by Helen Mirren
I did many roles in my time with the RSC, in a variety of plays. It was a great time of learning, not just about acting, but also about literature and history. Those years gave me an everlasting love of the ensemble.
Arriving in Australia
When I was cast in Age of Consent I had never worked on film and had only travelled on an aeroplane once before. I was very excited, I was to be paid a lot of money in comparison to the measly amount I was earning at the Royal Shakespeare Company. That money was burning a hole in my pocket. I decided to go to that enemy territory, the King’s Road, to buy myself an outfit wear to travel to Australia. I bought a short brown leather skirt and a bomber jacket to match. I spent more than I had ever spent before, all of my clothes at that time coming from charity shops and jumble sales. I was delivered to Heathrow to take the plane to Honolulu. There I was to be met, given some per diem, and taken to a hotel to meet James Mason, stay the night and then travel on to Sydney the next day. The plane ride was incredible. Qantas was a young airline, eager to impress and I was travelling first class, the only person in first class. The stewardesses treated me with great care, plying me with champagne.
We arrived in Honolulu at about two in the morning, the last plane to arrive. I stepped off the plane in my leather outfit, saw my first palm tree and was instantly drenched in sweat. It was so HOT! And humid! In the terminus were people meeting people off the plane with leis made of the sweet-smelling plumeria, which they hung around the necks of their friends. I waited for my lei. No one arrived. Slowly the terminus emptied out, until I was the only person left, with my bags and very hot in my King’s Road suit, and somewhat overhung. I had no money, nowhere to stay and I simply did not know what to do. I started snivelling. Then I saw a sign that said ‘lost and found’ It was over the only office open in the airport. I considered my situation. The sign seemed to suit it.
I walked in and saw something straight out of In the Heat of the Night: a cop, substantially overweight, with sweat under his arms staining his shirt, his gun on his hip and his feet on the desk. He asked me what he could do for me. I said I was lost and needed to be found. He asked me to tell him the whole story. I said I thought I was booked into a hotel somewhere in Honolulu. He got on the phone. I was booked into the Hilton, the first one he called. He then took me to his police car, that was just like in the movies, and put the flashing light on and the siren, and drove me at 100 miles an hour to the hotel. It was a great arrival.
I was shown into a vast suite and fell asleep, exhausted. In the morning, not quite knowing where I was, I stumbled to the shutters and opened them. Before me was the magnificent blue Pacific and more palm trees gently swaying in the balmy breeze. I let out a yell that awoke James Mason in his suite next door. We then had breakfast together on the terrace facing the ocean and I was introduced to the truly glamorous and sybaritic side of the film world.
Top: There is nothing like a printed business card to make the ephemeral real.
Here are James Mason and myself in 1969 on the wild beach of Dunk Island, one of the islands off the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. I had to learn to free dive for this film, and worked up to being able to spend quite a long time under water. While in Sydney, preparing, I had been given the use of a pool to train. A wealthy couple owned this pool. The wife was quite young and charming. One day, I was practising in the pool when suddenly two enormous dogs bounded up. I heard the words ‘Rommel, Goering, come here!’ uttered in a German accent. I looked up and silhouetted against the sun was a tall grey-haired man, maybe about sixty years old. I got out as fast as I could and never went back. James and I went native doing this film. We stopped wearing shoes and formal clothes. We caused a scandal when we returned to civilisation. The good people of Townsville thought we were insulting them by appearing like a couple of savages.
Following pages: From my scrapbook. The house and the inhabitants of Parsenn Sally.
Above left: One of the hundreds of dinners for ten or more that we enjoyed. Left: Sarah with Murphy, the dog who selfishly would not give up his bed for me.
Above: Me with my then boyfriend George Galitzine.
Life at Parsenn Sally, near Stratford, was drugs and rock and roll and also dressing for dinner and backgammon. It was called a commune by journalists, but in reality was far from that. More a house shared by friends, a cross between a travellers’ encampment and a posh country house.
Following pages: George’s painting of the fireplace at Parsenn Sally. It perfectly describes the house. It was also my mother’s favourite picture.
The start of my one and only acid trip, a walk in the country. I am laughing already. And the end result. A commune with nature.
This article came out in a Sunday supplement and the headline was to haunt me for the next twenty years or more. I shall never forgive Mr Oakes. The car referred to in this piece was an absolute lemon sold to me by my brother. The engine exploded after I’d had it a week. It was true that at that time I turned down film roles to concentrate on theatre.
Opposite: This picture was done by my friend then boyfriend then friend again, the artist George Galitzine.
Camping on the beach at Eilat.
On the Kibbutz
After a stint at the RSC and travelling in the States, Bruce, still my partner at that time, decided that we should visit Israel. As a Jew, his culture and history called him there. He suggested that we go together to work on a kibbutz for a couple of weeks, which I thought was a great idea.
And so we arrived, two very green but keen ‘tourists’ as the kibbutzim accurately called any visitors. It was about five months after the end of the Six-Day War, so decisively won by the Israelis. Ha’on, the kibbutz we had arranged to visit and work on, was a rural commune that grew grapes, amongst other things. Its vines nestled into the hills of the Golan Heights, the location for much fighting in the war. The Heights had just been occupied by the Israelis and there was still some shelling.
After a day to recover from the journey, I was to present myself for work. I was assigned to a young kibbutznik and sent out at 5 a.m. into the grapevines. They were a few miles from the community itself. I had been given a big plastic comb and was told literally to comb the grapes. This was to take off the smaller grapes to make room for the others to grow big. These grapes were destined for the table.
On the way out in the truck the young man told me how much he hated Arabs and wanted to join the army and kill them. He was about seventeen.
I was horrified. This did not fit into my understanding of the idealism of the kibbutz. However, I kept my thoughts to myself, determined to be a good ‘Tourist’. He sent me off into the vines with my comb and made his way down the other end. From time to time I would hear him speaking in Hebrew on his walkie-talkie.
After an hour or so I suddenly heard the inimitable high-pitched whine of a shell coming my way. It had been launched from the Syrian side and I looked up to see a puff of white smoke on the hillside, falling in the vines. The sound of the conversation being carried on with the base got louder and more intense. I carried on combing, thinking that this was what the kibbutz had to put up with and I had better be brave. More whines, and more puffs of smoke, getting closer, more shouting into the walkie-talkie.
Eventually, around 11.30 a.m. it was time to go back to base for lunch. In that heat you start work early and finish early, to do more later in the afternoon.
We arrived back to find Ha’on in uproar. The base had been ordering the young man back and he had been refusing, saying he was a brave Israeli soldier, and would not back down in the face of the enemy. The rest of the kibbutz, including Bruce, had been in the bomb shelter all morning, even though the bombs had been falling far from them. It was the first time this particular kibbutz had come under fire.
The next day I was taken off grape-combing duties and assigned to the kitchen. This was the communal kitchen that every day fed about two hundred people. I was taken to a far corner and shown a huge pile of very
greasy pans that needed to be washed. I set to work, and as I washed more pans were added to the pile. Behind me was the clatter and noise of a large kitchen. I slowly worked my way through the pile, making my own loud clatter. As I finally reached the end of the pile, some hours later, it dawned on me that everything had gone very quiet behind me. I turned around and realised that the kitchen was completely deserted. I was still standing there perplexed, wondering what to do next, when a woman came dashing in and indicated that I should follow her. Once again the shelling had driven the rest of the kibbutz down into the shelter. Some time had passed before they realised they’d left me in the corner.
Bruce then decided we might be safer hitch-hiking and camping out around Israel, which we did.
Peter Brook
Experimental theatre – touring the world
In 1970, the already legendary Peter Brook did his famous production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had very much wanted to play Titania in that production, but Peter rightfully gave the role to Sara Kestelman, who was dazzling in it. I only got to understudy Hermia, but had the advantage of being around for much of the rehearsal period, and watching the whole thing come to the extraordinary life it had. It is still being copied, or ‘homaged’.
I had seen Brook’s production of The Tempest at the Roundhouse in London and loved the way he redrew the relationship of audience and actor. Actor became audience and the audience would find themselves part of the play. This was all new. I then heard that Peter was preparing a new company of international actors, to work experimentally in Paris. It was what I wanted to do. I wanted to throw it all out and start again. I asked Brook if he would consider me, and he said I could go to Paris to see how it worked out. Bruce also applied, but whereas he could go immediately, I had the remaining year of my contract to work out. I also had been cast by Lindsay Anderson to play in O Lucky Man! which was to be shot in London.
My agent, family and most fellow actors thought I was mad to consider the move to Paris. As far as my family were concerned I had a nice regular job in a respected company doing great work, in a profession where all was uncertain. As far as my agent was concerned I was just getting known, articles were appearing in newspapers about me, and film and television roles were being offered, as well as other theatre. And I was about to walk away from all that. To them it seemed like professional suicide, but I was determined. There was no question, this was what I wanted. As soon as I could, I went to Paris and turned up on the doorstep of the Mobilier National, the ancient tapestry factory in Paris, where Peter had been given the top floor by the Cultural Ministry.
I almost missed my chance by being totally disorganised. I had failed to let the company know that I was finally free and coming. When I called to announce that I was on my way, I was told not to bother, I’d missed the opportunity. I said I would come anyway, and please to see me. This was what was needed. The way Peter worked at that time was to wait and see who turned up. He did not invite anyone to join. You had to show a desire or a curiosity of your own. Turning up did not guarantee a place, but it was a necessary first step.
The Space in Paris where we all spent so many hours of struggle was a large, high-ceilinged stone hall with skylights. It was empty except for a big grey-blue carpet and some strange-looking musical instruments along the side. When I arrived, Peter and some of his group had already been working for a year, travelling to Iran for a production called Orghast, which had been written by Ted Hughes in a made-up language. The people were unlike any I had seen before. There was Yoshi from Japan, a Kabuki actor; Miriam Goldschmidt from Germany, the beautiful result of a wartime liaison between a black American GI and a German girl; François and Sylvan, two Parisian actors, urbane and sophisticated; Michelle from the States, statuesque with a mane of red hair; and Lou Zeldis, a tall, skinny hippy with masses of blond ringlets. Lou and Michelle were former performers with La MaMa. There was also Bruce, my by now ex-boyfriend; and Malik, who combined French elegance and African roots (he came originally from Mali), a wonderful mix. We also had another American, the very Greek Andreas Katsoulas. We were to get to know each other very well.
A performance at a bidonville outside Paris.
We were actors not only from different races and countries, but also from different theatre disciplines. In the case of Lou and Michelle, the free-ranging, improvisational anarchy of the Living Theater and La MaMa, while Bruce and I came from the text-driven, self-controlled world of English literature and poetry, and Yoshi from the most disciplined of all, Japanese classical theatre with its intense physical and vocal demands. Sylvan and François were successful French actors with a bit of everything under their belts; likewise Andreas, whose attitude was one of terrific practicality and no pretension whatsoever.
We also had with us an American musical prodigy called Elizabeth Swados whose role was to work with us musically. She had a lot on her plate where I was concerned, for I inherited my mother’s complete lack of musicality in any practical sense.
The group went by the imposing title of Le Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale, or CIRT. We started work. The intention as far as I understood it was to work towards finding a common theatrical language, or a way of communicating through theatre that owed nothing to language or any particular culture. In other words, to find a universal human theatre experience. When I say we used no language, that’s not to say that we mimed. We didn’t. Certainly movement was important, but so were sound and music. Again, the music could not owe anything to a particular form or culture. It was a question of throwing out everything you had learned, depended upon and built up, and trying to reconfigure it into an unrecognisable form, but one that nonetheless made a theatrical sense. It was a horribly difficult task; one that encouraged deep self-doubt and insecurity, for there seemed to be nothing to hold on to. I think all of us went through that, with the possible exception of Yoshi.
Yoshi had started work with Brook some years before. He had played Ariel in Peter’s production of The Tempest. I had seen him in it. That had been his first experience of working in Western theatre. I think Yoshi told the story of Peter criticising him, saying ‘Yoshi, Ariel is of the air, it is all lightness. Why are you stamping heavily on the ground like that?’ Yoshi replied, ‘I am stamping with my left foot. In Kabuki that means “Air”.’ It is probably an apocryphal story, but it captures the cultural difficulties we all had in acting terms. Yoshi was by this time an old hand and understood more than the rest of us. He had also had the farthest to travel. Yoshi was our foundation and the wisest of all of us by far.
Every day, under the guidance and questioning of Peter, we did exercises and improvisations designed to winkle us out of our assumptions and habits. We were asked to use our knowledge and at the same time discard it. We were asked to be ourselves in the barest, purest sense – our nationality, our tribe, our race, our psychology – and somehow translate all that into a universal context, to be simultaneously specific and general. Most of our sessions were conducted in English with some French. The Americans spoke very little French, and some of the French did not speak English. My French from my Jean Louis days was not bad, but it improved substantially as I found myself the translator for Malik. I had to translate some very esoteric and abstract ideas, so I dread to think how it came out to Malik. He showed tremendous patience. Each of us had something distinctive and different to offer, and I think that was the whole idea. We were working on a concept that would ultimately become The Conference of the Birds, and if we had a text at all it was that Sufi story of birds looking for a leader, or a spiritual understanding. A kind of esoteric and spiritual Wizard of Oz.
Every night we would repair to that great old lady of Parisian restaurants, La Coupole, which in those days was still the preferred hang-out for artists, where actors could do the things actors do: complain, gossip and laugh – although laughter was thinner on the ground than usual.
As usual, I managed to find the only hotel in town without running water.
It was on Place de la Contrescarpe, then a wonderful part of the city, not known to tourists, with one of those magical food markets leading to it. I had been wandering around there and spotted this little hotel. I didn’t stay longer than a couple of months, but I loved it. It was the ultimate artist’s garret in Paris; a white, cell-like room with a very saggy bed and a sink in the corner with cold water only. The view from the window was the classic Parisian view of red rooftops. If you wanted a bath you had to ask Madame and pay, and she would go off and heat up some water and splosh it into a big old bath down the corridor.
At that time, the British Ambassador was a great man: Christopher Ewart Biggs. He was a classic ex-public school card-carrying member of the so-called upper classes, but also witty, very intelligent and interesting with wide-ranging interests and an open mind. He had an almost absurdly posh voice, and looked like a strange jungle bird that had taken on the form of a human. He and his wife were welcoming to starving expatriate artists and invited me to dinner in that beautiful embassy. He was later murdered by the IRA, with a car bomb. I mourned his loss.
While I was working in Paris, living the ultimate bohemian artist’s life, I was asked to attend the Cannes Film Festival for the first time. O Lucky Man! was making its debut. I agreed, thinking it would be a nice little break by the sea for Georgie and myself (Georgie had come to Paris with me). I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I arrived in my tattered clothes and run-down shoes, looking like a backpacker who belonged definitely and somewhat defiantly off the red carpet, behind the red rope. Amongst all those beautiful women in beautiful dresses I stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember seeing Rachel Roberts, famous for her working-class performances, swanning around like the Queen of Sheba in an enormous pink feather boa coat. The studio executives were horrified; this was not what was expected of a Warner Brothers film star. Lindsay Anderson told me off. ‘You must behave more like a star, Helen, for God’s sake!’ It was my first taste of the pressure to look good. They gave me some money to go out and buy myself an outfit for the premiere, and a pair of shoes. We used some of it to buy Georgie a pair of shoes he had his eye on as well. White patent, I seem to remember.
