In the Frame

by Helen Mirren

  The central character, the queen bee whose house it was, was Sarah. Here was and is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. A painter and prankster, with a mind like a trap, a posh girl who can do The Times crossword in about five minutes, with the most fertile imagination. Actually it was quite terrifying, but also incredible fun, and for me a necessary antidote to the seriousness of my struggle to become an actress.

  The house was like a cross between a country weekend for toffs, an artists’ convention, and a travellers’ camp. There was constant dressing up, animals everywhere, champagne occasionally and, if not, gallons of wine, games of wit always, lots of music. The music was Santana, Crosby Stills and Nash, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Randy Newman. There were often intimidating competitions, usually to do with wordplay. No mercy was shown to slowcoaches. The boys loved dressing in drag and the girls as nuns or tarts. There were also drugs, of course, marijuana mostly. Anyone who came was seduced, including some disapproving and uptight characters who hours later would be seen running through the garden with a feather boa round their neck. It was just irresistible. A scruffy Marie-Antoinette-meets-Ken Kesey existence. There were also serious conversations, good food always and dressing for dinner. Preparing dinner was a shared thing; it never seemed to be a problem. Likewise washing up. Certainly it was where I learned to cook for twelve people (something I’ve since forgotten). There were occasional rows about money and who owed what, usually related to the telephone, but nothing serious. Sex was private and personal, and almost always between established partners. There was a sweetness and kind of prudish innocence about it all, at least whenever I was around. My first night there I shared a bed with a large hairy Irish gentleman in the form of an Irish wolfhound called Murphy, who was outraged that I had been given his bed. He spent the night trying to oust me, sometimes successfully.

  Because I was working flat out at Stratford, just down the road, I never actually lived at Parsenn Sally. This Victorian farmhouse, rented at a peppercorn rate from a posh friend of Sarah’s who needed the place to be occupied, had been decorated with murals and the colours of the Caribbean and named after a cow Sarah knew. It was imaginative, it was beautiful. I had never seen anything like it. It was also always dirty for the animals held sway, treated as equals with the humans. It was a place you could find peace and privacy if you wanted, an intense conversation with a retired general, or a cat, or a raucous game of ‘Postman’ which involved much shouting and running about, delivering letters.

  Later, Sarah moved to Wiltshire and a ruin of a house called Surrendell. The menagerie of animals and humans went with her, and I visited her there too. Even later, she decamped to France and took the geese across the Channel in a decommissioned London taxi. When I visited Surrendell the bedrooms had not yet been built, and we slept in great comfort in the haystack. This was the house that Princess Margaret would later visit. She was a friend of Roddy Llewellyn who was, like me and many others, a sometime weekend visitor. I heard of her impending visit, for there was much excitement about it in the aristocratic heart of the place. However I made sure I was well away, not wanting to be a part of all that and foreseeing the fuss that might ensue. Contrary to reports, I never met her there, and indeed never met her anywhere except a couple of times in formal situations related to the theatre.

  After Bruce, my next partner was George Galitzine, the ex step-brother to Sarah and still a beloved friend. He balanced my shyness with his gregariousness, and laughter. All the men I have been with above all made me laugh. Georgie’s full title is Prince George Galitzine, his family having been honoured for a forefather bonking Catherine the Great. Like me, George is half Russian, but from an aristocratic family that had the sense to escape the Bolsheviks with money. There are a lot of Russian princes and princesses. Catherine was generous with her favours.

  George was by then the ex-boyfriend of another friend from those days, Sandy Campbell. She was one of the most upbeat, lively and quick-witted people I had ever known, and the only one who could and did beat Sarah at a mean game of backgammon. She was also very pretty, like Twiggy and with the same legs that never give up. Sandy, George and Sarah are still my very good friends, with Sandy also now fulfilling the role of my PA. Next to my sister she is the closest person to me, and I am godmother to one of her sons.

  The green and the gold of the English countryside were like a drug for me. I would stand transfixed by the beauty and the smells. The soft damp smell of distant fungus, the dry crackly smell of wheat in June, the strange pungent smells of the wild flowers, the richness of the ploughed earth. A single tree in a field could stick me to the spot. One of the lowest parts of Britain, the area would be wreathed in those magical low mists that rise from the river or the field, making a landscape of mystery and fairies. It was the first time I had been exposed to real countryside, real nature. My parents had no car while I lived at home, so trips to the countryside were not on. The stretches of Essex between London and Southend – those few sad fields after Dagenham and before Basildon – were all I had seen; not exactly sylvan.

  And every day I was exposed to the brilliant poetic writing of a genius who had lived in and loved that landscape, that river, maybe some of those very trees. Shakespeare wrote so descriptively and recognisably about Warwickshire. It was splendid to watch the landscape change in smell, colour and texture as the season progressed and the farmworkers did their thing, made me feel as if I never wanted to leave Stratford.

  I worked at Stratford, with seasons in London, for four years, and began to play some fairly major roles. All this time I took my job very seriously, keenly aware of my part in an important art form. I was helped in this by being surrounded by some of the greatest stage actors and actresses in Britain, many of whom were my contemporaries. I would stand in the wings and watch in awe. Frances De La Tour could make an audience laugh by doing absolutely nothing. The beautiful Susan Fleetwood, who so sadly died too soon and too young of cancer, lit up the stage with her energy. Alan Howard soared to heights of invention and poetic naturalism that were extraordinary. When he was on form there was no one like him, no one. He is the greatest classical actor I have known.

  Then there was the experience of hearing the same language night after night, and the way Shakespeare works, finding some new meaning every time. Simply to hear the reiteration of a line of beauty and complexity was to find a kind of belief. The theatre became my religion and I wanted to serve it.

  One actor in particular was encouraging and kind. Ian Richardson, one of the leading actors in Britain, shared his tremendous knowledge and craft so generously with me. I had one scene with him in All’s Well. A comic genius on stage, he helped me get as many laughs as possible, and showed me how to get an exit round. When I got applause, he religiously waited for it to die down when he could easily have stopped it dead. He was a very dear man and he and his wife Maroussia showed me great kindness.

  Lindy, Sandy, Bob and myself enjoying the sunshine and strawberries.

  Drenched in that kind of hothouse atmosphere of theatre culture, where everyone else is living and breathing the work, I became more and more serious about what I perceived as my inadequacies, and worked to overcome them. This meant I was often to be seen walking along the river muttering my lines to myself. I would stand at the foot of the statue of Shakespeare by the river in Stratford and beg for inspiration, and enough breath.

  During my second year at Stratford I was asked to appear in a film, Age of Consent, to be shot in Australia starring James Mason, with Michael Powell directing. The fact that my agent also represented James I am sure had a lot to do with my casting. I was given the time off from the schedule with the RSC, or maybe it just worked out, and off I flew to Australia via Hawaii. At this point in time I had only been on an aeroplane once before, when I flew to Paris to see Jean Louis and his family.

  I was also asked by Peter Hall to play Hermia in his film version of Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I was gaining film experience
, but I did not let it interfere with my desire to continue learning about stage acting. At the end of each film, I presented myself back at the gates of the RSC, hoping for a good role.

  And I was given some good roles, but never the ones I wanted. I longed to play Juliet for example, but was never asked. I did play Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, but in spite of it being a ‘title role’ it is underwritten. I also played some wimpy goody-goodies, Hero, for example. I felt frustrated.

  There were compensations, however. With the RSC I had the opportunity to travel quite extensively. During my four years, I went on one of the first cultural exchanges to Russia, a one-night-stand tour around Europe, and a tour to America that took in Los Angeles, Detroit and San Francisco. This was all very exciting to me. Touring with a company of actors is a very romantic thing to do, especially if you love the company of actors as I do. There is a lot of childish behaviour, a lot of laughter and a lot of late nights in bars or restaurants. It was amazing, too, to be in those exotic places not as a tourist but as someone hopefully contributing to the culture.

  Going to Russia was particularly significant for me, for obvious reasons. Before I went, my father gave me strict instructions not to mention my Russian roots or to attempt to find any relatives. He was aware of the potential danger, not to me but to them. At this time, Russia was out of the horrors of Stalinism but deep into the Cold War. This was a time of espionage; suspicion and an ongoing propaganda battle that I think we actors were a part of. Both sides seemed to view our arrival as something they could exploit. It was the time of Philby, Burgess and Blunt.

  It was a moving moment for me when the plane touched down in Moscow. We flew Aeroflot, of course, and they were still using prop planes. It took hours to get there. From the moment we landed I walked around looking for my Russian nature to manifest itself. To a certain extent it did. I was asked directions in the street because I looked Russian. Also I was bending over backwards not to be prejudiced about the world I saw, my father’s left-wing ideology echoing in my head. However the reality was that it was grim and unhappy. Old women would shout at you in the street if you crossed the road in the wrong place, laughter seemed to be unacceptable, and the shops had rows of the same thing. I had no idea before going to Soviet Russia how much of a Western consumer I had become, how addicted to variety and colour, and the fun of advertising.

  Having no concept of rates of exchange, Bruce, my then boyfriend, and I had made the mistake of taking our earnings in Russian roubles. We made that decision because British currency could only be spent in the foreign hotel shops and restaurants, and we wanted to be out with the people of Russia. But the exchange rate was so dire that we could hardly afford to eat, let alone drink. Desperate for some kind of alcoholic enjoyment, we went off to buy some Russian brandy to keep us warm in the Moscow midwinter. We found the shop, with difficulty, and joined the very long queue of bundled-up Russians. We must have waited for at least an hour, slowly making our way forward across the cold tiled floor. Eventually we reached the counter, pointed and handed over our carefully saved roubles. The bottle was wrapped in brown paper and handed to me. I turned and took one step. The bottle slipped straight out of the bottom of the paper on to the floor and smashed. The whole long queue looked at me in silence with an indescribable expression of resignation and sympathy and understanding, but letting me know I was on my own. Very Russian.

  Later Bruce went out with some students, got drunk and came back to the hotel, packed up all his clothes, including his boots and coat, and gave them to the students. He was left with nothing to wear for a week or so, freezing in the 20° below temperature of a Russian winter. No wonder I loved him.

  Our American trip was equally interesting, as we arrived in 1967, the Summer of Love. Los Angeles was hit by some of the worst rainstorms on record during the six weeks we were there. I don’t think we saw any sunshine, and houses were tumbling off hillsides, lending the city an apocalyptic quality.

  After LA we moved to San Francisco, the epicentre of peace and love in the late sixties, and I saw my first hippies, and bought my first beads. In fact, although I loved the ‘peace and love, man’ and flower power side of hippydom, I hated the ‘mother earth’ role allocated to the women. Those soppy girls with their drippy hair and droopy clothes and baby on the hip irritated me. I was more attracted to the laughing, raucous, hell-raising, feather-wearing Janis Joplin, and her unforgettable voice.

  After San Francisco we had three days before we were due in Detroit, and some of us took the option of travelling across America by train. This was a brilliant choice, and in those three days I felt I learned much about the American Dream and all the sacrifices in its name. The scale of the landscape was incredible to me, coming from the contained nature of the English countryside. It took a whole day to cross one plain, with no trees, or towns on it. The train would stop right in the main street of towns like Cheyenne and you could get off and dash into a bar and meet the locals for twenty minutes before getting back on board. The bar on the train would open and close at strange hours, according to the rules of whichever state we were travelling through.

  Finally we arrived in Detroit, the place I loved the best, although it was by far the least glamorous. It was suffering from the effects of the riots that had happened just a few months before. However it was the first time I had been in a predominantly black community which had money. The shops were full of people spending and having fun. I went with another actor to a concert where we were the only white people in the audience. It got a bit hairy when one of the acts seemed to consist of a guy just shouting ‘burn, whitey, burn’ to a drum beat. The audience however treated us with complete graciousness. I also met up with a beautiful American football player, also black, who took me to some fantastic music clubs. One we had to leave hastily as there grew a sense of animosity towards us from the girls there. I was scared. They were going to ‘kick my butt’.

  Good friends then and now: Terry Taplin, George Galitzine, Sarah Ponsonby, Murphy the dog, me and Andrew Sanders.

  The huge Diego Rivera murals in the town hall, so overtly pro worker, were astounding for that capitalist country. Detroit was not pretty, but to me it seemed beautiful and at that time I much preferred it to San Francisco or Los Angeles.

  Work carried on at the RSC with many different productions, many different roles. One of the advantages of regular employment was that, on paper, it made you look like a responsible person to those in the financial world. I took advantage of this and bought my first house, at last having saved enough money for the deposit. I bought it together with my old friend Terry Taplin and his girlfriend, Lindy. We were to share the house, them upstairs and me downstairs. At that time you could not get a joint mortgage without being engaged to be married, so Terry and I went through an overacted pantomime as an engaged couple for the benefit of the mortgage lenders. It involved sitting on knees, I seem to remember. We got our mortgage, and the three of us moved into a respectable working-class part of London called Parsons Green. We promptly painted the red-brick house green and yellow, all over, like a Jamaican house. Over the next eighteen years we watched the area turn into the expensive exclusive part of London it now is.

  After four years of work and travel, rehearsal and performance with the RSC, I began to feel as if I was walking on the spot, or rather gently making a wheel of tasteful culture go round and round.

  Things were moving and shaking in the world of theatre by this time. Actors were questioning the very shape of theatre, asking why did it have to be performed in a theatre at all, or from a written text. In the States the Living Theater and La MaMa were throwing the whole thing up in the air and in Europe Grotowski was experimenting with the psychology of theatre. Actors wanted smaller, more intimate spaces. Fringe theatre was on the rise.

  Back then, there was no small space in Stratford. That came later out of the move by a group of actors and trainee directors, including Mike Leigh and Mark Rylance, to borrow a small space
in the gardens at Stratford. Much to the annoyance of the bureaucracy, they made their own theatre there where Mike Leigh experimented with his first improvised theatre, Mark devised plays, and Ben Kingsley did a brilliant impersonation of Peter Brook.

  Opposite: Now I had my own costumes made for me, it was my name sewn inside. I was very proud. Here is a fitting for the costume for Cressida, a beautiful white silk dress.

  Below: On stage as Cressida with Sebastian Shaw as Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida at the RSC, 1968.

  Below left: A voice production lesson with Kate Fleming.

  After Manchester I Joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. My first two roles were Castiza in ‘Revenger’s Tragedy’ and Cressida in ‘Troilus and Cressida’. I was not really ready for this but steamed ahead anyway, helped by kind and experienced actors like Sebastian Shaw, Norman Rodway, and especially Ian Richardson. Ian took me under his wing, showed me respect and taught me with generosity. He and his wife Maroussia were so kind, I shall never forget it.

  Opposite: Playing Miss Julie in Miss Julie, RSC, 1972.

  In the long wait in ‘Hamlet’ after the mad scene and before the gravedigger scene, my friend Barry Stanton and I would get up to mischief. He was playing the gravedigger and I was Ophelia. I liked to haunt the roof of the theatre at Stratford, in my death make-up. I would wander up and down, hoping a tourist would catch sight of me and think I was a ghost. Barry and I also invented a story of Ophelia and the gravedigger being madly in love, a tragic story that ends with both their deaths.