18
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.