by David Essex
Sho apparently wanted me because he had enjoyed my Che in Evita so I flew to Hollywood to meet him. The script seemed lively, my scenes would be shot in Yugoslavia and I fancied being a bad guy for a change, so I agreed to do it.
Yugoslavia was about to be no more, of course, and when I flew out to Belgrade in 1992 you could sense the ethnic tensions and general unrest that were soon to lead to civil war. Even within the film unit there was a degree of suspicion and contempt between workers from different areas of the Balkans.
We filmed in Dubrovnik, Belgrade and Montenegro, which were all beautiful, although some of the local customs were not to my liking. In Montenegro, near to the border with Albania, I saw a gypsy with a dancing bear, although the bear’s gyrations were clearly mainly to try to alleviate the pain of being led around via a hook that its handler had viciously twisted into its lip.
As well as being its star ninja, Sho was also one of the film’s producers, and Shogun Mayeda was a proper martial-arts action movie and very physical to shoot. Its team of Japanese fight co-ordinators spoke absolutely no English and so as they taught me the fight sequences, we had no choice but to develop a whole new language to describe the moves.
This bizarre argot sounded as if it belonged between the pages of a comic book as it mostly consisted of childish phrases such as ‘Ka-Boom!’ or ‘Whoosh!’ Sometimes during filming, I had to stop a scene to politely enquire of my tutors whether they required a ‘Ka-Boom!’ or a ‘Whoosh!’
The movie’s director was very old and inanimate and in truth didn’t entirely seem to know what he was doing, and the whole project’s surreal air was heightened by the fact that the cast also included Christopher Lee, the venerable and veteran actor best known for playing Dracula in a stream of old black-and-white Hammer Horror films.
Christopher Lee was charm personified and quite possibly saved my sight after a fairly dreadful mishap on the set. The scene we were shooting required Don Pedro and his gang of evil Spanish cohorts to fire muskets at our Japanese foes, and I guess I should have taken heed when the towering Serbian special effects guy materialised on set covered in numerous burns and bandages.
We shot our guns at the enemy and the director raised himself from his torpor to request another take. The battered-looking FX man refilled my musket but was clearly a little generous with the proportions because when the order to fire came, my gun went off like a cannon, blowing back and shooting gunpowder and flint into my eye.
The pain was excruciating but being both a trouper and a bloke, I declared that I was OK and indicated I would carry on filming. The film crew seemed perfectly satisfied with this, but Christopher Lee stepped in and insisted that I should go to hospital. With a look of inconvenience, the director reluctantly agreed and packed me off with an interpreter.
The first hospital we visited was closed for a holiday, which seemed unorthodox, but at the second one a white-coated doctor examined me pretty quickly. He clearly didn’t like what he found because the interpreter informed me: ‘The doctor says he must operate immediately.’
The doc led me to a basic operating room with a bed and various bits of surgical equipment littered around, and then vanished. As I sat on the bed, a middle-aged nurse appeared and washed some of the gear in a sink, which would have been very hygienic and laudable were it not for the fag hanging off her bottom lip.
So I was in a second-choice hospital in a close-on third world country, a nurse was smoking in the surgical room and a doctor who didn’t speak my language was about to operate on my badly burned eye. What could possibly go wrong?
If I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I soon learned that I was mistaken, as the doctor returned and it became evident that he was to perform the operation without anything as tiresome as an anaesthetic. Grasping a giant scalpel that looked to me more like a broadsword, he began to scrape and dig about in my eye.
It hurt, a lot, but after a few minutes of apparently productive excavation, the doctor nodded with satisfaction and smiled, at which point the nurse put out her fag to administer the stitches with what looked like the kind of rope you would use to tie up a fishing boat. I thanked them, but as I drove back to my hotel, my eye ached like crazy.
The next morning it was just as sore, not to mention extremely red and swollen, and filming was clearly out of the question for me for a few days. The director suggested that I took a week off and went home to have it checked out so the next morning I boarded a plane to London.
As I have learned, bad news travels fast in media circles and I was met at Heathrow by scores of Fleet Street’s finest jostling to get pictures of the wounded pop star. Even some TV news cameras were there, which surprised me as I had no idea how they had gotten wind of my mishap.
The following morning I travelled to Harley Street to see (well, as well as I could) a bow-tied eminent eye specialist named Eric Arnott who had done a lot of work with cataract sufferers in the developing world. I was braced for bad news, but Eric surprised me: ‘Whoever did this did a brilliant job,’ he said. ‘I guarantee when the stitches are out, the scar will be almost invisible.’
Eric explained that the Yugoslav doctor had done the right thing to operate immediately as gunpowder is highly corrosive and would have eaten my eye away in a matter of hours, leaving me blind on that side. I gratefully decided that on my return to Belgrade I would take the doctor a bottle of whisky to thank him – and, of course, a packet of fags for the nurse.
After a week or so I was once again ‘Ka-boom!’-ing and ‘Whoosh!’-ing on the Shogun Mayeda set. As a baddie, Don Pedro was inevitably to meet a sticky end, and eventually the time came to film the climax that involved Sho slicing me in two with a Samurai sword in a fight to the death in fast-moving rapids.
I clearly had some kind of death wish making that film because I decided to do the stunt myself. Wearing a suit of armour, I had to clunk around in a rapidly flowing river, bouncing off rocks as I battled Sho, before being swept away. Thankfully, the special effect splitting me in half would be added later.
The Japanese fight trainers had slung ropes over the riverbanks for me to grab on to and after Sho had finally vanquished me in a flurry of ka-booms and whooshes, I fell backwards like a discarded tin can. The powerful rapids carried me downstream, crashing off the rocks, and I missed a lot of the strategically placed ropes before finally grasping the very last one.
Wet and probably rusting, I was hauled in to land with my heart pounding to be greeted by a round of applause from the smiling Japanese. I am led to believe – as you would hope – that Shogun Mayeda was very big in Japan.
Nearer to home, Derek and Mel were normally besieged before each Christmas with requests for me to appear in pantomimes but we had always turned them down. Even two decades on, the memories of lizard-tongued brown bears and Dandini were still painful, and more importantly the vast majority of the scripts that we got sent were cheesy rubbish.
Nevertheless, I have no snobbery towards the art form and I think pantos are very important. Normally they are a child’s first initiation into theatre and if the production is not only bright and colourful but also has depth and intelligence, who is to say they won’t be hooked and return in later years to see Shakespeare or Chekhov?
Driven by these noble ideals, I decided to write my own panto and to base it around Robinson Crusoe. I dutifully read the classic Daniel Defoe novel but have to confess that I found it rather heavy-going and didn’t draw too deeply upon it.
It seemed highly ironic to me that after Mutiny! I was willingly undertaking another project based around boats and sailing. A psychiatrist may even detect a degree of masochism there, because boats and I have never got on.
Over the years I have suffered a few red-faced sailing-related moments, not least a holiday in Florida when a company let me take out a turbo-charged powerboat, figuring it would be safe as I was a trained helicopter pilot. With Verity and Dan on board, I immediately went the wrong way around a buoy and smashed the pr
opeller on some rocks. We had to call out the US Coastguard to rescue us.
Verity and Dan were also with me on a boat on the Thames when I decided to circumvent the tiresome lock system by sailing around them. It took an astonished fisherman to warn me to turn back before I reached a concrete weir that we would have had no chance of avoiding.
Despite this, I seem destined to tackle nautical subjects and so began work on The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Together with friend and writer David Joss Buckley and a great director, Robin Midgley, we took fairly large liberties with Defoe’s now outdated plot and came up with a storyline full of magic, hexes and that staple panto theme, the battle of good versus evil.
We were also mindful to ensure that Robinson Crusoe’s friend and sidekick, Man Friday, was treated in an enlightened and respectful manner. Pantos did not use to be the most PC of productions, and I still cringe at the memory of one Crusoe I saw where Man Friday did nothing except jump up and down in a monkey suit.
I approached the show as I would any musical, writing original songs for it and also recycling some of the score from Mutiny! We eschewed women dressed as men but had a tremendous pantomime dame, and Robin cast Verity, who was by now a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, as my daughter.
We did a run of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford and to my surprise and delight it broke their box-office records. It was such a special experience for me to act with Verity, especially as it was so obvious from her voice and presence that her casting was down to talent, not nepotism.
At subsequent Christmases, we transferred Crusoe to Liver-pool, Bournemouth, Southampton, Edinburgh and Cardiff and it was always a great experience. Robin always directed and the main cast members of Micky O’Donoughue, John Labanowski and Bobby Bennett remained largely unchanged, which gave the company a real family feel.
Musically, I have always sweated over my albums, writing long and hard into the wee small hours of the night as I strive to touch that ghost and perfect the orchestration and arrangements. It therefore made a pleasant change in 1993 when I went into the studio with Mike Batt and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to record an album of cover versions.
Cover Shot saw me re-interpret songs I had loved over the years by a host of artists, including the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’, Cat Stevens’ ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’, America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’ and a new take on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ that I was particularly pleased with.
Cover Shot was primarily a labour of love and I had no idea at all what people would make of it, but it must have touched a nerve because it peaked in the album chart at number three – my first Top Ten album in eighteen years.
Meanwhile, the constant flights to Connecticut and back were draining and time-consuming and so I was delighted when Carlotta, Kit and Bill moved over to live with me. Time had flown and the twins were ready to go to school, and we decided to start their education in England. I just loved having the family together again and we moved to St John’s Wood, north London.
My TV sitcoms, ninja movies, pantomimes and covers albums of recent years had not necessarily all been to Derek’s taste but he could not have been more elated by the next work offer that came my way in 1993. Sir Peter Hall, the Royal Shakespeare Company founder and former director of the National Theatre, asked me to appear in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of manners She Stoops to Conquer.
I almost felt like I owed it to Derek to do it but in truth I was very wary. While I was sure the experience of working with Sir Peter would be invaluable, I had never attempted any of the classics before, the quality of the cast was daunting, and all in all it seemed a little too far out of my comfort zone, even for me.
Even so, I agreed to take on the part of the scheming Tony Lumpkin and rehearsals began in mid-summer ’93. The august Sir Donald Sinden played Mr Hardcastle, my stepfather, while national treasure Miriam Margoyles was my mother. Virtually the whole of the rest of the cast were classically trained actors. No pressure, then.
Even after all those years treading the boards, the world of high theatre was new to me and I found the rehearsals nerve-wracking. It was all very thespian and I didn’t really care for the play, which seemed to be two hours of gobbledegook. The days dragged, with the high point being the ride home through the warm summer evenings on my Triumph Bonneville.
Donald, Miriam and the rest of the cast were tremendous and very supportive but I still felt like an outsider and Sir Peter’s directing style didn’t help. He was the first director that I had ever worked with who spent rehearsals with his nose in the text and hardly watched the performances in front of him. It could be frustrating, but I just told myself, ‘Look, this is Sir Peter Hall! He knows exactly what he is doing.’
She Stoops to Conquer opened with a week in Leatherhead in Surrey and then embarked on a tour of Britain. The audiences and reviews were good wherever we went, and Sir Donald and Miriam had an excellent understanding and rapport that won them a lot of laughs.
The lovely Miriam is larger-than-life in more ways than one and we had a bit of a mishap at the Festival Theatre in Chichester. One scene required me to hoist her over my shoulder and exit stage left, but I took a tumble and dropped her roughly on to a flight of stairs. Miriam was unhurt, but I tore the ligaments in my ankle.
The accident had happened just before the play transferred to its West End run at the Queen’s Theatre, which meant I would have to appear with a walking stick. We also hit a few problems as Sir Peter decided to revamp the production, strip away some of the niceties we had developed in the provinces, and get back to his beloved text in a more purist fashion.
Sir Peter also wanted to rethink my character in a way that I didn’t really agree with. He decided to play Tony Lumpkin as more of a country bumpkin, with a lot more ‘Ooh aah!’ going on, which for me turned my role from two hours of talking gobbledegook into two hours of talking gobbledegook in a funny accent. There was even talk for a while of me wearing a ginger wig and a fat suit. I thankfully persuaded him out of that one but I didn’t see the need for all the changes. Was it just panic, and fear of the London critics?
To cap it all, when the London opening night rolled around I got food poisoning. The stage crew thoughtfully positioned buckets at strategic points in the wings but I could hardly get through my performance and in retrospect I certainly shouldn’t have gone on. It was an awful night, the reviews were poor and mine were particularly dreadful: again, it seemed, I was the pop star who was refusing to stay in his box, and getting ideas above his station.
The play limped into the New Year, quite literally in my case. Things were better at home, where Carlotta, Kit and Bill were happy in London. My parents were still out in the wilds of deepest Essex, and we began looking at finding them a place closer to us so they could see more of their grandkids. That was before I received a phone call from a hospital in Essex in my dressing room during the matinee of She Stoops to Conquer on Wednesday 24 January 1994.
My dad had died.
The world stopped. He had done what? How? Why? I asked to speak to my mum but as she took the phone she was clearly still in a state of shock. She told me that my dad had decided to have a short nap after his lunch. When she went to wake him, he had gone. A heart attack, apparently. It was that simple.
My mind was racing. What should I do? Dash from the theatre to the hospital? Finish the matinee? I tried to think what Dad would have wanted me to do. Surely he would have said that the show must go on? After all, he had never given up on anything in his entire life.
Yes, that was what he would want. I would finish the matinee and play the evening performance. ‘I’m going to carry on and do the shows and I’ll be round straight after,’ I told Mum. ‘OK,’ she said. I don’t think she knew what was going on.
I put the phone down and stared at myself in the dressing-room mirror. Had that call really happened? I tur
ned up the tannoy linking the room to the stage and heard Sir Donald Sinden booming his lines. It was nearly my cue. In a daze, I watched myself walk to the stage and finish the performance.
I didn’t tell the rest of the cast because I didn’t want sympathy. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry…’ I couldn’t bear that. I was sorry enough. I told the company manager after the matinee and he said I should go home, but I told him I would do the evening performance.
Between the shows I walked through the streets of Soho. I am not sure what I did but I seem to remember buying a coffee and being asked for an autograph and signing it like a man who was not really there. I don’t think that I was.
I was back at the Queen’s Theatre by the ‘half’, which is theatre slang for thirty-five minutes before the curtain goes up. As the evening show neared, I felt a power, an energy and a brightness inside of me. I can’t begin to explain what happened and I am not going to: I just knew that it was the strongest performance I had ever given. I felt my dad connecting with me. He was telling me I had done the right thing.
After the show I changed quickly and drove to Essex. Heading through the dark streets and country lanes, I was suffused with sadness, but I knew I had to focus on my mum. She had lost the one man in her life: her lover and companion for more than fifty years.
When she opened the door, I hugged her. She looked so girlish and so lost. Dad had died aged seventy-five, which I guess was quite an achievement when his TB had so nearly taken him at twenty-eight. We sat up until the early hours, talking and sharing memories of him. We cried a lot; we laughed a lot, too.
I couldn’t bear to leave Mum on her own in the house full of memories of Dad, and the next morning I suggested she pack a bag and come to stay with us for a while. She moved in with us at our new place in Long Ditton, Surrey and I’m glad to say she never moved out again. We behaved like a proper family should.
Few women would welcome the mother-in-law coming to live with them but Carlotta could not have been kinder and it was good for Kit and Bill to have Mum with us. They had reached a lively age, were often fighting, and would ignore me trying to calm them down. When their granny said ‘Oi!’ they knew she meant business.