Biggins (4 page)

When we weren’t in school, my new gang all had a home from home in the cafe on Blackboy Hill. You could get a full roast lunch and pudding for practically nothing. It was like a common room, for us kids from an earlier
Fame
. Though I don’t think my mother – let alone my grandmother – would always have approved of the service. You had to write your order on one half of a raffle ticket and kept the other half while you waited for your number to be called.

‘Number 472!’

When the call came, you got up to get your plate from the counter. And day after day the other half of your ticket would be swimming on top of the gravy. Silver service it wasn’t. Sorry, Mum, but I don’t think I always left a tip.

Our group was always ready for an adventure. But we always seemed to be totally unprepared. One day we decided to go on a big day out on the beach at Weston-Super-Mare. None of us had any idea about distances or
timings, so we decided that to make a real day of it we would have to leave early. We hired a huge van and all piled in at 6.30 in the morning. We arrived at our destination at precisely 6.45. It was still dark and nothing was open. Why had none of us realised that Weston was only just down the road? Hungry and sleepy but laughing like drains at our own stupidity, we piled back in the car and set off again. In the end we had our day out in Devon, but we got it wrong again as it turned out to be a lot further than any of us had expected.

I lasted my full first year in my garret room in the student digs. Then Tony, Tim, Michael Hadley and I shared a rented house in Clifton. And not just any house. Our digs had a ballroom! No wonder I started to get ideas above my station. They were great times. Tim was the most anal of us all and wanted everything to be very tidy and clean. I seem to remember rotas for cleaning different rooms on different days. But I don’t remember paying much attention to them. Nor do I remember ever doing the washing up. Sorry, Tim.

It was in that second year that I first met Nat’s pal Peter O’Toole. He was in his late thirties then (how old that seemed!) and had already immortalised Lawrence of Arabia, been nominated for two Oscars and scored some amazing reviews on stage. Nat had invited him over to Bristol to talk to us and inspire us. He succeeded. Peter was by far the most famous man I had ever met. I loved him then. He was charismatic, very theatrical, dry and witty. Theatrical gossip was already my drug of choice and I was thrilled to try to get a bit of a fix of it from him. Such
a shame that when I worked with the great man on
Masada
so many years later it turned out to be such a terrible experience. But I will get to that story in a while.

As well as being a wonderful man, Nat’s great strength was in spotting talent. He could see beyond four-minute audition spots and somehow grasp what actors were truly capable of. In a strange sort of way I think he helped push Jeremy and me together and cement our friendship. I think he adored me, and he adored Jeremy as well for quite different reasons. He saw the talent Jeremy had as an actor. He saw the talent I had as a personality. There was a wildness about Jeremy back then that Nat also respected. It was the same wildness he responded to in Peter O’Toole. Nat loved a challenge. He loved to bring the best out of people and I think we were both touched by his genius. He didn’t always create great actors. But he always created great people.

For all our laughs and jokes, Jeremy and I weren’t entirely inseparable. He had asked our fellow student Julie Hallam out on a date. Then he fell in love with her and she fell in love with him. It was the great romance of our gang. I’d barely kissed anyone, let alone been in love at this point, so I was beside myself with excitement at having front-row seats for this love story. After about a year we practically forced them to get married because we were all in love with the romance of the situation. Talk about living through others.

Julie’s family were well-off, so the ceremony was marvellously grand. It was held in a gorgeous country church and all us students – mostly in some variation of
our first-night finery – crammed in and then headed over to the reception. I was best man, which I saw as an enormous honour and responsibility. I adored making a best man’s speech – being the centre of attention and making people laugh was quite wonderful. And I didn’t feel as if my duties as best man should end there. After helping to manage the whole ceremony, I joined the happy couple on their honeymoon as well. I’m not sure the concept of being a gooseberry had been fully explained to me.

The happy couple sat in the front, while I lounged on the back seat of their Citroen 2CV as we raced down through France to Denia, then a little village on the coast near Alicante in Spain. We had the roof down all the way and had glorious sunshine right from Calais. Though it turned out to have been a little bit too glorious for my liking. Our little villa was called Los Pinos (no sniggering at the back, please) and when we arrived I was burned almost from head to toe. Then the actual sunstroke kicked in. I was so sick I couldn’t leave my room for days. I could hardly bear to have a sheet on my skin and for quite a while thought I might actually die. It gave the honeymooners some privacy, I suppose. But I made sure they took frequent breaks from their marital bliss so I could tell them how much I had been vomiting.

Funny how things turn out. Everyone saw Julie as the huge talent of our class. She was the one we would all tip for greatness. Jeremy, meanwhile, was the fun-lover, like me, who didn’t always take it too seriously. And when their marriage broke up after a year or so, she became a doctor’s wife and has barely acted again, while he went on to win an Oscar.

The course lasted two years and for our end-of-term shows we got to tread the boards on the Bristol Old Vic’s stage itself. These performances were the ultimate showcases. You never knew who might be watching. As news got around about the depth of young talent in Bristol in both our years, we attracted a lot of agents, casting directors and other powerful industry figures.

I can see now that I should probably have taken more advantage of all that. Trouble was, I never felt the competition or the rivalry that ran to the core of some of my fellow students. Maybe I should have done. Some of my peers fought for every role. They schmoozed people to within an inch of their lives. They were desperate to get the big parts. They talked constantly of all the roles they thought they had been born to play. I didn’t. I just waited for life to happen to me. Maybe it’s because I was never an easy actor to categorise. I was never a classically handsome leading man – so how odd that I ended up a leading woman in panto. And, while I wanted to be in
Hamlet
, I never saw the need to actually be Hamlet. I was in my element in the minor roles. I just wanted to be in the company. I could have made a lot more money and enjoyed a lot more respect if I’d had that killer instinct. But maybe I wouldn’t have had so much fun. Besides, my strange belief that life would happen to me anyway seemed to be coming true. I did get good roles. And they got noticed.

My first big break came in a play I can barely remember today. I’ve had to struggle even to track down its title. I think it was
The Life of Tom Paine
. But it could well have
been
The Rights of Man
by Tom Paine. Or possibly something else altogether. What I do remember is that it was a marvellous role. British-born Tom Paine was a hero in 18th-century America, an Everyman figure who took part in the country’s Revolution. The play was a modern take on life in the USA and it was a huge coup for me to be offered the lead.

Throughout our course, Nat brought in a stream of talented directors to work with us on different performances. For
Tom Paine
, we had David Benedictus and we performed the play as a showcase in one of the studios in Clifton. An invited audience from the industry was watching, and among them was David Jones, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It seems that he saw something good in either my performance or my personality, or both. It would be quite a few months before I found out what it was.

The tears when I left Salisbury Rep were nothing compared with those we all cried when our Bristol years ended. Breaking up our little gang seemed almost criminal. We were so close. And for me there was one extra thing to worry about as reality beckoned.

‘Come on, Christopher, enough’s enough,’ my father said to me after I had moved back from Bristol to Salisbury and was planning my theatrical takeover of the world. ‘You’ve got the theatre out of your system now. You should come and work in the business with me. You can make £100 a week.’ And Dad, ever the gentlemen, was prepared to change the business to suit me. I was passionate about antiques and bric-a-brac – not least
because I had spent so long in antique shops when I was propping in Salisbury. I had become a regular face in most of the local shops, always trying to do a deal and borrow some furniture or fittings for our next production. Two years on and most of those shopkeepers still remembered me, which may or may not be a good thing.

‘Let’s open a bric-a-brac shop of our own,’ my father said. And we did – I seem to think that we called it ‘Biggins’. It was a lovely shop, I’ll admit that straight away. But working there was just as dull as I had expected. We were bang in the middle of Salisbury but some days several hours would go by before I saw a single person. And when that sole customer did come in I could hardly follow them around the shop and pepper them with questions just to get a conversation started.

Always leave a tip. Going back to my mum’s old rule, my tip would be that, if you love people and you’re always up for a laugh and a gossip, don’t work in an antique shop.

‘Sorry, Dad, but I can’t stay. Will you be able to run it without me?’ I’d been in our new shop for less than six weeks. It felt like six years. And by now I had an escape route.

R
oger Clissold had been one of my early heroes at Salisbury Rep – not least because he hadn’t shouted at me too much when I ruined one of his performances.

Disaster had struck in the middle of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
.

‘Yup, it was a real smart farm,’ was the line Roger should have delivered in the cemetery scene. I was one of the 12 extras on stage holding umbrellas painted with headstones and instructed to be as still as the grave. ‘Yup, it was a real fart smarm,’ was what I swear Roger said one fateful performance.

My umbrella was the first to start shaking. Then the one next to me began to shake, and the next. Soon all 12 of us were laughing out loud and rolling around the stage. I suppose if you’re going to corpse on stage you might as well do it in a cemetery scene. But at the end of
the night I was ready for a bollocking for my bad example. Roger, to his credit, had seen the funny side. And our friendship grew from there. Today I’m godfather to his son and I’ve been with him through a lot of the ups and downs of his life.

By 1969, Roger had moved on from Salisbury and become artistic director of a new company he had formed in Derby. He asked me to join the cast in
Lysistrata
and then join his Rep full-time. He said he could afford to pay me something like £30 a week – so much less than I could have got if I’d stuck with my dad’s antique shop. But I could just about survive, so I said yes without a second thought. At least in the theatre I had people to talk to pretty much 24 hours a day.

In Derby I moved into a classic theatrical digs. I had a tiny single bed in a boxroom, shared the family bathroom and had to be up and out just after breakfast each morning. As soon as I shut the front door I would head off to meet a fellow company member who lodged nearby. We would gossip away as we headed to the theatre together. But our journey didn’t always go smoothly. Does anything?

One morning an old female tramp leaped out at us as we turned a corner. I nearly had a heart attack with fright. ‘Can you spare something for some food, sir?’ she asked me as I tried to breathe normally. I found a few coins.

‘Ow, Gawd bless you, sir. You’re a true gentleman. I won’t forget you,’ she squawked. ‘Your lady friend is blessed to have you.’

One week later the same grubby little lady popped up again. ‘Sorry, love, I don’t have any change today,’ I said, with a relaxed smile.

‘You shit. You horrible fat man. You’re a disgrace, you should rot in hell,’ she spat out in fury as we scuttled away.

It was a good lesson for the rest of my professional career. You can be hot one week, ice-cold the next. No one remembers your last review. You truly are only as good as your last performance.

In Derby I met another set of marvellous people, and worked on ever more powerful plays. I also learned another life lesson, this time without the aid of abuse in the street. I learned the old chestnut that it’s not what you know but who you know – and most importantly of all it’s who knows you.

Another old pal from Salisbury knew me. He was the actor and writer David Wood and he asked me to come to London to do a musical play he had written.
The Owl and the Pussycat Went to See…
was based on Edward Lear’s poem and was moving to London after a tryout in Worcester. It was a wonderful opportunity and Roger Clissold agreed that I should take it. So two weeks later I moved out of my digs, left Derby Rep and headed south. It was 1969 and
The Owl and the Pussycat
was opening at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in the strange no man’s land of Holborn. Our audiences were vast, noisy crowds of school kids. I played Head Jumbly and a bluebird. No, it wasn’t
King Lear
. But it was London. It was bliss.

I celebrated my 21st birthday in that company. Patsy Rowlands, the wife of our musical director, made me laugh, and nearly made me cry, when she presented me with a cake. ‘You’re lucky to get it. This was my seventh
attempt and if it hadn’t worked I would have gone to the shop,’ she said as she lit the candles. All the others had burned, failed to rise or fallen prey to some other kind of culinary disaster. I was in tears that someone had taken so much trouble over my birthday. And I was thrilled that my parents could see how well I was being looked after. My parents had come up to town for the big day. They had seen our latest show, and then a big group of us went for dinner in a restaurant in Earl’s Court.

As I had given up Dad’s shop for this, it was important to me that he saw me as a success. And it was pretty clear I was falling on my feet. I was surrounded by friends and laughter. There’s no nicer place to be. When Mum and Dad came to see where I was living, they got another indication of how well I was doing. The boy who had lived in a caravan for two years and had been brought up in a house with an outside toilet and no bath had already adapted brilliantly to living in a house with a ballroom in the Bristol days. Now in London I acquired even more expensive tastes. I was offered a room – well, two rooms – with two other old pals from Salisbury Rep, the marvellous aristocratic Jonathan Cecil and his wife Vivien Heilbron. They lived in a beautiful house in Fulham, on Ifield Road, and frankly I blame them for reinforcing in me the standard of living I had already started to grow accustomed to. I had two rooms of my own, a bedroom and a sitting room. But I also had the run of the whole amazing house. And I paid only £4 a week. I was 21, and I could live the life of Riley. I developed a keen taste for luxury living. Some things never change.

Now here’s a surprise. Shortly after moving into Ifield Road I took a girl back to my rooms. She was a fellow actress from
The Owl and the Pussycat
and something about her had caught my attention from the very start. Beatrice Aston was a bright-red-haired Australian with a bright Australian sense of humour, and she was playing a Jumbly Girl to my Head Jumbly. We hit it off after our very first rehearsal. That very first time we found ourselves in some local dive until late, and after that we seemed to be back there night after night. We had lunches, dinners, whole days together whenever we could. We laughed and we plotted and we planned. I remember how wonderful it felt to have someone entirely on my side. And how wonderful it was to have someone who was always there, someone you could accept joint invitations to parties with, someone you could always have beside you.

Have I always been in love with the idea of being in love? I think I may have been. And as the months passed I felt, so strongly, that I was in love with Beatrice.

‘We should get married.’

It wasn’t a proposal as such. It was more of a conversation. And it ended with Beatrice saying yes. So our plotting and our planning moved up a gear and led to a wedding ceremony at Chelsea Register Office, with her good friends Willie and Dorgan Rushton as our witnesses. We were all dressed in colourful, fun clothes and we had a colourful, fun day. The four of us went out for lunch afterwards and we just carried on laughing.

Beatrice moved in with me in Ifield Road. I was 21 years old and a married man – a happily married man. Wonders never cease.

Today Beatrice carries a heavy load for having married me. She was terrorised by the press when I was in the jungle in 2007. All of them were desperate to dig up a story which simply isn’t there. For the truth about our marriage is very simple. We were happy together for all the time that we were together. We were still very naive about life back then. But we were happy. And it was only much later that we both started to accept that something wasn’t quite right.

When those cracks began to show, we never rowed and we never said anything we now regret. We just followed slightly different paths and wanted different things as the months went by. And after a couple of years we faced up to things and agreed to split. We had got married in a low-key way. We moved on from our marriage in exactly the same fashion. Nobody ever got hurt and I have promised that I will never say more than this – because there’s absolutely nothing else to say. What happened was entirely right for us both at the time. Our marriage didn’t last but our friendship has. And Beatrice deserves to have it left at that.

Back on the work front, like every other jobbing actor back then, I tended to work on short-term contracts – six weeks tended to be the most security you ever got. But who cares about security at 21? Who cares if there are times when you’re out of work and need to borrow a little from pals to scrape by? You do the same for them in their fallow patches. That was the way of the theatrical world. And I was lucky. Bits and pieces of work always came in. I always felt I was moving in the right direction. And I loved having the chance to branch out.

My first piece of television was for a detective series called
Paul Temple
with Francis Matthews in the lead role. I played a gentleman thief and my job was to break into a safe while eating a chicken leg. Classy stuff.

I got my first agents, Gillian Coffey and Harry Harbour, who had lovely crowded old offices just off Brook Street near Grosvenor Square. They had all the good old variety people on their books and were incredibly well respected in the theatrical world. Gillian had seen me perform in Bristol and left me a note saying I should get in touch if I ever needed representation. I jumped at the chance and never regretted it. Over the years Gillian became a close friend – one year she even joined my dad and I on a week’s holiday. Mum doesn’t like to fly, so Dad and I were off to a Greek island and Gillian had the time to come too. We had tiny, clean rooms in one of those classic whitewashed houses on – wait for it – Mykonos. It is probably the gayest island in the world and I swear I had no idea when we booked. Nor, needless to say, did my dad. But we had a lovely week. As I looked around at our fellow sun-worshippers out there, I was starting to realise just why I felt ‘different’. I was starting to think it wouldn’t turn out so bad after all.

Despite my theatrical roots, Gillian got me plenty of TV work over the years. And I loved that new challenge. Television was a whole new world for me. On set everything seemed small, intense and serious. I took a while to work out how to act for the cameras. It was so different. These huge machines totally hid the cameramen (and back then they were all men) behind them. I felt lost
without the wide open spaces of a theatre and I hated not having the noise and atmosphere of a live audience. But I buckled down. I know some of my theatre pals from Bristol looked down on television. They thought it was beneath them.

But I just wanted to work. I think it is only the very young and the very beautiful who can pick and choose their jobs. They are the only ones who can declare that they’re going to Hollywood or that they’ll only play the classics. People like me had to say yes to every offer we were made. So I said yes to
Doctor at Sea
, part of a set of comedy series filmed in studios near Wembley. It was tacky, low-brow stuff. But I had a strange feeling that other, far grander projects were still in store for me. It turned out that I was right.