by Justin Lewis
When Sherlock initially made him a star on television, Cumberbatch was still in a long-term relationship with Olivia Poulet, whom he had met on their drama degree course in Manchester. By the mid-noughties, Poulet’s star had also started to rise, with minor roles on television in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries and The Rotters’ Club leading to her first co-starring credit: as the young Camilla Parker Bowles in Whatever Love Means, an ITV drama about the romance between Camilla and Charles, Prince of Wales. Later she would perhaps be best known on television for playing Emma Messinger, the cynical Tory spin-doctor on Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Cumberbatch and Poulet made a reluctant showbiz couple, rarely giving journalists more than the most basic of information. ‘We are good friends,’ Poulet had tantalised the Sunday Telegraph in 2005. ‘We’ve been good friends for a long time. But then we were not such good friends for a bit. And now we’re good friends again.’
In the autumn of 2007, they moved from West to North London, from Shepherd’s Bush to Hampstead. Here, they bought a flat with a roof terrace described by Benedict as ‘my sanctuary’. The prospect of marriage was rarely raised publicly by either of the pair, but by his mid-thirties, he had godchildren, while she had nephews, and he regularly announced he was broody, even hoping he might reduce his workload in order to embrace parenthood. ‘I know you pick up an amazing amount of stamina the minute you become a dad, but I would like to be a young dad. I would love to have the ability to juggle a career and have a young child.’ His was not a secure profession. Acting, like many jobs in the creative arts, is feast or famine, but despite this, he was insistent he could make it work, given the chance. ‘Children are expensive,’ he was quoted as saying in the pages of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, ‘but as an actor, if you freak out about economic maturity you’ll never step out the front door. Everyone I know who has done it says you will never regret it. Your life doesn’t stop when you have children.’
He told The Sunday Times in the summer of 2010: ‘We both want children, but not necessarily right now, and not necessarily with each other. We’re great as we are for now.’ They had even appeared together in Sherlock’s second story, ‘The Blind Banker’. But in March 2011, with both parties’ careers in the ascendant, they chose to part amicably after 12 years together. Single again, but still with a great fondness for his ex, Benedict confessed that his broodiness was still present, but recognised, ‘the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.’ The split with Poulet would bring some unwelcome attention from the press for Cumberbatch, and he was doorstepped by reporters and photographers. ‘It was unnerving to think they knew where I lived,’ he told the Radio Times.
After their break-up, Poulet continued in The Thick of It on BBC2, played Carol Thatcher (daughter of Margaret) in a Channel 4 biopic, and shone in a revival of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls in the West End. She also wrote comedy sketches with the writer-performer Sarah Solemani, a drama script about women in their thirties for the BBC, and a screenplay about four young women who had rowed the Atlantic Ocean.
The newly-single Cumberbatch suddenly became one of showbusiness’s most eligible bachelors, regularly linked to other women in the gossip columns. Later in 2011 the designer Anna Jones accompanied him to the Venice Film Festival where Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was opening, but if this was a relationship, it seemed relatively short-lived. Photographs circulated, too, of him with the supermodel Lydia Hearst, and he was seen out and about both with the Russian model Katia Elizarova, and with the actress Liv Tyler in Los Angeles. The gossipmongers could get carried away, though. There was the night he was snapped by a swarm of paparazzi in the company of a mystery woman, who turned out to be his personal assistant. ‘We got papped to the point that I couldn’t actually see, and I had to put my head down. Immediately, they presume, “Ah, beautiful blonde…”’ The personal assistant was also his niece.
Even after the end of his long-term relationship with Poulet, he remained keen to start a family but knew that he wanted to find the right person. ‘There are always moments and meetings and chance encounters,’ he said in the summer of 2012. ‘But to make meaningful relationships is very hard at the moment. Also, I was in a very long, long relationship all through my twenties and early thirties, so I know about looking for the right one, I guess.’ ‘One of his regrets,’ his half-sister Tracy Peacock was quoted as saying, ‘is that he hasn’t found someone to settle down with. I think they would have to be someone not in the acting profession, someone who was happy to hold the fort while he went off and pursued his career.’
It’s one thing to have your stage and screen performances becoming the centre of attention, quite another to find that you yourself are scrutinised and spotted. At least to begin with, Cumberbatch didn’t mind being recognised, and found that meeting the public was mostly painless. ‘You do get a few spiky people who want to have a go, but I can just about deal with them. I’ve got the energy for it. It might be different if I was older.’ But it was at the deli counter in Tesco’s when he realised he had crossed the line into superstardom. ‘The staff all stared at me. A younger guy split off from the group and said, “Mate, I’m not being funny but you know that series Sherlock? You look quite a lot like him.” I said, “I am Sherlock”.’
He admitted that he was unprepared for being in the constant glare of the media. ‘I hadn’t really made myself a target,’ he said, citing his roles of Hawking, Pitt the Younger, Van Gogh and Frankenstein – four roles sufficiently different to prevent any kind of consistent personality from breaking through. Now not merely a famous actor, it was presumed that he was a Personality. And with the arrival of celebrity can come a sense of loss. ‘Just because I’m in my thirties,’ he told the Radio Times in August 2012, ‘it doesn’t make the weirdness of no longer being private any less. I don’t think it matters whether it happens when you’re 25 or 55. Something is suddenly taken away.’
Personality and celebrity can be a trap, and Cumberbatch has to date dealt well with becoming a star, with a few wobbles. Genial and charming in company, he was mostly happy to sign autographs for fans, but would quip that afterwards he would have to ‘have ice cubes put to my wrists’. Occasionally, he would lose patience a little and wonder aloud about the value of signing autographs. ‘What is this need for proof we all have? Why do people need me to ruin the front page of a book with my terrible signature so that they can prove that they’ve met me? Will no one believe them otherwise?’
An over-sensitive reaction? Perhaps, but if you haven’t sought the limelight for its own sake, adjusting to the constant attention is not easy. You are recognised by people you don’t know. They know all about you, or at least the version of you that they’ve read about. There’s an argument that once someone is in the public eye, part of the job is to be professional and polite with the public. But it is still a job, and the problem with fame is that it is impossible for other people to relate to you directly, especially if you’re an actor. Do the autograph hunters expect Sherlock, or Cumberbatch, or the Cumberbatch with the celebrity sheen? Being famous is still an act.
To Benedict Cumberbatch, fame with permission was fair enough. For the more obsessive fans, he expressed concern, although often more for their own welfare. But without any permission or warning, the attention could feel intrusive and unpleasant. He did not appreciate opportunists trying to take his picture without asking. ‘I feel it’s cowardly and a bit pathetic,’ he said. ‘Just ask me if you really want me to have a photograph with you.’
In March 2013, he was at home one night when he discovered that someone was watching him from another property nearby and live-tweeting his every move. ‘It was the strangest fan experience that I’ve ever had. It was such a strange and a direct thing to see these tweets. I found it really worrying and very hard to deal with.’ The tweeter quickly deleted the messages and baked a cake by way of an apology. Cumberbatch would say little more about the matter, and did not contact the police, but it d
id underline the fact that you couldn’t escape attention if you were a celebrity, especially with 24-hour media coverage and social media (Cumberbatch does not tweet). ‘The sad thing is I don’t really have anonymity any more in the UK, as it has got just like it is in America.’ He didn’t mind being spotted sometimes, or stopped – but it was a strange life for it to happen all the time.
Cumberbatch knew that the rate he was going, he was unlikely to become much more famous: ‘It won’t last on quite the same level, but what you have to do is just treat each bit as a job and get the best out of those experiences. If you constantly walk around in a bubble of excitement you wouldn’t be able to do any work.’ The answer was to try and remain grounded with his nearest and dearest, who even if he had wanted to get too grand, wouldn’t have let him. When he was sent an outsize black whip with a red heart on the end by an anonymous admirer, he couldn’t resist mentioning it on a TV chat show… only to discover that the fans who sent it were some of his friends.
* * *
Cumberbatch had wanted success, not necessarily fame. If he had sought recognition it was for the work, not for him as himself. This was a bit of a shock, and the almost unanimously positive reaction on Twitter shook him slightly. He half-expected ‘people abseiling down into our garden just to get a sneak peek at us.’
After three and a half decades of being Benedict Cumberbatch, he was now being called Sherlock in the street. But he had devised a wry response: ‘When people come up to me and ask, “Are you Sherlock Holmes?”, I say, “I just look a bit like him. I’m not actually Sherlock.”’
CHAPTER 12
IN DEMAND
Despite his rise to fame in cinema and on television, Benedict Cumberbatch had not abandoned stage work. The Royal Court hired his services again in spring 2008, this time with Katie Mitchell on directorial duties, for a domestic drama by Martin Crimp. In The City, Chris’s marriage to Clair (Hattie Morahan) is falling apart when the company he works for is restructured, and he loses his job.
As usual, Cumberbatch conducted considerable research for the role of Chris, in which he contacted and visited support groups for the redundant. For one scene, he was obliged to visit a meat counter in a supermarket, because his character had to take on a new job as a butcher.
The City marked the first time the childless actor had to portray a dad on stage. He was especially nervous about one specific scene, a confrontational one with a child actor, but ultimately felt reassured. ‘I was worried, but there are studies showing that young actors are very strongly aware of the difference between fiction and real life.’ Great care was taken in rehearsals with these junior performers, whose parents were always made aware of what was going on.
If anything, it was the audiences who could be more troublesome. During the press night performance, a mobile phone ringtone sounded persistently for several minutes. ‘There was a moment when Hattie broke off,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘and I thought about stopping and saying, “OK everyone, we’re only 20 minutes in, so we’re going to ask that the phone be turned off and we’re going to start again.” I had this speech all ready, but I was repressing it and repressing it.’
Worse was to come on a subsequent night. At the end of the final act, one audience member called out, ‘That was absolutely awful!’ ‘What annoyed me,’ Cumberbatch said, ‘was that the audience had been sitting in silence at the end of this very puzzling play, and then someone decided to hijack their entire thought process.’ Such is the peril of live theatre – it can elicit an instant reaction, and not always a welcome one. For him, compelling the audience to concentrate was a modern problem in the theatre. ‘Texting and talking have become a real problem, but you have to understand that you can’t demand their attention, you have to command it. You have to make them behave by your acting, not by shouting: “Behave!”’
Riskier still is live television drama, where there is no safety net for retakes. In 2009, Cumberbatch took part in a project organised by the Sky Arts channel called Theatre Live!: a season of plays which were being transmitted on TV as they were being performed. Of course, in the early days of television – before videotape became commonplace – all programmes were live, drama included, and if a play was to be ‘repeated’, the cast and technicians had to reassemble and perform it again. All sorts of things could go wrong; worst of all, in 1958 a key actor in the ITV play Underground suffered a fatal heart attack (offscreen) during the live broadcast, and the other actors had no choice but to improvise the story so as not to draw attention to the missing performer.
Cumberbatch’s parents, Wanda Ventham and Tim Carlton, were active in those early days of television drama. They were just starting out as professionals, and so were already well prepared for pitfalls, having an abundance of stage experience behind them. Such a background means one can cope more easily with various disasters, and Cumberbatch was no different, but Theatre Live! was to prove a nerve-wracking collision of live television and live theatre. There was no second chance if anything went wrong.
The play was called The Turning Point, written by Michael Dobbs, perhaps best known for his political drama, House of Cards. ‘So much of modern broadcasting is safe and desperately over-controlled,’ said Dobbs, ‘but live drama, with all its risks, promises something that will keep everyone on the edge of their seats – audience and actors alike.’ Cumberbatch would play the spy Guy Burgess in a play about a meeting in 1938 between himself and Winston Churchill. At the time, Churchill was in between stints as Prime Minister and felt to be in the political wilderness, while Burgess was one of the Cambridge Five spy ring, passing secret information to the Soviets.
Despite the growing number of screen roles coming his way, Cumberbatch remained passionate about theatrical work. ‘It’s the best place to be,’ he said. ‘I know it sounds wanky, but as an actor the more I do it, the more I need to do it. I know I ought to say my ambition is to take over the world and be the lead in everything, but I’m really happy with the way it is going.’ It was all experience, and in 2010, he would proudly tackle a part and production by a playwright close to his heart.
* * *
In 2010, as the centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth approached, it was time for his work to be reassessed. During the 1940s and 50s, Rattigan was one of the most celebrated of British playwrights. He wrote about a small sliver of society, but with such insight into the human condition that even if you weren’t upper middle-class, it was quite possible to relate to the emotional make-up of his characters. He wrote about the class he knew, but he still understood humanity. It was about the stiff upper lip of British society, but it was about that moment when that stiff upper lip would tremble. His many plays were about human vulnerability. Rattigan’s private life had to remain private, though; homosexuality would not be decriminalised in Britain until the late 1960s.
Like Benedict Cumberbatch, Terence Rattigan grew up in Kensington, West London, and was educated at Harrow School. He gained a scholarship to the school after his father, a top diplomat, was forced to take early retirement. The two were even in the same house at the school, The Park, and both excelled at cricket. He arrived there in the late 1920s, over 60 years before Cumberbatch. At Harrow, one of Benedict’s most acclaimed performances had been in Rattigan’s 1948 play, The Browning Version, in which he played a classics master called Andrew Crocker-Harris, a man forced into early retirement, who was painfully aware that he had not lived up to expectations. The play was said to have been inspired by a classics master at Harrow. Cumberbatch had been a fan of Rattigan’s since school days, and now in his mid-thirties, he would be instrumental in helping to revive interest in a playwright who had once been immensely popular, but whose reputation had been neglected.
Just as Cumberbatch had been discouraged from making acting his life, so Rattigan found his father trying to dissuade his son from being creative, and becoming a playwright. ‘You can do it in your spare time, old boy,’ he was told. Rattigan gained a place at Oxford to study histo
ry in 1930, but ended up leaving to pursue opportunities in London theatre. His early attempts got nowhere, and he soon became short of money, but in 1936, his run of rejections ended unexpectedly. A play he had written entitled French Without Tears was given a six-week run at short notice as a replacement for a play that had been forced to close. The cast were unknowns, and no one expected it to do well, yet it ran for over 1,000 performances.
Rattigan’s second play was a bittersweet comedy about a group who had been the ‘Bright Young Things’ generation of the 1920s. Too young to have been called up for World War I, they had partied hard during the Twenties and Thirties, always reaching for the drinks tray, and decried any unwelcome conversation topics as a bore. Their interest in politics was almost non-existent, and now, at the end of the 1930s, they had still not faced up to maturity.
He called the play After the Dance. Set in the year 1938, it premiered in June 1939, but the ballyhoo surrounding it would be short-lived. After being staged a mere 60 times, the outbreak of World War II in September of that year forced its closure. Rattigan found it hard to write again once war broke out. Either he suffered writers’ block, or a breakdown of sorts. He visited a psychiatrist, who suggested he went off to serve in World War II. He got into the Royal Air Force, where he began writing what would become Flare Path. After the war ended in 1945, he would enjoy a string of successes on the London stage, among them The Winslow Boy in 1946, The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and 1954’s Separate Tables. He also became a noted writer of film screenplays, including adaptations of The Way to the Stars, Brighton Rock and later, in the 1960s, Goodbye, Mr Chips.
But even in peacetime, Rattigan felt deeply uncomfortable with After the Dance. He felt that in a time of austerity, Britain would find it hard to accept such detached and hedonistic figures, and so refused to include it in any published anthologies of his works. It was adapted for BBC Television in 1994, but the 2010 stage revival marked the first time it had been performed in London for over 70 years. Even then, during an economic downturn, the escapist and careless bunch of characters it depicted might have been hard to swallow. But Rattigan never sneered at the characters he created, and always respected them, imbuing them with humanity and sensitivity.