by Helen Mirren
Dear, kind Auntie Gwen made it possible for me to go by letting me stay in her very small flat in Hampstead Road. It had a shared toilet and no bathroom. You had to wash standing in the kitchen in a bowl of water. A completely dangerous madman lived upstairs. It was perfect for me, because it made it possible for me to do this very exciting thing.
I only played a citizen, running and shouting with everyone else, but it was a start, and best of all it took place in a real theatre, the sadly destroyed Scala, just off Goodge Street, with a real stage door, real wings, real flies and a real auditorium. I vividly remember those dim, dusty wings, the ropes going high up into the darkness and the romance of the lit-up wooden stage. Just to walk through the entrance marked STAGE DOOR was thrilling. The physicality of the bricks and mortar of theatre was then and still is very important to me, and any theatre, even one that’s empty, is full of meaning.
The next year I played Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was impressed by wearing a costume that had once been worn by Diana Rigg, already a famous actress. It had her name sewn in! I loved that little name tag. It made me feel like a professional. The following year I played Cleopatra and my career was launched.
In the meantime I had started my college studies in the New College of Speech and Drama, a teacher training college housed within Anna Pavlova’s old home, Ivy House. This graceful villa on the Hampstead Road had a pond in the garden and two resident swans, à la Swan Lake. Anna Pavlova had been one of my heroines when I was in love with ballet. One night an audience showed their appreciation for her dancing by unhitching the horses from her troika and pulling it themselves, cheering, through the snowy streets of St Petersburg. Now that’s a star! The welcoming speech as the new intake of students gathered for the first time in her old house commenced with a warning: if we wanted to act, we were in the wrong place. This college was only for teachers. My heart sank.
I had wanted to go to drama school, but my local council would not give grants for drama, art or music schools, thus making it economically impossible for me. So this was the next best thing, and it appealed to my parents, who wanted me to have something to fall back on. During my training, I taught in Bethnal Green Secondary Mod and it was abundantly clear that the teaching profession was not one I would excel in. My classes were mayhem.
The programme for Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It did give me an opportunity to discover the village nature of London, however. As a newcomer to the grand old city, I decided to teach a course on London architecture because it was something that impressed me. Midway through describing the architecture of Regent Street, I noticed puzzled looks on their faces. A hand went up.
‘Where’s Regent’s Street, miss?’
‘It’s that big shopping street right in the middle of London. You know, the one that leads from Piccadilly Circus to Oxford Street.’
They hadn’t heard of them either. I wondered if they were pulling my leg. This was a class of fifteen-year-olds, after all. Then, as I questioned them, it became clear that they had never been further west than Tottenham Court Road, a couple of stops on the Underground. For them, that was ‘going up West’. The rest of London was unknown territory; Chelsea might as well have been as far away as Manchester.
While at college I made wonderful friends, including Peter Freeman and his girlfriend Judy. Now known as Paul Freeman, he also became a successful actor. We had absolutely no money. I often went to bed wearing my coat as I could not afford to feed the gas-fire meter. Pubs cost money too, but at least they were warm and you could pretend to be drinking by getting lost in the crowd. There was also a coffee bar in Hampstead, called the Coffee Cup, where the owners kindly let you sit for hours with one cup of coffee.
My first digs comprised a room in a flat owned by a brave Jewish lady, who was very ill and needed to have oxygen every day. A lecturer at London University, hers was a brilliant mind in a twisted body. She was also the kindest person, putting up with me setting fire to her curtains by going out and leaving candles burning, and stealing a spoonful or two of cottage cheese from her fridge. She only threw me out when she started coming across strange boys in her corridor at one in the morning.
It was of course in London that I found sex, or rather it found me. It was not a wonderful discovery, or one sought out by me. It became the source of much heartache as I experienced the calumny of young men. I had arrived an innocent in mind and body, with very romantic notions that somehow sat side by side with my vehement feminism. It turned out to be a lethal mix. My trustful romantic nature was badly let down, my feminism confronted. I felt worthless and shamed, and became suspicious, hurt and angry, until I found someone who really cared for me. I am still pissed off, actually.
My next digs were a room in the attic of a tall building whose only bathroom was six flights down, with the ubiquitous meter for the hot water. I was living on my grant, which was tiny. It was hard enough to eat, let alone pay for hot water. As a supplement to my income I got a job as an usherette in the Everyman, an art cinema in Hampstead. I had a torch and a black dress. I loved both the costume and the role. There I got to see some of the greatest films of all time. In particular I remember Citizen Kane, which I saw many times.
After playing Cleopatra to some acclaim with the Youth Theatre I still had a year of college to go. I had an agent, and a job if I wanted. Quite a few repertory theatres had made enquiries. The question was whether to leave and start work in that real world. If I left college, it would mean I would have to pay back my grant. The thought of that debt terrified me, and foolishly I stayed on, even though it was clear by then that I was not destined to teach.
Playing Kitty in Charley’s Aunt, University Theatre, Manchester, 1969.
At this time I had the good luck to meet and go out with, and stay in with Ken Cranham, a fellow actor from the National Youth Theatre. It was Ken who restored my self-esteem and romantic tendencies. We loved each other. I found a person who shared my interests, and introduced me to more. He was so lovely to me and I am indebted to him. He saved me from a terminal rage. His family were kind-hearted and welcoming. His mother often cooked us a delicious Sunday lunch that was gratefully received. We would also dream about going to a good restaurant and ordering separate dishes. We had so little money we had to go to the cheapest Chinese or Indian place and share one bowl of the least expensive item on the menu. When Ken left college ahead of me and landed a job in the West End, in a Joe Orton play, he immediately took me to a posh Chinese restaurant, where we ordered more than one dish. It was fabulous.
Ken, like all the men I have had a proper relationship with, left me a better person than he found me. He took me to boxing matches; I remember going to Leicester Square at three in the morning to watch Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston on the big screen. It was an amazing night. Strangely, all my guys have loved boxing, good food and good music. We would also queue up for the gods at the Old Vic and see Olivier and Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Frank Finlay and Geraldine McEwan, in legendary performances. Ken once queued up all night for a ticket to see Olivier playing Othello, a famous performance. He got the ticket and then slept through the whole thing because he was so tired from being up all night. These productions and performances I remember very clearly. It was extraordinarily exciting, and fed into my ambitions of becoming a great stage actress. Nothing on the screen compared to it for me. I did love foreign films, however, and we would go to see Fellini, Antonioni, Renoir, Alain Resnais and anything French.
Ken went to RADA, the illustrious drama school. I was jealous. The students seemed confident and sophisticated, even supercilious, and they had scripts under their arms. In retrospect, however, I’m very glad I did not go to drama school. I think that experience can destroy as much as it teaches. It is an intensely competitive environment, much more so than in the professional arena. I was left in the raw, so to speak, and my learning took place in the real world of theatre, acting with, watching, and therefore being taught by some of t
he best actors in Britain.
My first professional job was in Manchester at the University Theatre (which later became the Royal Exchange Theatre). After playing Cleopatra with the Youth Theatre I had been approached by agents who wanted to represent me. I was very lucky in this, as it’s so often a catch-22 situation for actors: you can’t get work without an agent, and you can’t get an agent without working.
I signed with a darling man, Al Parker, an old-school American agent living in London and working with his wife, Maggie Parker, an ex-actress who by then was really running the agency. She approached agenting in a very motherly way. Whether you were eating healthily was as important as what role you were playing. Making money mattered less than making a career. She stayed my agent until she retired, many years later, and then I remained with her loyal assistant, Sandy Rees.
The telegram sent by Al Parker after seeing Antony and Cleopatra.
Maggie and Al sent me off for a couple of gruesome film auditions, one of which was with Michael Winner. He earned my eternal disdain and anger by asking me to stand up and turn around, as if I was a slave in a market. It was humiliating, and even more humiliating was the fact that I did not have the balls to overturn his desk and tell him to bugger off. I never did that again.
In fact I wanted, and was destined for, the theatre. Apart from a rare brilliant excursion into the northern working class, British film at that time consisted largely of Hammer Horror and Carry On. Neither offered anything that excited me. More than anything, I wanted to be a Shakespearean stage actress, because that writer had seduced me and addicted me.
My first break came when I was approached by Braham Murray to join his company in Manchester, to play one of the girls in Charley’s Aunt with the famous and successful actor Tom Courtenay. I spent a lot of time giggling at Tom’s brilliant performance. And after that I played Nerina in The Merchant of Venice.
There was an actor from the old school in this company called Barry Cussins, a lovely man. He taught me a lot about acting. He had done twice-weekly rep just after the war, which meant having to rehearse, learn and perform two different plays every week. This inevitably led to all kinds of disasters, and he shared with me many of those great old theatre stories. This was really the start of my professional career, and it held all the delights of repertory theatre.
The first of these was the digs. Not so different from being a student: no heat, or at least, no money for the meter, and not much money for food. Breakfast at the digs consisted of mountains of wet white bread thinly spread with margarine. Our staple diet consisted of the most enormous and incredibly greasy spring rolls from the Chinese takeaway, which cost very little and filled you up for hours. However, there was the camaraderie, and the equality of an actors’ ensemble, something all actors love and feel comfortable within. This I found and loved in Manchester, and again about six months later at Stratford-upon-Avon.
Before Stratford, one of the directors at the Youth Theatre asked me to play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, a typical Angry Young Man play of the sixties. As with all those plays, it was a boy’s fantasy and the girl’s role was sexist crap. However, it was a professional engagement, with a wage attached. We played it for one week at the Empire, Sunderland. The vast, echoing mausoleum of an auditorium seated around two thousand. We attracted around two hundred. The seats of the theatre were like cinema seats; they flipped noisily up if anyone stood to leave. Many people took that option, especially when I had to deliver the line ‘Will you shaft me?’ By the end of the play there were maybe a hundred and thirty-four left in the audience.
I had great friends at college, especially my dear friend, Judy Mathieson. My three years at teacher training college did not ultimately impact upon my professional life as much as joining the National Youth Theatre. Starting as a walk-on ‘courtier’ in ‘Hamlet,’ it was there that I met my first proper boyfriend, Ken Cranham, and mixed with other hopefuls. It was my first taste of the community of actors.
The following year I was asked to play Helena in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Bad casting, as Helena is supposed to be tall and thin and I was short and fattish. I was very excited because the costume had Diana Rigg’s name sewn into it. She is tall and thin, and she was a famous actress. I felt I had arrived in the real world of acting, even though my costume didn’t fit. Here Diana and I are both wearing the same costume.
Right: Applying my make-up for Cleopatra, 1965; Below: On Cleopatra’s throne; Opposite: A photograph taken during a break in rehearsals, and below right, combing my wig.
In my third year at the Youth Theatre I was asked to play Cleopatra. I had to overcome my toxic mix of a great physical shyness and a palpable physical presence. I was in an environment full of testosterone and chaotic male hormones, and the word sexist had not yet been invented. I was in at the deep end. I loved the power and the passion of that role, and of course, it’s always good to be queen. I tried to ignore the real world and engage in the imaginative world of that great character. I had to do my own wig and make-up, of course. I also had a horrible flu for the whole of the one and only week we played at the Old Vic Theatre. This was the role that launched my career.
Stratford
The Royal Shakespeare Company and a house called Parsenn Sally
I had been invited to audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and duly did, and was given a place in that extraordinary and subsidised institution. Trevor Nunn had just taken over from Peter Hall. He was young, only twenty-seven, I believe, and looked eighteen, so he was regularly challenged by the security guard on his way to rehearsals.
It was the perfect time to join, the start of something new. My first role was as Castiza in the macabre Jacobean play, Revenger’s Tragedy. It gave me a love for those Gothic, extreme plays of passion, murder and mayhem – sixteenth-century Quentin Tarantino, right up my alley. This was a spectacular production, all in black and white, very visual and with a sensational central performance by Ian Richardson, matched by the great Alan Howard. Castiza was not much of a role, all put-upon innocence, not the kind of thing I wanted to play, but a central role, and a wonderful way to start.
In fact, the whole experience was a wonderful way to start. The theatre was big and vocally demanding, so I was in at the deep end there. We had a voice teacher, Kate Fleming, followed by the famous Cicely Berry; and above all we had rehearsals. The repertory system means you rehearse at day and perform at night, different plays. Sometimes we would rehearse one play in the morning, perform another play in the afternoon and another one at night, all great pieces of literature. Around this time, my relationship with Ken came to an end, unable to withstand the pressure of my putting work before love.
At night we would fall into the Black Swan pub, otherwise known as the Dirty Duck, for a lock-in that would last until three or four in the morning. Then I would head home through the low fog that rises on the Avon as the sun rises. The Dirty Duck is the only pub I have ever loved. It was run at that time by a powerhouse called Pam, who knew the most intimate details about every actor, both professional and personal. She was a tyrant and a mother confessor, an amazing woman in body and personality, and she took no shit from anyone. It was the place you could bang on about the audience, about why this scene worked and that one didn’t, and about what was going on in the rehearsal room, ad nauseam.
You could joke and you could flirt. You could laugh until you cried and then cry until someone made you laugh again. After a performance, actors need a space to unwind. It is physically and mentally impossible to go straight to bed when you come off stage. Like everyone else, actors need to complain, gossip and crack jokes. The only trouble is that they get off work at eleven at night. The Dirty Duck performed a great service for many years before me and many years after. Its walls must resound with the passions of thousands of performers, actors and dancers, for the Royal Ballet would do a season there as well. Pam told me that the dancers were even bigger drinkers than the actors.
As ever, I found a room in what must have been the last remaining building in Stratford without a proper bathroom or running hot water. It didn’t matter too much because it was in a beautiful old Elizabethan building, full of atmosphere, and I had the theatre just across the street. I earned very little that first year, being the lowest of the low in wage terms. Once again, barely enough to eat, and not enough to spend money in the pub, so alcohol did not feature in my life. Nights in the Duck consisted of sitting with one warm drink for hours. It was quite a few years before I could drink much more than a glass or two without being dizzy or sick.
In the company was an actor called Bruce Myers who made me laugh and became my partner. Bruce came from a large excitable Jewish family based in Manchester, and I found them very liberating and great fun to be around. Although I was not Jewish they showed me warmth and made me welcome. Some of his family are still very close friends.
On stage as Cressida.
I think it was in my second year at Stratford that I met up with a group of people who would become very good friends for the rest of my life when I visited a house called Parsenn Sally. Though Sarah Ponsonby’s home has often mistakenly been described as a commune, it was in truth simply a house that was shared by a group of friends, like a flat share in London, except in the country. It was an artists’ haven, visited by musicians, painters, jugglers, gardeners, horse trainers, actors, furniture makers, property developers, designers, rich people and poor people, and general hangers-on.
