by Justin Lewis
As the 1990s dawned, Benedict’s days at Brambletye were coming to an end. The school’s headmaster had an idea for where the boy should go next. He suggested to his parents that maybe the ideal place for Benedict could be the school he had attended himself: Harrow. There he might find the structure and responsibility to help him continue his journey through the educational system.
Brambletye had not been a cheap educational option. Harrow would be pricier still. Throughout the 1980s, Benedict’s parents had taken numerous stage and screen jobs to ensure that their son’s school bills would be paid. By 1989, Wanda was playing Rodney’s mother-in-law Pamela in Only Fools and Horses, and touring in stage farces by Ray Cooney.
Harrow was not an inexpensive option, and Wanda and Timothy needed a scholarship in order for Benedict to attend. ‘I’m not a hereditary peer,’ Cumberbatch remarked years later. ‘I wasn’t born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.’ Yet despite his relatively modest background when compared to many of his peers, Benedict Cumberbatch would feel extremely grateful for his education at Harrow.
CHAPTER 2
AN INCREDIBLY PRIVILEGED BUBBLE
Benedict Cumberbatch’s five years at Harrow School began in the autumn of 1990. He had turned fourteen in July of that year. Around two-thirds of the funding towards his education there had come from his grandmother, whose family owned a tea plantation in India.
He arrived at the 400-year-old school, populated by around 800 pupils. Fagging and corporal punishment were still commonplace. ‘One night, while I was doing my homework, there was a terrible commotion. It seemed like the entire school was chasing this one boy who’d been caught “fiddling”.’
Harrow had been a prestigious school for centuries. Its alumni included seven British Prime Ministers, including Robert Peel, Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill, the poet Lord Byron, the novelist Anthony Trollope, and the creator of Horace Rumpole, John Mortimer. But Benedict felt like an outsider to begin with. ‘I was a very middle-class kid by most standards,’ he said in 2005. ‘I was surrounded by Lord Rothschild’s son, Prince Hussein’s son, dignitaries, princes and peers.’ Many of his contemporaries in the 1990s were from far wealthier backgrounds. ‘Everyone was always going on fantastic holidays, and I would be like, “Yeah, I’m going to see my gran in Brighton.”’
He soon ‘fell in with a nice bunch of teachers’, a few of whom – like drama teacher Martin Tyrell – gave him the impetus to develop his acting abilities in the school productions. And it wasn’t long before he found like-minded peers in the classroom. ‘I was gregarious and found a coterie of brothers I’d never had before.’ He had an inbuilt confidence, partly spurred on by the love and support he had always been shown by his parents. He did not feel entitled to be at Harrow, but felt he was able to investigate what was going on. He was not naturally clever, but he was good at learning.
Letters home to his parents were sincerely, blissfully happy. There was a brief period when he was targeted by a school bully, and his sense of confidence momentarily dissolved. Then he remembered himself. He pinned his enemy against the wall. No further bullying took place.
It is abundantly clear, checking through back issues of Harrow School’s weekly magazine, The Harrovian, that Benedict Cumberbatch was one of Harrow’s star drama pupils. But his first mentions came not from stage appearances, but from his contributions on the sporting field. Even in his first year, he was part of the Yearlings’ rugby team, and would soon join the Junior Colts cricket squad, who would play matches against Eton, Radley and Wellington. In his third year, he would lead the Junior Colts for a while, when the resident team captain was indisposed.
According to Harrovian reviews, ‘B.T.C. Cumberbatch’ gets his first name-check for performance in 1991, after participating in a concert involving the ‘Shells’ (the most junior year at Harrow) on 3 March. But it was in the summer of that year that he made a breakthrough. June found him performing material from Geoffrey Willan’s comic school stories about Nigel Molesworth, and reciting from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Most notably, that same month, he was cast in a production of the Bard’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Given that Harrow was an all-boys school, there were no girls to play the female roles in the play. Three years after Bottom, Cumberbatch was assigned the part of Titania. ‘Cumberbatch was every inch the imperious Fairy Queen,’ reported The Harrovian in its 15 June issue. ‘His ringing tones filled Speech Room, and he displayed a mature control of gesture and movement that promises much for future productions. What most impressed here was the sense of danger this young actor breathed into the fairy kingdom.’ ‘Even then, I was conscious of being typecast,’ Cumberbatch told The Sunday Times later. ‘After rehearsals, I’d be backstage, whipping off my Cleo Laine-style Titania wig and changing into my rugby kit.’
Incidentally, fans of comedy at the school had an extra treat that Saturday night. Several ‘Old Harrovians’ (i.e. former pupils) presented their own special interpretations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One was the writer and founder of Comic Relief, Richard Curtis, who had been head boy at Harrow in the mid-1970s. He presented a specially written ‘Ode to Shakespeare by Edmund Blackadder’.
It was around this time that Cumberbatch met a future co-star for the first time. Much later, Rebecca Hall – the daughter of theatre director Sir Peter Hall and the operatic soprano Maria Ewing – would become good friends with Benedict. They would appear together in the film Starter for 10 and the TV series Parade’s End. But at the time, Rebecca was eight years old, and she was only in the audience because the best friend she had accompanied had an older brother in Benedict’s class. ‘You could already see what he was going to be like when he was middle-aged,’ Hall would tell the Daily Telegraph in 2012. ‘He is a one-off. It is the fate of people who are unique for others not to notice their talent straight off the bat. Benedict was never going to be the next anybody. He was always going to be just who he is.’
In the year below Cumberbatch at Harrow was Laurence Fox, later star of Foyle’s War and Lewis. Fox enrolled at the school in autumn 1991, as did Patrick Kennedy, who would subsequently work with Benedict on screen: Parade’s End (again) and Cambridge Spies on TV, and in the films Atonement and War Horse. At Harrow, Cumberbatch and Kennedy would appear together several times: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with Benedict as Willy Loman and Patrick as his son Biff, was well-received, as was the 1994 staging of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, where Cumberbatch’s Petruchio landed him the tag of ‘the supreme communicator’ in the pages of The Harrovian.
By that stage, Cumberbatch was enough of a young man to be cast in exclusively male roles: as already mentioned, Petruchio, but also Clarence in Richard III (May 1993). Prior to these, though, he was often cast as women. In late 1991, he had stormed it as the maid in Georges Faydeau’s 1907 farce, A Flea in Her Ear. ‘A delightful cameo,’ The Harrovian called his appearance. ‘He had mastered the farce style to enchanting effect.’ His Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (May 1992) would be described by Harrow’s drama teacher and stage director Martin Tyrell as ‘the finest since Vanessa Redgrave’s.’ ‘I have seen pictures of that,’ elaborated Cumberbatch much later, ‘and I look like I am possessed by a woman.’
Also in his second year, he had landed the central role in Pygmalion as Eliza Doolittle. The Harrovian theatre reviews were mixed. Its write-up of this production (autumn 1991) praises how ‘convincing and commanding’ was Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Eliza Doolittle, but regretfully notes that ‘this performance lacked individuality and he never really made this amazing role his own. At times he veered from Shakespearian rhetoric to a highly convincing impression of Audrey Hepburn’. It’s worth remembering of course that this is the school play being reviewed, not press night at the Old Vic, and Cumberbatch was still only fifteen at the time, an age when few with acting aspirations have established their own personal identity, let alone mastering the identities of others. It is forgivable that he woul
d be channelling the star of My Fair Lady at that age. Soon after this, his voice broke and he began to be cast in male roles and would shine playing men of all ages.
The teenage Benedict, compelled to take on women’s parts in the plays due to a complete lack of female pupils, felt frustrated by Harrow being a boys’ school for another reason: it made him shy around the opposite sex. ‘Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap,’ he has said. ‘I was rubbish with girls for a long time.’ This wasn’t helped by an arrested physical development. ‘I was a very late developer – very late. Fifteen, 16 – maybe even 17. But the one grace of an all-boys boarding school is that you could lie about what you’d done on your holidays.’
Acting was not the only performing he did. He also did fairly well at public speaking. On 29 October 1991, he made ‘a witty and confident speech’ on the subject of fame as part of a Junior Final. It was a curiously prescient choice of subject, given how high his profile would be 20 years on, and while there is no known record of what he actually said on the subject, perhaps the experiences of his parents gave him an insight into how fame works.
He clearly excelled at recitation. In March 1994, his penultimate year at Harrow, he almost won the Lady Bourchier Reading Competition, held at the school. In the final round, he read passages from Graham Swift’s prize-winning novel Waterland, and from Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. ‘All his readings had colour, while the prose passages had excellent narrative drive,’ wrote the school magazine. Cumberbatch was placed as a joint runner-up by the special guest adjudicator, ‘Stephen Fry, Esq.’. It gave an early indication that, as well as acting, Cumberbatch was a terrific reader of prose and poetry, a skill which would lead to plenty of voice work years later, especially in radio.
But there was undoubtedly a pull towards acting which Cumberbatch experienced. Were it not for an unexpected attack of nerves, his screen debut might have happened in his mid-teens. When former pupil Andrew Birkin was busily casting for his film version of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, he went back to his old school to seek out new talent. The uneasy subject matter – incest between teenage siblings – caused Cumberbatch some discomfort, especially the prospect of having to take his clothes off. ‘I was terrified. I was really prudish at that age, and I didn’t want anyone seeing what I looked like. So I didn’t audition.’ The chance to share the limelight with a young Charlotte Gainsbourg (Andrew Birkin’s niece) was gone, but the very fact he’d been offered the opportunity to audition made him feel that he might have a future in this acting lark. ‘I think that was the moment when I stumbled into realising that acting could be a thing for life rather than just something I did during term time.’
* * *
By his third year at Harrow, it seemed no production would be complete without Benedict Cumberbatch. Whether it was Russian drama or farce or revue, he was one of the stars of the school’s drama offerings. He had joined the Rattigan Society, named after yet another Old Harrovian: the dramatist Terence Rattigan, who had been one of the giants of British theatre in the 1940s and 50s.
Though they attended Harrow 65 years apart, Cumberbatch strongly identified with Rattigan. Both had spent much of their early lives in Kensington, they were in the same house at Harrow (The Park), and both spent plenty of time poring over books in the school’s Vaughan Library.
On first seeing the numerous rows of books, Cumberbatch felt overwhelmed. ‘I thought, I probably won’t have a lifetime long enough to read the first shelf – let alone the first room, let alone the whole fucking library. I’ve always been after the idea of betterment, to understand the world around me.’ His attitude to self-education would later extend into adulthood, where it would be typical for him to research a given role thoroughly.
The Rattigan Society would visit London regularly to watch plays in the West End. In early 1993, Cumberbatch was entranced by a revival of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, starring Penelope Wilton and directed by Karel Reisz. Indeed, he was blown away by the mix of subtlety and great emotional pull of the play. ‘The big moment. I realised Rattigan had a profound depth. Among all the wit, when the mask slips it’s painfully raw.’
In June 1994, Cumberbatch made his own splash in a Rattigan revival. Back at Harrow School, he flourished in The Browning Version as the Classics master Arthur Crocker-Harris. Written in the late 1940s, The Browning Version is set at ‘a Public School in the South of England’, which many have interpreted as being Harrow. ‘Crocker-Harris’ character moves between iron resilience and emotional collapse,’ wrote The Harrovian in its 18 June issue, ‘and Cumberbatch moved through each stage of his character’s progression with considerable ability. He is to be congratulated on a performance to which he evidently committed himself fully.’ Sixteen years later, in After the Dance, Cumberbatch would make an even bigger impact in a Rattigan play.
Another production which had a strong connection with his future career took place in 1994, in a Harrow staging of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The play brought Stoppard to prominence in the 1960s, and in 2010, when the playwright made a rare return to television with his adaptation of Parade’s End, he specifically wanted Cumberbatch for the lead role of Christopher Tietjens. (It seems appropriate to mention here that in November 2013, Cumberbatch would appear in a special extract of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as part of an evening of celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of London’s National Theatre.)
Sometimes, original material would be developed for Harrow School productions. Often, these took the form of revues, consisting of short comedy sketches and songs. Occasionally, something more ambitious would be tried. In November 1992, a brand new musical was premiered over four nights. Ain’t Life Good! was loosely based around the plot of the classic Frank Capra movie, It’s A Wonderful Life. Cumberbatch, playing a heavenly Blessed Soul, was just one of over 100 people involved in the production, which reportedly played to packed houses.
Such was the reaction to Ain’t Life Good! that the following summer, it was put forward to compete in the South Bank Youth Music Festival competition. In the final round, held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 1 November 1993, it was judged to be Best Original Work. It marked the first time that Cumberbatch had been part of a prize-giving performance outside of his school gates.
Cumberbatch’s singing abilities have rarely been called upon since his schooldays, but from the reviews of the time, it sounds as if he already possessed burgeoning vocal skills. At a Swing Band Concert just before Christmas in 1994, his guest spot on ‘Minnie the ‘Moocher’ was such a hit with the audience that he was compelled to reprise it as an encore. Weeks earlier, he also did well in David Calhoun’s City of Angels, which marked the opening of Harrow School’s new Ryan Theatre in November 1994. ‘Cumberbatch perfected the character of Stone,’ wrote The Harrovian in its 8 December issue. ‘His whisky beaten, cigarette stained voice aptly captured the personality of the philandering private eye.’ It also noted his ability to make his singing voice be heard over the band, and even showed some promise as a dancer, a skill he had seemingly rarely used thus far. (Cumberbatch would later see a West End production with his parents, and at the time of writing, is likely to be involved in a big screen version, under the title The Lost City of Z.)
Whether in a starring or a supporting role, it’s evident that Cumberbatch was a superlative ensemble player. He did not act in a vacuum, he was not playing the big star, and he was co-operative with his fellow actors. But then, he was not drawn to acting because it was an opportunity to ‘show off’. Having both his parents in the business gave him a reality check about making acting a career choice. ‘Because I saw the working practices behind what they did, it didn’t carry a lot of mystique. I knew about the peripatetic nature, the uncertain income, what it can do to your social life … all of that.’
Benedict’s acting ambitions were not entirely supported by his parents to begin with, even though both were stalwarts
of British stage and screen. ‘They were like, look at us, how out of control our lifestyle is, how money’s a huge ebb and flow.’ Indeed, part of the whole game plan of sending their son to Harrow in the first place was to wean him off the notion of wanting to be an actor. Ventham and Carlton were hopeful that a balanced education would push him towards an alternative, more secure career than the one they had both pursued. It seemed their ‘plan’ had not worked.
Cumberbatch later reflected that he lacked focus in his final year at Harrow (1994–95). He confessed that, now eighteen years old, he had preferred ‘pot and girls and music’ to studying. But there still seemed to be no let-up when it came to other extra-curricular activities. In sport, he had drifted from rugby and cricket to abseiling, and had become a mainstay of the school’s paragliding regiment. He was still fanatical about art – ‘My canvases were the walls of deserted squash courts. Where else would you be indulged like that?’ – and in February 1995, a ‘huge scissors sculpture in metal and string’ he had made helped The Park win a House Art Competition at the school.
But inevitably it was as a stage presence where Benedict Cumberbatch had made his greatest impact at Harrow. One of six departing pupils of 1995 to receive an Evelyn de Rothschild Leaving Scholarship, he was singled out for greatness in July of that year by the headmaster in an end-of-term speech. While Nicholas Bomford acknowledged that it was ‘invidious to pick out boys for special mention when so much has been achieved as a result of collective endeavour’, there was no escaping that even as a team player, Ben Cumberbatch was emerging as a star. His performances on stage, said Bomford, ‘will long be remembered by those lucky enough to have seen them.’ Drama tutor Martin Tyrell would later describe him as ‘the best schoolboy actor I’ve ever worked with’.
