Authors: Sheila Hancock
In 1978, when we returned to England, Margaret Thatcher was being heavily promoted as a possible prime minister. I had met
her in 1975 as a fellow panellist on
Any Questions
. At that time she was being groomed for the leadership of the Tory Party and her posse of supporters came with her, including
Airey Neave, who was later killed by a car bomb in the House of Commons car park. I had no one advising me but I held my own
against her on the programme, and even scored a few points. On our return from Australia, I played Miss Hannigan, in charge
of the orphanage in the musical
Annie
, at the Victoria Palace. One night the tannoy demanded that we wait on stage after the curtain call to greet Mrs Thatcher,
the newly appointed Leader of the Opposition. I did not think she would remember me or care if I told the stage manager I
had to get home and relieve my babysitter. I was in my bra and pants and a very grubby kimono when there was a knock at my
dressing-room door. The lacquered blonde smiled sweetly into my greasy, makeup-less face and purred in her studiedly soft
voice ‘I didn’t want to miss you.’ ’Vantage, Thatcher. A few years later, John and I visited Number 10 for a party and she
welcomed the guests in front of the press photographers. As I put out my hand she grasped it and hurled me across her to clear
the shot for the far more beguiling picture of the Prime Minister with Inspector Morse.
In 1979, when she was elected the first female prime minister, it was a triumph for feminism. On her election as leader of
her party she had said, ‘I beat four chaps, now let’s get down to work,’ so we hoped she would give some credit to the campaigning
women without whom her position would have been out of the question a few years previously. For her victory speech she chose
to ooze a prayer of St Francis of Assisi, which up until then I had rather liked.
Lord make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred let me sow love
Where there is injury pardon
Where there is doubt faith
Where there is despair hope
Where there is darkness light
Where there is sadness joy.
The previous year, after fifty-three episodes and two features films, John had decided to quit
The Sweeney
while it was still a huge success. The last speech spoken by Jack Regan started with, ‘I’m thoroughly pissed off with this
lot’ and ended, ‘You can stuff it’ – rather more in the mood of the country than Maggie’s unctuous prayer.
28 February
Daunted by all the planning. The ashes ceremony at home
for close friends and then, sometime, a memorial service.
It is expected. He has become a sort of icon for people.
He would be utterly bemused and probably pretty cynical
about the reaction to his death. People didn’t really know
him, and what most of them are mourning is Morse, or
Kavanagh, or Jack Regan. People want someone to look
up to. He always played fundamentally decent, if troubled,
men. But he
was
decent as it happens. He was worthy of
their respect but not for the reasons that most of them have
imposed on him.
WE HAD WHAT WAS known as the Winter of Discontent in 1979. Strikes had become violent, rubbish was uncollected and bodies
unburied. Maggie endeavoured to bring about a glorious summer by balancing the books as her shopkeeper father had taught her.
Her main objectives were less public spending, lower taxes and control of the unions. How she achieved them had a lasting
effect on our country. Our hopes of her boldly advancing the feminist cause were soon dashed; the Sexual Discrimination and
Equal Pay Act in 1975 had nothing to do with her. Nevertheless, women were making progress in the seventies and eighties.
They were allowed on to the floor of the Stock Exchange for the first time, and in 1977 Angela Rippon was permitted to read
international news on the BBC. ITN followed suit with Anna Ford the following year, and, even more daring, in 1981 a black
woman, Moira Stuart, was allowed to announce serious matters to the nation. She still receives hate mail more than twenty
years later.
In the eighties the Thaws conformed to Maggie’s belief of the importance of the family unit. Take care of you and yours and
society will take care of itself. There’s no such thing as society, only individuals. We joined the Me Generation. Our family
was all right. We were having a very good time. Not being involved in a demanding series, John was around more. He cooked
Sunday lunches, on one occasion varying the regulation roast with an attempt at Peking duck – lunch was served at 6 p.m.,
preceded by a lot of blow-drying of the scraggy bird with hairdryers and a fair amount of bad language, but we were duly appreciative
of his efforts. Barbecues were less of a success. Richard Briers was usually his co-cook and they always miscalculated how
long it took to light the barbecue and get the coke glowing. They used everything from paraffin to gin to encourage the fire,
and we dreaded their burnt sausages with petrol sauce. My Christmas parties were not hugely popular with them. The games I
organised drove John and Richard to cower in the basement with a bottle of gin – or two. My treasure hunt with clever clues
laid round the house and garden usually descended into open warfare. Thaws Junior and Senior used spying and violence in the
battle to pick up clues. On one occasion one of my cunning ruses took them to the phone box in the street where they had to
phone home and pick up the next riddle on the answer-phone. They were in the middle of a pitched battle to prevent each other
using the phone when Lucy Briers arrived wailing that she had no coins. John sweetly paused to give her his, then continued
to do battle with his father. The neighbours nearly called the police.
On the professional front, John was disappointed that a series called
Mitch
about a crime reporter was left on the shelf for two years, so that when it was aired its topical material was dated. He swore
he would never work for that company again, and didn’t. I landed a coveted role in the most expensive musical ever staged
at that date. When I was cast as Mrs Lovett in Stephen Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd
, to be performed at the vast Drury Lane Theatre in 1980, I was daunted but, egged on by Steve and Hal Prince, did well in
rehearsal, absorbing the complex lyrics and music. At the first band call, when the rest of the cast were cheering excitedly
as the complex, sensational score was revealed, I became rigid with fear. I had always suffered from stage fright, starting
in my repertory days when every Monday night I had faced audiences with only a sketchy knowledge of my words and moves in
the current play. I had a firm conviction, usually proved right in rep, that first nights were synonymous with disaster. It
was many years before a hypnotist replaced this engrained negative thinking with something more helpful. But at the
Sweeney
Todd
band call all my usual convictions of inadequacy rendered me sick with terror. Only my family were aware of this, because
it would not do for the cast, or the management or, God forbid, the press to know that the leading lady was seriously planning
to do a bunk. I would have done, had it not been for John’s hands grasping mine night after night and steadying me.
1 March
Vivid dream about John last night. It was so real. I was by
the fridge and John came into the kitchen carrying a box
and said, ‘Put the stuff for Lucky in here.’ I was doing so
when suddenly I remembered he was supposed to be dead.
I grabbed his hands, felt their chunky strength and said, ‘It’s
you.’ He smiled radiantly. I said, ‘You’ve come back.’ He
still glowed. I hugged him. I could feel exactly how that
felt. I smelt him. I caressed his hair, felt its silkiness. I kept
saying, ‘Please stay. Don’t go. Please please stay.’ He just
looked at me with that wry, loving, private smile.
John had beautiful hands, small, round and always immaculate. Not manicured, but clean and neat. Next to my bony ones, his
were almost feminine. They often spoke for him. If he could not find the words to express his love, his caresses demonstrated
it. When I came home from rehearsal he did not know what to say to help me because this sort of destructive dread of performing
was alien to him, but he took my shaking hands firmly in both of his, looked me in the eye and said with absolute conviction,
‘You can do it, kid.’ So I did. I got through the run of the show with his help, but my stage fright prevented me from acting
for a whole year.
Instead I turned to directing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. After a year of that I was tempted by an offer to act again in
Stratford-upon-Avon, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It meant a disruption of our family life, but to begin with John
was happy to accept that. In 1981, at forty-eight, I had never appeared in a Shakespeare play and I embraced the Bard with
a naïve enthusiasm. I was the only member of the company who had not been to university and read all the right Shakespearean
scholars, so my contributions at rehearsals were more ‘Oh my God, isn’t it wonderful?’ and ‘That’s so bloody true’ than a
Jan Kott thesis. It was not easy juggling a family and the demands of the company but we just about managed.
Then John, too, was invited to Stratford to play Sir Toby Belch in
Twelfth Night
, Cardinal Wolsey in
Henry VIII
and Nick in Saroyan’s
Time of Your Life
. In one episode of the ill-fated
Mitch
he had worked with Oliver Ford-Davies. Admiring the power of John’s acting, Oliver suggested that he should do more theatre.
Six months later, standing in the wings of the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, buckling under a sweaty wig and heavy
regalia, Cardinal Wolsey turned to the Bishop of Winchester and snarled, ‘It’s all your fucking fault.’ John’s attitude puzzled
the Young Turks at the RSC. He didn’t join in the earnest discussions on text. In one scene Howard Davies, who directed him
in
Henry VIII
, wanted him to break down in tears and admitted he didn’t know how to help John reach that emotional peak. John just looked
at him as if he were a moron, and played the scene. The tears flowed then and every night of the run. Richard Attenborough
had a similar experience when directing him as Fred Karno in the movie
Chaplin
. He had to do a difficult drunk scene and Dear Dear Dickie, as John affectionately called him, wondered if he would like
a nip of whisky to help him. John’s gentle reply was, ‘That’s very thoughtful, Dickie, but I thought I might tackle it through
acting.’
2 March
Full of fear. I keep panicking. Perhaps I didn’t allow him
to die properly. Maybe I should have forced him to face it.
Ellie is worried about that too. We all went for a walk in
Richmond Park but we are all so spent. Grief is exhausting.
John was simply a born actor. The reason he was sometimes ungracious when people complimented him was because he could just
do it, it was a gift, and it did not seem to warrant praise. As a child he had learned to cope on his own and, as an actor,
he could develop his characters on his own. Many actors, especially young ones, expect the director to tell them what to do.
This is foolish because many directors are rubbish, gaining their reputations through good casting and having a brilliant
designer come up with a concept that gives the critics something to write about. Paradoxically, though he slaved away at his
scripts at home, John was also adaptable to other actors’ performances, which is why they all loved working with him. He liked
fluidity. He hated the sort of actor who, if John unexpectedly came into the scene riding an elephant, would still give the
same performance. Despite his God-given intuitive talent, John loved being directed if it was by someone he respected, and
would complain that most people just let him get on with it. That was because they knew he would.
He was naturally observant. He had a photographic memory of places and persons, their manner and appearance. He could mimic
anyone perfectly within minutes of meeting them. He then deepened this portrait by incorporating his own feelings. Despite
his retiring demeanour, he seethed with emotions that he could call into play. Like me, he felt at a disadvantage in the rehearsal
room with all the ‘clever clogs’. Canny as always, he used this in his portrayal of Wolsey. Howard Davies says: ‘He was a
working man in the court of kings, and there was something about John that was the same in his working life. When Cardinal
Wolsey’s fall from grace happened in
Henry VIII
he was able to tap into something about class difference, about the pain of being displaced in a world that didn’t recognise
you, and didn’t follow you and in the end support you.’
As always, John was unaware of just how much the company did support him. He kept himself to himself offstage and left after
one year, refusing to accompany the shows to the Barbican in London. Terry Hands’s plea that the London critics should get
a second look at his performances was met with, ‘I don’t give a fuck for the London critics.’ But he did. He was irked that
despite the general verdict of the cognoscenti that he was giving superb performances, some of the desperate-for-copy critics
made disparaging references to
The Sweeney
and TV actors. He too was discovering that once those guys have put you in a pigeonhole, usually in the first role they see
you in, they won’t let you out. John claimed that one of the reasons he was leaving was that he was uncomfortable at the RSC
because it was institutionalised, though Terry reasonably averred that so was a long television series. But in TV, John was
in a world he understood and, more importantly, he was top of the pile. At the RSC his already fragile identity was swamped
– and what’s more, he was paid a pittance for working his arse off.
He could have made a lot of money in films but, despite a brilliant performance as the vile police chief Kruger in Atten-borough’s
Cry Freedom
, which brought offers from Hollywood, he chose to stay a big fish in a small pool, or so it seemed to others. John did not
consider TV inferior. To him, the Hollywood movie schedule, as opposed to the speed of TV filming, was as protracted and boring
as the repetition of a theatre job. There is no doubt, as his performances at the RSC and later at the National and Manchester
Exchange showed, he was a fine stage actor, and that, had he focussed on theatre, he would have been more lauded by the ‘posh
wankers’, as he called them. He did have an ambition to play Lear one day – though he was worried whether he could carry the
dead Cordelia in the last scene without tripping up: ‘Never, never, never, oops, sorry.’
In 1993, when he was doing
Absence of War
at the National, John was irritated by the ten weeks of rehearsal: ‘We could get this bloody thing on the road in three weeks.’
Oliver Ford-Davies, with whom he was working again, felt his reluctance to contribute to the rehearsal process hampered him.
Richard Eyre thought John did not like to be seen to be working too hard lest it looked like showing off. Oliver plucked up
courage to discuss one scene with John and Richard that he felt could be more profoundly realised. John just smirked and made
Oliver feel uncomfortable. Then they ran the scene and John did, brilliantly, exactly what Oliver had intended. The question
is, would he have done so without the discussion? Had he not been so inhibited and inhibiting to others, could his work have
been even richer? Howard Davies again: ‘There was something in his shyness that didn’t believe his own talent. Both endearing
and attractive, it gave him humility, but it tugged at his feet and held him back. Very regrettable.’
3 March
Dealing with all the mail very slowly. The hundreds of
letters are kind and loving. Full of sorrow for the man they
felt they knew. What he would have been most proud of
are the letters from his peers, praising his extraordinary
ability as an actor. It seems the whole profession valued
him and recognised that he was a fine actor. He would
have like that. And been amazed.
After bailing out of the RSC, John was a bit depressed about where his career was going, but he did a job that cheered him
up no end. Peter O’Toole’s days of excessive drinking were over by 1984, but when John played Doolittle to his Professor Higgins
in
Pygmalion
Peter still had a jolly good time on stage. In front of the audience he would frequently chortle with delight at his fellow
actors’ performances. He thought John’s Doolittle was a perfect Shavian performance, capturing Shaw’s sympathy for the downtrodden,
that was the stuff that turned people into Marxists. There was one particular line, the delivery of which O’Toole cherished
at rehearsal. When Higgins challenged Doolittle about going to a pub, he loved the way John barked the reply: ‘Why shouldn’t
I?’ in fierce defiance rather than whining reproach. Unfortunately it should have got a laugh, but never did. It became an
obsession for them all. John tried every possible inflection, those on stage tried different reactions. Nothing. Eventually
that line came to dominate the whole scene. You could see John preparing for it pages before. The more it failed the more
they fell about. When I went to the show John begged them all, ‘Please, please, Sheila’s out front. Don’t make me laugh. Do
absolutely nothing.’ Their dutifully blank stares convulsed him and I watched a stageful of actors, all speechless with mirth,
O’Toole openly doubled up and guffawing.