Biggins

by Christopher Biggins

  Maybe what I meant to ask was: ‘Why are you pregnant?’ Although that didn’t really sum up my feelings either. All told, it was all something of a shock. Mum and Dad had called me into the living room in my final few months at Salisbury Rep.

  ‘You’re going to have a baby brother or sister,’ my mother added. Yes, thanks for clearing up what ‘I’m pregnant’ means, Mother.

  Of course, if I was in shock, you can imagine what my poor parents themselves thought. With me getting ready to go to Bristol they had probably been looking forward to having the house to themselves. I know Dad was particularly stunned by Mum’s news. But he had a second surprise coming.

  ‘Can Pam really be pregnant? It’s been 18 years since she had Christopher,’ he asked our long-time doctor, the still wonderful Jim Drummond.

  ‘She certainly can be pregnant, and she’s not the only one,’ Jim said. It turned out that his wife was having a baby 19 years after her last. There must have been something in Wiltshire’s water supply back then.

  All things considered, it was probably a good thing that I was ready to fly the nest just as the new chick arrived. I like my sleep. And like most teenage boys I wasn’t keen on the idea of changing any nappies. I was also a bit of a worrier – and I didn’t like worrying about my mother’s health. Giving birth after such a long gap wasn’t easy for her. And this birth wasn’t an easy one. It turned out that my mother had a fibroid as big as a grapefruit that needed to be removed. She had a Caesarean section to deliver her baby and the surgeon threw in a hysterectomy for good measure.

  But she and my baby brother both came back from hospital safe and well. Little Sean was soon the new prince of Sidney Street. And he’s turned out to be a real treasure. With an 18-year age gap, he and I were never going to be like ordinary brothers. Technically speaking I was easily old enough to be his father – when we were out in the street together I think a lot of strangers assumed that’s what I was. Fortunately, as we hardly ever lived in the same house at the same time we never had any sibling rivalries either. And today I’m proud to say that we’ve always been good friends.

  I cried on my first night at theatre school. I moved into digs in Bristol, for a taste of the full theatrical experience. I had a room high up in an attic in a house shared with half a dozen or so other students.

  My mother and father had dropped me off, I had offered shy greetings to some of my fellow residents and then, upstairs and alone, the tears had begun to fall. This was the first time I had ever been on my own and everything felt so alien. All the confidence I had built up with all those talented, older people in Salisbury faded away. How would I cope on my own? More importantly, how would I cope among people of my own age?

  Until I got to Bristol I think my peers had scared me. No, I’d never been bullied in school. Yes, I had dear John Brown and a handful of other pals from my various classes. But in the main I felt more comfortable with adults. I think it’s because of that nagging feeling that I was different. Not having a sense of belonging can be quite horrible. If you’re different you always worry that you might come under attack at any time. My thinking had always been that older people were less likely to lash out at me. I wanted them wrapped around me, just like the cotton wool that had made me itch all those years ago as a baby.

  Bristol taught me so much. But the first lesson was that no one lashed out at anyone. Being different was fine – in fact, it was something to be applauded if not actually encouraged. Within weeks I realised that I loved being with my own age group. And maybe that’s because we were the most extraordinary group in the theatre school’s history.

  Jeremy Irons was one of the first of my fellow students to say hello. Then I met the others. There was Simon Cadell, who came from a real dynasty of actors, Tim Pigott-Smith, Ian Gelder, John Caird, Tony Falkingham, the fantastic Gillian Morgan, who became Gillian Eton, Sheila Ferris, now married to Poirot himself David Suchet, the lovely mad girl Hazel Clyne and so many more. We were a fantastic group and we were in a fantastic place.

  The theatre school – opened just after the war by none other than Laurence Olivier – was in a big old Victorian house right on the edge of Clifton Downs at the end of Blackboy Hill. You got to it by sweeping up a grand driveway – it was all very Brideshead Revisited, so Jeremy had a head start when he got into his role as Charles Ryder all those years later.

  There were probably only about two dozen students in a year and a couple of years of students at the school at any one time. But the building was always buzzing. Groups were constantly rushing around – and unlike at an ordinary school we were all desperate to learn. We had a focus. We wanted to perform.

  Best of all was the fact that we were all pretty much able to concentrate on our classes. Forget part-time jobs. These were the best of times to be students. I got a grant, as did almost everyone else. And my parents were always ready to top things up if I ran short some months, bless them. So I often did run short some months. That, too, has been a story of my life.

  Our principal was a marvellous man called Nat Brenner. He was thin, wiry and hairy with a striking face and a good line in smart sports jackets. He and his lovely wife Joan lived in the flat on the top floor of the house and beneath them a warren of ten or so rooms were converted into different types of rehearsal studios and performance spaces.

  Dear Nat was a hugely talented and wonderful character. It was because of him that we were so young in 1967. It was an experimental year at the theatre school, with so many of us aged just 18 and 19. They had never gambled on young talent like this before. But look where so many of us got to. And I think we all grew to be one of Nat’s favourite intakes. He was incredibly supportive and I found him very approachable – so approach him I did. He knew theatre. Peter O’Toole was one of his best pals. So I guessed he might be good for a gossip and I was right.

  Maybe not every 18-year-old newcomer would have been comfortable spending so much time with their principal. But it didn’t seem strange to me. I also bonded with Nat’s wife, Joan. I sensed that she could feel a bit excluded because Nat was so dedicated to his school and his students. So Joan and I would have coffee together and gossip in their flat. Again, I never thought for a minute that there was anything unusual about a new student sitting having coffee with the principal’s wife in her drawing room. I never saw why some people were supposed to be off limits to others. If two people want to become friends, why shouldn’t they? I didn’t see why age, status, wealth, looks or anything else should get in the way. That’s why I’ve had so many wonderful friends. And why they’ve all been such a fabulously mixed bunch.

  ‘All right, class. Imagine you’re squeezing a lemon between your buttocks. Now walk around the room without letting it go.’ Rudi Shelley boomed out the instruction in his rich and wonderfully exotic accent from somewhere out in middle or Eastern Europe. Rudi was a small man with big presence. He had long hair, an extraordinarily rubbery face and, of course, perfect posture. He taught us all to stand tall and to walk properly. I’m six foot one and I do still stand and walk properly. I’m proud of that. It’s kept me in good stead and it’s largely thanks to Rudi. His deportment lessons were only the start of our background education. The lovely Lynn Britt, with her scraped-back black hair and angular dancer’s face, gave us two hours of classical ballet instruction every week. It may seem ridiculous, really, to teach us all that. And even then I was no sylph-like ballerina. But ballet is a surprisingly useful skill. So much stems from all that training, all the breadth and depth I acquired in Bristol. It meant I could turn my hand to anything in the years ahead. Just as well, the way my feast-and-famine career would turn out.

  But squeezing a lemon between my buttocks and doing a bit of ballet lost their thrill after a while. What I wanted to do most was act. Central to everything at the school was, of course, the dream of playing in the Bristol Old Vic itself. The theatre, a couple of miles away on King Street, is a most wonderful Georgian building. It had it all – an incredibly ric
h history, a cast list of almost all the greats you could care to name. It even had a theatre ghost, though my booming voice must have scared her away as she never turned up when I was around.

  The first time I walked into the theatre I felt its embrace. It was so different to Salisbury Rep. This was a proper theatre, not a converted church hall. This was the real thing, with deep colours, rich brocades and row upon row of seats. But the place didn’t fool me. I loved the fact that backstage everything was just as crowded and chaotic as it had been in my home town. Maybe that’s what I like about theatre: the gap between artifice and reality. The different roles that theatres themselves can play. The magic we can make.

  Of course I also liked the outrageous characters I met in them. And the Bristol Old Vic certainly provided them. It had a great front-of-house manager, a fittingly camp and theatrical man called Rodney West who loved the enthusiasm of all us young students. It was just as well because he ended up seeing an awful lot of us.

  The marvellous Jacqueline Stanbury and I got the ball rolling. We decided to organise first-nighters for each new performance. Our gang would dress up, the boys in black tie, the girls in long dresses. Most of us might have had to rely on charity shops for our finery. But we made it look a million dollars. Rodney helped make sure we always got the seats we wanted. The theatre has a horseshoe gallery where you sit in a narrow row of seats on the side edge of the balcony. They’re not the best seats in the house by any measure – the view was badly restricted and you had to lean at a worryingly wide angle to see the whole of the stage. But they were where we loved to be. When you sat there you were almost on display yourself – I could always sense it when people in the posh seats of the stalls were looking our way. We loved the attention.

  It was in those seats that it dawned on me that theatre itself would be one of the great loves of my life. The company was extraordinary in those years, great plays, wonderful performances. Thelma Barlow, still a dear friend, was at the Bristol Old Vic back then and I remember being dazzled by her performances – she was like a lovely china doll. A lovely china doll who could set the stage on fire when her play demanded it. And leading the company was the marvellous Peggy Ann Wood, the first person I ever saw to get an entrance round when they walked on stage. I was stunned by the thrill of it as I joined that applause. Now, whenever I get an entrance round, I thank Peggy for showing how it’s done.

  Today I’m known as an avid first-nighter and I’m sad that it’s often misconstrued. It’s not about being at the opening of an envelope – though I’ve done my fair share of that as well. No, my first nights are about the love of theatre, of the excitement, nerves and magic of an opening. It’s important to me to keep seeing more actors in more plays. I don’t understand some other actors who seem proud of the fact that they never go to the theatre. Shouldn’t they be ashamed of it instead? To me, the theatre is where we learn. It’s where we find new passions. That was instilled in me in Bristol.

  So I was a worthy, hard-working, theatre-obsessed pupil, then? Well, not quite. I loved the life of a drama student just as much as I loved the drama itself. I loved the camaraderie, the in-jokes, the tricks we played and the stupid things we all did. Tim Pigott-Smith and Simon Cadell were in the serious set, they were dedicated to the craft, and I respected that. But I had fallen for the whole ambience, the joking, the laughing that went on when the audience wasn’t looking.

  Maybe that was my downfall: not to be seen as a serious actor. I ultimately beat a lot of those serious players into the Royal Shakespeare Company. But I never quite made it stick.

  Funnily enough, Jeremy Irons was the other person in our year who was widely seen as insufficiently serious for the classic roles. He was so handsome, a clear leading man with extraordinary presence. He was so social, so gregarious, and that’s why we got on so well. He was also very sporty, and he loved his horses and country life. Academically speaking, neither of us was exactly the brightest of people at Bristol. But we laughed the most. Jeremy’s reputation today is far more serious. At the time, though, we both just wanted to have fun.

  He and I sat in the Blackboy Cafe once to have a laugh over the latest industry gossip, the way we always did. The Australian Coral Browne, Vincent Price’s wife and surely the world’s campest actress, was a heroine of ours. We had just heard the probably apocryphal story of her hailing a cab one rainy night outside the Haymarket Theatre in London. As she climbed in through one door, another soaking-wet passenger climbed through the other.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid the lady is first,’ said the cabbie.

  ‘Which lady?’ asked the man.

  ‘This fucking lady,’ she snapped.

  Jeremy and I just knew that she was our type of girl.

  ‘We should write to her. Just be honest and say we’re two drama students out in Bristol and that we’d like to have lunch with her,’ I said.

  ‘Do you really think she would come?’

  ‘I think she will. She’ll be a hoot.’

  Shame on the two of us for chickening out. Coral’s no longer with us. But I’m still convinced she would have joined us if we’d ever had the guts to post the letter.

  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 ado
red 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.