Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis

by Davis, Warwick

  There was only one exception to this rule and it applied to my father. We had an in-and-out gravel drive, of which he was extremely proud. We lived on Lovelands Lane, a cul-de-sac, and it was one of those roads that appeared – to time-short drivers anyway – as if it might possibly be a shortcut to a nearby freeway.

  Every so often a car would zip up our little cul-de-sac, discover they were driving toward a dead end, realize that my father’s circular drive would save them from the inconvenience of stopping to make a three-point turn, and so drive straight through and around, spinning their wheels and scattering Dad’s precious gravel before zooming off back toward the main road, usually even faster in an effort to make up for lost time.

  Invariably, this would happen at suppertime. It had an extraordinary effect on my father. He would sit bolt upright in his chair, as if zapped by a cattle prod. He’d then throw down his cutlery and napkin and leap up, knocking his chair over. By the time it hit the ground he was outside, sprinting toward his Jaguar, leaping over the hood in a single jump before diving in on the driver’s side. The ignition was instantly followed by the engine’s roar as the Jag flew out of the drive (throwing yet more gravel toward the house). Seconds later Dad would be grinding through the gears, screaming down Lovelands Lane in hot pursuit of the trespasser.

  Mum would sigh stoically. Kim would smile (she’d no longer have to eat all her peas). I, on the other hand, would mutter “kaggernash!,” a swear word of my own invention, created so I could “curse” within earshot of my parents. I used it on this occasion because it was my job to sweep the gravel back to perfection. Fortunately, I had come up with a cunning plan that made the job easier, even a little fun. I owned a Honda ATC 70. I tied a garden rake to the back of the tiny motorbike and drove up and down until the gravel was as smooth as a Japanese garden.

  Hours after the dinner plates had been cleared away, my father would return, driving sedately and smiling strangely. He never spoke about the outcome of his pursuit. We didn’t know whether he had caught up with the trespassing driver, or what had transpired between them if he had.

  I half-expected the police to roll up one day (hopefully they wouldn’t skid to a halt in the drive) and arrest Dad on suspicion of mass murder, finally linking him to all the shallow graves and burned-out frames of Cortinas, Capris, Escorts, and Fiestas that littered the countryside surrounding the pleasant village of Lower Kingswood, Surrey.

  Mum, meanwhile, was mainly kept busy with Kim, my average-sized, younger sister, and me, although she also worked as a secretary and personal assistant. I was a real handful, a tightly wound ball of rubberized energy that bounced around the house and garden at giddying speeds. If I wasn’t swinging from lampshades (at two-foot-six I was the perfect height to play Cheetah, Tarzan’s monkey, and relished the role a little too much), I was charging my bike through stacks of cardboard boxes, copying The Dukes of Hazzard.

  My parents were wonderful and devoted lots of time to Kim and me but, of course, this didn’t mean they were perfect. My earliest memories tend to be of a traumatic nature. One of the very first is of my mother and father walking with me in the countryside, each of them holding one of my hands as they swung me back and forth, much to my screaming delight.

  For reasons that to this day remain unclear, Mum and Dad both decided to let me go when I was at the zenith of one such arc. I sailed like a tiny screaming football into a forest of stinging nettles. To me this forest was just like the kind you find in Lord of the Rings,d full of giant walking trees and plants that entwined themselves about one’s limbs. I fought my way out of the undergrowth (overgrowth in my case), a furious screaming red mass of mumplike blisters. Mum was mortified while Dad maintained an “It’ll toughen him up” approach to parenting.

  My very earliest memory was no less traumatic. I was crawling around the lounge floor when I found a pin and decided what better way to treat such a find than as food, and swallowed it. It pierced my tonsil. I screamed the house down and twenty minutes later, after a brief stop in the operating room, a surgeon waved the pin under my mortified parents’ noses and told them, “He could have died from this, you know.”

  My parents really wanted to send me to a “normal” (as opposed to a “special”) school. In the mid-1970s, being little was seen as psychiatric as well as physical.

  All too often, little people were put up for adoption by parents who’d had the bejeezus scared out of them by ill-informed doctors with little scientific and absolutely no social knowledge. Invariably, these children struggled to find a home.

  As the time neared for me to start school, Mum and Dad visited the headmaster of Little Chinthurst, an excellent local primary. They were really worried that he might view me as being “disabled,” or that I was simply too small to fit in.

  Dad was so concerned that even though he was wearing a suit when he got back from work for the interview, he changed into a fresh one. He really wanted to give the best possible impression. My parents didn’t mention I was smaller than average until right at the end of the interview.

  “Oh, really?” the headmaster asked, “that’s interesting because we’ve just had another little chap leave.”

  Mum and Dad were pleasantly gobsmacked. Sure enough, one of the coat hooks in the cloakroom was lower than all the others.

  Of course, at school I was indeed entirely “normal,” just a tad smaller than my classmates. Although kids can be cruel, none of them ever saw me as being particularly different, although there was one unusual exception: Pedro, a Puerto Rican boy who had a bad case of lollypopguildophobia.e The first time he caught sight of me his eyes saucered. He yelled, “Extraterrestre!” and ran screaming straight out of the school gate. Poor Pedro was so traumatized at the prospect of seeing me on a daily basis that he was forced to abandon the school.

  I never thought about the fact that once they were five years old my classmates were already taller than I would ever be. There was no eureka moment; nobody sat me down and told me I wasn’t going to grow up to be my father’s height. I didn’t know what it was to be tall and was used to being small, so I just felt, well – normal. I was unusual in that I had an enormous amount of energy with a personality to boot. When I realized that I was getting left behind heightwise, I simply turned up the volume.

  Having said this, we had a weekly woodwork lesson where we were supposed to choose something we would make for our end of term project. While most of my classmates made toy boats, boxes, and stools I decided that it would be appropriate to hack together a pair of stilts.

  I had absolutely no desire to use them or to be taller at this stage and, as unbelievable as this might sound, I did not realize for one second what the connection was. Throughout my early life I suffered from the rather naive trait of missing the blindingly obvious.

  In this case, I just thought a pair of stilts would be easy to make. Boy, was I wrong. The hammer and chisel did not sit easily in my hands and the results were . . . curious. For some reason, we were supposed to show our finished pieces to the headmaster. His study was just like Dumbledore’s: there was the leather sofa, the softly ticking clocks, the shelves lined with leather-bound books. He looked at me and frowned.

  Before him were two wonky sticks of unequal length. In fact, if the assignment had been to make two pieces of wood look as unlike stilts as possible, then I would have won first prize.

  “And, er . . . what have you made, Warwick?”

  “Stilts, sir.”

  “I see, ahem, yes, stilts,” and then he had a sudden choking fit and quickly ushered me out of the room.

  The headmaster was a decent enough guy who obviously loved his job. He once summoned my class to his study in groups of three or four at a time. Rather conspiratorially, he beckoned us inside. “Look at what I’ve got here,” he said, and pointed at an oversize calculator on his desk. “The ZX 81. This is the future.” He raised his eyebrows significantly. Whatever he was trying to communicate went straight over my head. “And I’
ve got the RAM pack,” he added grandly. I blinked blankly back at him.

  Little Chint, as the junior section of school was known, was packed full of bizarre teachers. The science teacher had suffered from polio as a child and wasn’t much taller than me. She walked up and down the classroom as she lectured us; her limp was so large that she would disappear and reappear behind the laboratory benches as she went.

  The headmaster had an obsession with Cliff Richard. In assembly he’d play us modern religious sermons recorded by the Peter Pan of Pop, none of which ever seemed to make any sense.

  Mr. Miller, the Latin teacher, was known as “Windy Miller” for reasons too obvious to go into here and was ironically cursed with an enormous nose, while Mr. Scully (a.k.a. “Yellowbeard”) liked to nip out every five minutes for a cigarette. He’d hide behind the school wall but we could tell when he was on his way back to the classroom because the cloud of smoke that always accompanied him started to move. Then there was the teacher, whose name escapes me, who would whirl around and throw a piece of chalk at anyone who was mucking about while his back was turned. We thought he had psychic abilities but in reality he could see us all in the reflection of his glasses as he wrote on the board (he let us in on his secret on our last day).

  Sports day proved to be difficult. I sway a bit when I walk and so the egg-and-spoon race turned into a pick-up-the-egg-and-spoon race and when the teacher shouted “Go!” at the start of the sack race, I pulled up the sack and disappeared inside. As for the obstacle course (essentially a couple of upside-down benches and a few hoops), well, I might as well have been trying to get into the Special Air Service.

  Unusually, I loved school dinners. They did a great mashed potato, a wonderful meat pie, and fantastic rice pudding with jam. The only thing I couldn’t handle was cabbage. The problem was, we were supposed to eat everything on our plates before we could leave. To get around this, I’d pop the cabbage in my pocket and then spend a few minutes out in the playground surreptitiously scattering cabbage pieces in the style of The Great Escape tunnelers getting rid of the soil they’d dug out.

  The only incident of bullying I ever suffered was pretty mild, as it goes. As my classmates began to overtake me heightwise, there came a time where two of my best friends, Paul and Richard, started to use my height for their own amusement. They managed to lock me in a classroom simply by closing the door behind them, knowing that I wasn’t able to reach the handle to open it.

  I returned home in a miserable mood. Dad asked me what was wrong and I explained. He just nodded and didn’t say too much at the time. Behind the scenes, however, he came up with a cunning plan.

  As they were my “best friends,” Dad had Paul and Richard’s phone numbers and so he called their homes and asked to speak to them personally.

  “Warwick’s been telling me that he’s been having a bit of trouble at school and that two of the kids locked him in the classroom today,” he told them. “He doesn’t want to tell me who did this, however. As you’re his best friend I’m asking you to keep an eye out for him and to let me know the next time this happens, so I know exactly who’s behind it.”

  I never had another day’s trouble from Richard or Paul and normal relations were resumed.

  My routine at the end of each school day was to get changed out of my uniform, hang it up (I was also an obsessive-compulsive child), make a cup of tea, and then switch on the TV to catch my favorite shows.

  I never missed an episode of Scooby-Doo, broadcast once a week at 4:30 p.m. Back then, if you missed it, you missed it. There were no video recorders (except for some extremely expensive top-loaders with huge buttons and dials), no Sky Plus, just three channels to choose from and that was it.

  Then there was Take Hart with Tony Hart. (My mum’s claim to fame was that she once acted in a famous road safety ad for Brittax with Tony. She put on her seatbelt while Tony did the talking.) Another favorite was Rentaghost, a long-running children’s TV series about a bunch of ghosts trying to set up their own business. This would later become a major source of inspiration for my own filmmaking.

  Once the news came on at 5:40 p.m., I switched over to BBC2 for the Laurel and Hardy reruns. These were a huge influence on my own physical comedy. They are simply timeless and now my own kids have gotten into them; their favorite episode is “Brats,” made in 1930, where Stan and Oliver look after themselves as kids. This relied upon some quite sophisticated special-effects work and an awful amount of physical pain, something I would come to experience myself, also in the name of comedy.

  When he was home Dad’s word was final on what we watched and that meant sports or Last of the Summer Wine. He enjoyed wrestling, which was broadcast live on ITV on Saturday afternoons. It was beamed from some dodgy town hall from locations across the UK I’d never heard of before. It was nothing like the slick American shows you see today. The blokes were as fat as sumo wrestlers and were covered in hair, prison tattoos, and Brylcreem. The air was blue with cigarette smoke exhaled by a working-class audience.

  The fact that these hugely fat men would beat each other up straight after Saturday kids’ TV never seemed to trouble anyone. I can remember the big bout of the time would be between Big Daddy (good guy) with a record-breaking 64-inch chest and the amazing 672-pound Giant Haystacks (bad guy) – he looked like a man who had been bottle-fed scrumpy since birth. As far as I could tell, it pretty much came down to two blokes charging at each other using their bellies as battering rams.

  Dad also enjoyed snooker and the Derby, but what took precedence over all else was Wimbledon. Then, this being such a special occasion, the television would be connected to an extension cord, taken outside, and we would watch it in the garden. Dad also did this for the Grand Prix, which was the only time the TV was allowed on during lunch or dinner, when it would be turned around to face the table so my dad could see it while he ate.

  As blindingly obvious as it may seem my first film memory really was of Star Wars, which came out when I was seven years old. The excitement it caused reached insane levels. The local cinema was literally surrounded by a line.

  Just as my friend and I finally completed the circuit and stepped up to the ticket booth, as if on cue they did that classic thing of flipping the sign around in our faces – cinema full. Then a man emerged and, with an air of great importance, strung the magical velvet rope between two short steel poles, thereby preventing entry into the building. Being British, we would never dare to challenge the authority of the velvet rope, but we weren’t afraid of a line, either, and so we stayed put until the next showing. We were the first in and therefore able to choose the best seats.

  We left the cinema in a daze and, after I got home, I spoke to my mum at about a hundred miles an hour trying to explain the plot as she applied her makeup, ready to go out. From that day on, my friends and I talked about Star Wars constantly.

  It should therefore have been at the forefront of my mind when my mum repeated her question. “Come on, Warwick,” Mum said earnestly, “what do you love more than anything else?” There was nothing I liked more than the idea of driving a go-kart, so I shrugged my shoulders. Mum sighed, then smiled brightly. “How would you like to be in Star Wars?”

  a Ewokese for “A Long Time Ago in a Village Far, Far Away,” although the literal translation is: “A While Ago in a Tree Hut Across the Valley.”

  b Brace yourselves: this book is pun-heavy, most of them unintentional.

  c As it turned out, the doctors were wrong yet again and it would be many years before I would discover that I had a far more unusual and complex one-in-a-million condition (lucky me).

  d No, I wasn’t in Lord of the Rings, I’m too short for a Hobbit.

  e An irrational fear of little people. Lollypopguildophobia would also send people with hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words) into convulsions.

  Chapter Two

  An Ewok Is Born

  Nana Davis (who got me my big break), me, and Mum on the day of
the Return of the Jedi cast screening. Behind us Dad is holding up my Darth Vader action figure carrying case, given to me by Mark Hamill.

  On my way to Elstree to film Return of the Jedi.

  My sister and I making friends with Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker).

  Another toy for the Star Wars collection – except this one was based on me!

  The dads with two Ewok sons, me and Nicky Read.

  Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

  David Tomblin directs me in Return of the Ewok as Nicky Read looks on.

  Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

  A “heads-off” moment. Note the costumes hanging behind me. After a few weeks of filming they had a unique aroma.

  It was all thanks to my Nan.

  Nan could easily have been the inspiration for Professor Minerva McGonagall. My parents were very social; they were always going to Saturday evening dinner parties or some kind of dinner and dance, which meant that my sister and I were placed in the loving care of Nana Davis.