I think there were times when Dad felt acutely different and needed to escape. At work, for example, he withdrew at lunchtimes. He never told me that, but it was obvious. When I looked at my dad’s paper in the evening, all the crosswords would be done (all the races would be marked, too – but my mum wouldn’t know about that). Dad, like any working-class man, had to take in the world around him, make a lightning-quick assessment of how to survive, and get on with it. His love of his dictionary was apparent in the house, but he wasn’t likely to go to the boozer or the factory and speak about it. Chances are he’d have been mocked, so he kept his mouth shut. The nearest he could get to his real character at work without sticking out was the crossword.
For the modern man, masculinity comes from within. For the working-class man, it came from without. I believe Dad came into this world caught between the masculine and the feminine. He was innately a very, very sensitive bundle. But his default way of behaving was learnt, laddy, an act, a character he took on to survive. You can’t go into Colgate-Palmolive on a stacker truck spouting the sonnets of Shakespeare. Would you want to be the one examining your deeper feelings, in depth, in a factory or pub full of men? Working-class life, in my dad’s day, was about survival. Those survival chances would not have been helped in any way by opening up regards your doubts about your own masculinity or how it was defined in society in general. Men might admire one another’s skills – ‘You want to see his joinery’ – but there wasn’t enough time, learnt freedom or communal will for any deeper examination of one another’s feelings. Dad certainly didn’t have the luxury of being able to explore his masculinity through being an actor. His wasn’t a bohemian life of self-analysis and pondering the relevance of classic stage works to an imagined ‘man of today’. His male peers were present, real, as was his life. There were other more pressing matters than a discussion about the Lakeland poets.
When, after Central, I had felt totally lost, detached from the industry I was trying to operate in, with pressure closing in from all sides, and developed an overwhelming need to speak to someone about it, I began seeing a therapist. Back then, to walk into somewhere and try to get therapy very much wasn’t the done thing. Yes, everybody does therapy now, but this was the ’80s and I was a hairy-arsed northerner. What took me there was the line from Grandad Pop to my dad to me. The difference between me and them was that I was living in the modern world and I was not going to deny quite how vulnerable and feminine I was, something they had to do out of necessity. Therapy wasn’t an option for them. Dad was working in heavy industry. He’d go home and read his dictionary, but when he went out the door to Colgate-Palmolive, he put his work face back on. Talk about acting. He did that five days a week for year after year.
Dad was, however, in private at least, allowed to be more flexible, albeit with a good measure of conflict and contradiction. To show weakness in a platoon is to let the platoon down. I wouldn’t want to be the one who did that, but I also wouldn’t want to be the one who vilified the man who revealed it, and, while he’d lived in much less reconstituted times, I saw the same in my dad. I remember him once sat on his throne very uncomfortably watching John Hurt all tarted up as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant. There’s one scene where Crisp walks round a corner only to see a load of soldiers outside a pub. He knows he’s going to get beaten up, but he makes a decision, setting himself and walking through them – ‘Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can.’ The soldiers don’t hit him because they’re too consumed with bemusement at the audacity of what he’s done. While this was unfolding on screen, I was watching my dad out the corner of my eye. I could tell he admired Crisp, and I knew, because of the world of strong masculinity, and indeed casual homophobia, he occupied, that the emotions he was experiencing confused him. He also loved Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner, a male in crisis, trapped and emasculated, an antidote to Bond, and with more than an element of homo-eroticism.
Dad asked me once, ‘You’re not a gristle-twister, are you?’, because I’d told him I didn’t have a girlfriend.
Much more preferable to be ‘podgin’’ – shagging. I’d been doing exactly that when I came home one Sunday morning and my dad was outside working on his car.
‘Where’ve you been?’ He eyed me up and down, those blond streaks in my hair, Paul Calf meets Kenneth Branagh. ‘Have you been podgin’?’ I blushed and half indicated I had.
‘You can make yourself bloody ill, you know,’ he said, and went back to his car.
It was the same with other prejudices. The racism he saw on Roots would make him seethe, and yet he himself would use racial epithets. This man who admired Paul Robeson so much would, in clear opposition to that fascination, use terms that were wholly unacceptable. I believe that came from two things – wanting to be one of the boys and fear of the unknown. Again, we get back to the rudimentary education he was given. When I came back from drama school, your classic Rik Mayall student, I berated my parents about racism and my dad commented, ‘I have to say, my doctor’s Indian but he’s a nice fella.’ It was said in all innocence. I know had he seen a black man being racially abused he’d have found it intolerable. He hated bullying. To be a bully was not to be a man. Had he walked down a street and seen two white men dishing out a hiding to a black bloke on his own, he’d have pasted the pair of them.
Dad’s masculinity, therefore, was oblique. It wasn’t straightforward. His attachment to the underdog meant he understood the many shades of right and wrong, strength and weakness. And yet as much as he respected the voice of the oppressed, the minority, he was also informed, as is so often the case, by that desire not to stand out. He was an individual who, on occasion, felt, due to decades of social engineering, compelled to go with the crowd. To show a sensitive side was to invite homophobic abuse. I’d done it myself. There were a couple of lads at school we called ‘puffs’, ‘faggots’, ‘queers’. I became just like one of the other apes. Racist terms we used as well. That’s what happened in white working-class backgrounds in the ’60s and ’70s, especially in my area because it was all white. That was something else I rejected. I came to London and started mixing with people of all kinds of sexuality and race.
Equally, to be masculine was not to show overt sensitivity in a relationship. Dad loved my mum very, very deeply, but I wouldn’t see him being romantic or showing obvious displays of affection. I never saw them holding hands or kissing, but then my mum’s not that physically demonstrative either. You could say she’s of that era, but none of us have broken that barrier, so maybe it’s just in the genes. With the Ecclestons, we communicate how we feel with our eyes. If you want much more, forget it.
Similarly, there’d be no bunches of flowers from Dad – none of that – and he didn’t like dancing – he was too self-conscious, too embarrassed – so Mum would always dance with somebody else.
I once went into my mum and dad’s room and saw a book, The Sun is my Tormentor, a Mandingo-esque novel of love and adventure, by Mum’s side of the bed. Seeing my mother in middle age and her desire for romance moved me deeply. It made me cry. I felt for her emptiness and also because I knew there were greater romantic novels that, because of her conditioning as being unworthy of such literature, she perhaps felt she couldn’t venture into.
Who knows how the physical side of their relationship expressed itself? As anyone of my generation knows, there was rarely, if ever, any discussion about sex. It was bad enough if it happened on the telly, let alone in your own house. On holiday, because of money, I would share a room with them. That’s when most couples might finally relax. And there was me on a camp bed. How did they handle that?
I feel I am caught in a dichotomy with masculinity. I understand its crushing historic negativity and the untold damage it can cause as it cascades down through the generations, and yet I cannot deny that it has an importance, a resonance, with me, which makes me reluctant to throw out a lot of masculine tropes. I genuinely like the physicality of males. It’s part o
f us, and I love it. The question, then, is whether physicality is the same as masculinity. For me, the difference is that to be a man does not mean to be in denial of one’s feelings; it does not mean a stultifying lack of communication and adopting the mental and physical mannerisms of the traditional alpha male. For myself, there are roles I feel that have suited me as a man better than others. I was reminded during the rehearsals for Macbeth that I can’t work intellectually. The director kept telling me, ‘We just want to see you thinking.’ I don’t know what thinking is or means. I don’t trust my mental ability and I come from generations of people taught not to trust theirs, to regard themselves as not having an intellect. The way I play any role is physically and instinctively and intuitively. Sounds a bit grandiose, but that’s just the way I am. I don’t play any part with my head; I do it with my heart and my body, exactly how I would on a building site or in a war zone. Macbeth is a person of the body, a soldier, which made me feel qualified to play him in a way that I’m not qualified to play Hamlet. I needed to play Macbeth by saying the words and then on some emotional, intuitive level get into his head. Now I have landed on words in a book, but again this memoir is hewn predominantly from what happened anywhere other than in an intellectual, or even plain academic, environment. I would find freedom of inner expression through anywhere other than education.
As quite a physical actor, the physical performance of Macbeth was well in my ballpark. But truly to reflect him as a fighting machine, I had to look like one. People go out and play Macbeth and perform as if they’re reading poetry. Wrong. He’s a warrior, and I went to work on the weights to make myself look like one. When I played Hamlet, on the other hand, I never thought anyone could believe me in that role. It wasn’t so much the less defined physicality; I simply never thought anyone could accept me as a student of philosophy at Wittenberg. But I believe, and I think others would too, that I could be a soldier and cut someone’s head off. Hamlet has an intellectual complexity. Macbeth? By killing, he just becomes confronted with his self. At that point, he’s basically a grunt, and I can do that. But is one less of a man than the other? Shakespeare’s brilliance was to take a character like Macbeth, the ‘grunt’ of my own description, and then add layer after layer of complex internal and external emotional questions. A man asking, as all men are forced to at some point, several points, ‘Who am I?’ I’d noticed it before when I was playing smaller roles in the play, such as the Bloody Sergeant. From my vantage point, I’d watch, fascinated by what Shakespeare was doing, taking somebody who has killed children, killed an old man in his sleep, and making us feel sympathy for him. How? How can we be sympathising with this monster? At the same time, Macbeth is experiencing serious mental torture, a breakdown in modern parlance, as he tries to reconcile the man he is with the man he wants to be. The genius of Shakespeare is that he wrote Macbeth in 1623. He was sparking conversation about masculinity centuries before they started discussing it on Newsnight. I wonder how he’d feel to know that the masculinity debate would still be raging 400 years later. But Shakespeare was far from the initiator of that debate. Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, in which I starred at the National Theatre, was written in 441 BC. Then I played Creon, a man whose intractability is his weakness and yet he is blind to the failing. Absolute masculinity. And again a state of mind I felt compelled to inhabit and explore if I was going to deliver the role to the best of my ability.
It’s important to recognise that, while my mum appreciated Dad’s gentler side, she enjoyed the alpha side too. Having Dad in the house made us all feel, I’m sure her included, that nobody was going to cross us as a family. I was once hit by a metalwork teacher at school so hard that I flew across the room. I was messing about and he saw me. A huge bloke, he got up out of his chair – it was the suspense that was most horrible – and walked slowly across the classroom. And then it came – wallop! I told my mum and my brothers and they were adamant that Dad shouldn’t find out. He would have been straight up there and filled him in. I didn’t need telling. I knew to avoid revealing matters of emotional import to my dad because I wouldn’t want to distress him. My mum and my brothers were the people I went to. My brothers were unusually feminine and would give me the support I needed. Keith echoed my dad, a gentler version. Alan was maternal and echoed my mum.
Mum also saw a man who got his hands dirty and grafted, a man who was never late for work and never had a day off sick. Dad did what the man did – he provided. The adjunct to that, the bolt-on extra, was that he was smart, considerate and polite. I saw every side of Dad as she did, which opened my eyes to an unspoken, barely recognised form of maleness. At the same time, my mother’s personality – equally strong, but more predominantly calm, loving, open – delivered an intensely female side to me. So maybe I am more like Hamlet than Macbeth after all. Asking that essential question, ‘Am I my mother or am I my father?’, in the end Hamlet concludes that he’s neither, he’s actually himself – ‘I love them both and they’re part of me, but actually there’s a me.’ I have yet to reach that level of certainty. It feels there is too much of Dad in me ever to claim independence. Our identities are knotted too intricately together, which has meant some quick and highly necessary realignment at times. When I came to London in the early ’80s, it might as well have been in the form of a dinosaur plodding down the M1. That dinosaur had to learn quickly. He had to deal, quite rightly, with the third wave of feminism. The women I went to drama school with were going to Compendium bookshop in Camden Town and reading Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. I was raised by a bloke who came from a very male environment and my male role models, Sean Connery in James Bond and Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name, were so far pre-#MeToo they may as well have existed in the Palaeolithic period.
Through the arts and acting, I found a way wholly to be myself, unashamedly, while remaining male. I could love football as well as poetry. Society didn’t allow Dad that luxury. I have represented that working-class position so many times on screen, men who are, both physically and in terms of their employment, archetypally masculine, but are enduring personal crisis, a tension between how they believe they should project themselves and how they actually feel. It feels as if I’ve played dozens of incredible and emotionally complex men, and yet at the same time always played my dad. It’s as if I, and the writers I have encountered, have always known the fascination with Dad that churns inside me, possibly because the same obsession churns inside them with their own fathers.
I’ve spent my entire life trying to hook the best bits of my dad and throwing the worst bits back, and that tension has given me a career. Look at Trevor Hicks – dignity at all times. I understood that because I’d seen it in my dad. Drew McKenzie – huge potential stymied by institutional self-preservation, blindness and bias. Again, Dad. I could go on – and on.
Robert De Niro once pointed out, ‘You know actors win Oscars for crying? Human beings try not to cry.’ He’s right. I’ve played lots of characters who try not to cry. I studied at the master. I saw how he reacted when he heard the news that his best friend Larry Morgan had died. It was as though he went into shock. He was fighting the emotion. As much as it tried to get out, he was pushing it back down again. He was physicalising the pain. ‘He was my best friend.’ Feet treading on the spot. ‘He was my best friend.’ Arms up and down. Fighting, fighting. It was like the horse had got out of control and he was trying to rein it in. I know, in the same position, my mum would unashamedly have quietly wept in front of us.
I only saw Dad cry once. In 1976, he managed to get hold of tickets from a lorry driver for the FA Cup final between Manchester United and Southampton. I’d completely fallen in love with the Tommy Doherty United and been to every game home and away in the run to Wembley. I couldn’t have been more excited – except, of course, the tickets he’d got hold of were from a Southampton lorry driver. We emerged from the stairwell slap bang in the middle of the Southampton end. I burst into tears, so upset it made my dad cry too.
A Southampton dad consoled me, which my dad really appreciated. Thankfully, the deal Dad struck next year for the FA Cup final against Liverpool, tickets that were like gold dust, saw us well and truly ensconced in the United fans.
Maybe Dad cried when his sons were born, although when the twins came into the world he wasn’t even allowed to be in the same room. Hospitals made no provision for men to be present. Even to enquire would have been deemed an oddity. Word was he was so consumed with anxiety that he ripped up his cigarette packet and book of matches while he was waiting outside. Thankfully, attitudes changed between 1956 and 1964, which meant he was present when I made my entrance.
‘I will never ever forget the look on your mother’s face when she first saw you,’ he used to tell me. Again, he lived that moment vicariously through her. His fascination, his satisfaction, was in witnessing a woman see her offspring for the first time. From that moment on, he saw Elsie Eccleston through the prism of childbirth. It changed his perception of her and heightened his respect to see her go through birth and bring another human being into the world.
There was something about birth in particular that caused absolute wonderment in Dad. If it was featured on a documentary, he would get emotional. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ he’d say. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ Over and over again. He would watch all the viscera of it and be amazed by it, whereas some men, especially back then, would have been, ‘Turn it off!’
It’s one of the reasons Mum fell in love with him – she knew the tenderness was there. Behind those four walls she encouraged it to come out. When she had children, she was telling him, ‘This is in you. They need you.’ He didn’t need asking twice. He was already versed in strong emotional attachment. He had a very paternal side when it came to his own family, always there for his brothers and sisters if they had a problem. My mum always said how marvellous he was when his own dad had dementia. He didn’t need to be asked; he wanted to be right there caring for him. He’d go round straight from work. He was very nurturing, not a word some might expect to see in an examination of working-class masculinity. And right there is the crux of the situation – masculinity is just as subject to idle stereotype as femininity. I have been as guilty of that as anyone at times, but the more I have stopped and sought to understand masculinity, the more I have learned that really there is no simple definition. I set out to understand the line of men I come from and my place in it, only to find that perceived uniformity, that line, is actually non-existent. Each and every one of those men will have been wildly different, leaping from one generation to the next, shedding and accruing baggage along the way. Everything in common and nothing in common. As individuals, how could it be any other way? What saddens me is that their uniqueness was so abjectly dismissed. To the factory owners, the politicians, the generals, they were anonymous. Their lives were purely functional, utterly unimportant, and within that skewed dynamic a masculinity based wholly on survival thrived.
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