stay, forbidden entry to heaven. Only in 2007 did the Pope decide to abolish that ruling. Good old him. Pity he didn’t look at what some of his supposedly celibate priests and nuns were up to at the same time. My very first school was a convent in King’s Cross, where threats of hellfire and the cane had me screaming in terror every morning as my father dragged me up the hill towards the malign Mother Superior. In fact, come to think of it, maybe my lifetime battle with fear and rage stems from those few months I spent at that school, not the war, which I normally blame. It could be argued, on the other hand, that those malevolent crows taught me to deal with threat.
I remember limbo dancing being all the rage in the fifties. Brought over by the Windrush generation from the Caribbean, it was a painful competition to dance under an increasingly lowered stick, or in our case skipping rope, in a backbend, legs doubled under us, in a way that did not suit our rigid English bodies.
Limbo, as it has now come to be known in the secular world, is not a comfortable place to be. I know it well. Most actors do. The between-jobs, when you doubt you will ever work again. The almost worse situation, when you are offered two parts at the same time, and can’t decide which you should do. In the old days, for me, the decisions depended on which paid best, which might give me a contact for future work, and which might improve my pathetic curriculum vitae. Nowadays the criterion for me is a project I believe in, regardless of the size of my part – in fact, preferably small. Or a new challenge, like climbing the mountain in Edie, or one I have just been offered, to manage a canal boat.
I spend most of my life in a state of indecision. One of the big advantages of being a vegan is the limited availability in most restaurants. I used to drive waiters and fellow eaters mad with my shilly-shallying over the menu, and then my tasting of everyone else’s choices, and deciding I’d made the wrong one.
When I have a flare-up of pain from my RA, it is made worse by my mithering about which of my numerous medications I should take, or should I force myself to exercise, or just give up and go to bed? I have started using a UCLA app about mindfulness, and when I make up my mind to do that it seems to help. Until I find something else to dither about. You only realise how damaging indecision – being in limbo – is when you finally decide something, and the sense of relief is tremendous.
The limbo situation that I am in now in France does not promise any imminent resolution. That our mairie, in its lack of wisdom, designated our perfect little haven for expansion beggars belief. It is an ancient mountain village of six dwellings utterly unspoiled by any modern development. It is ramshackle and primitive with some Palaeolithic remains, ruins, and vestiges of Roman and medieval history both in the village and in the fields around the houses. No swimming pools, no geraniums, no concrete roads – just broken stone, and cobbled paths, and a patch of earth used for generations as a boules pitch. There is a working barn where we celebrate the gathering of the grape harvest with aioli and wine, and the fields around provide a cornucopia of cherries, lavender and sunflowers.
My stone house is dilapidated by generations of sun and mistral storms, and my neglect, but it continues to protect and bring me joy. It was built centuries ago, with only two tiny windows as lookouts on the wall turning its back to the violent wind, while the other side basks in the beneficent, healing sun. When it is too hot, the shutters and windows are kept closed, providing a welcome shady retreat. In the winter I light the wooden stove, and watch the flames flicker around the logs. At night, a million stars cover the skies, silence, apart from the white barn owl floating around, occasionally piercing the stillness with an eerie shriek.
We have formed ourselves into an association to defend our ancient home, which, being French, has involved a lot of wine and despairing shrugs. Despite a few changes over time, the community has remained tightly knit. After John’s death, I came back to find a rose bush planted by my door, and each one of my neighbours held me in their arms, no words, just the conventional three kisses on the cheek, and some tears. When we were all gathered round André’s tomb up on the hilltop town of Saignon, Monsieur Le Cros made a speech about how pleased André’s parents would have been, after the travails of war, to see round their son’s grave neighbours from Germany, Sweden, England and France. My dilemma is: Do I leave this place that has provided ease for the last thirty years, or remain and face the inevitable upheaval of change? In the meantime: limbo.
August 2019
Back in London, every time I turn on the radio or TV at the moment I am incensed by a manic, garbled Boris Johnson telling us how wonderful it is going to be under his leadership/dictatorship. His guru, Dominic Cummings, has obviously held training sessions for the prime minister’s dazed acolytes in how to walk confidently, talk positively, smile all the time, making sure that you hide the fear in your eyes, and when in doubt promise large sums of money or a title. The most incompetent recruits are not allowed to do interviews that might expose their stupidity under expert scrutiny. This especially applies to Boris – as we have been brainwashed into chummily calling him – who might bring the whole house of cards down with the irresistible temptation of a cheap laugh or a clever bon mot. It’s been like a toned-down version of those alarming pictures from North Korea, where huge crowds smile and laugh and clap when the dear, murderous leader appears. Optimism is the flavour of the month. For my part, 2016, 2017, 2018 and what we’ve had so far of 2019 have been shit whichever way I look.
Before all these things happened, when I was chancellor of Portsmouth University, I often used to warn students that life is not always a bowl of cherries, but the empowering thing to remember is that it’s entirely up to you what you make of it, and how you deal with it. Grab and cherish the good bits. Rheumatoid arthritis and the drugs I’m on, plus my age, make death imminent. That’s just a fact. With that in mind, wouldn’t it be sensible, not to mention more enjoyable, to heed Dominic Cummings’s message of relentless positivity myself? No, even as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, that is too big an ask.
There is a poem by Walter de la Mare called Fare Well that I might fare well-er if I observed. The last verse says:
Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.
Should I not look around and try to realise what an extraordinary planet I live on? (And how we are destroying it.) Remember my faith in my fellow man. (Farage, Trump, Ann Widdecombe.) Feel grateful for my life so far?
Should I not to delight pay the utmost blessing?
Okay. Yes. The last two. I will resist the urge to snarl, ‘Sentimental bullshit.’ I will drop the ‘rage rage’, and I’ll try gratitude and delight. That is what I will do.
I’ll try. I’ll really try.
August 2019
My new passport has arrived. The royal blue that Farage insisted on actually looks a nasty black. I deliberately scowled when I sat for my new photo and look suitably old and tragic. I will use my European one until the last possible moment.
Stop it – I must dig around for a bit of ‘delight’.
Life for everyone demands constant, sometimes unexpected, change and adaptation. Those who desperately try to avoid anything that will jeopardise their security are doomed to fail. Illness strikes, villages expand, jobs are lost, people die or leave, politics change, people called Dominic dominate.
