After my first lead I had a bigger and much more difficult one. After seven years and twenty-five roles at the National, and without ever once coming into contact with the commercial theatre, I was to be given my big chance. I was once more a prince, although in this case he was epileptic.
The role, that of Prince Myshkin in Simon Gray’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, looked perfect on paper. Dostoevsky’s character is a man for all seasons, which was convenient when you realise the book was first published in serial form. On stage it was going to be impossible to reveal every facet of his character, for he changes so often and is so many different things to so many different people. Simon’s idea was to pick out one through-line and be consistent to this, so he seized on the character’s goodness and gentleness, specifically in relation to his disease.
The challenge became how to show for three hours, when I am on stage virtually the whole time, this man who often appears to be saintly without becoming an insufferable prig. I had to convey an inner life of innocence that is not on overt display, but is brought out by the reactions of the other characters. I had to get onto a different place, and not just be relentlessly good.
To find the details of epileptic behaviour I watched films which the BMA and the British Epileptics Association supplied me; I read papers on the subject, and I learned that such fits sometimes do not have any visible manifestation, but from a movement or a sound may lead to a state of total immobility. Myshkin’s fits are ecstatic, and he even knows when they are about to happen. Dostoevsky is specific about them starting with a cry, but I never found anyone like this in all I saw and studied.
One doctor suggested the kind of scream Myshkin made would be like that of a peacock, so I went off to Holland Park and tried to provoke the peacocks into uttering their cries for me, but they were not very obliging. One main problem was that Simon kept changing the script every day in rehearsals. He would arrive with fistfuls of new stuff to learn overnight. I think he suffered from a variation on the theme of writer’s block: if you looked at the scripts they were full of dot-dot-dots.
Anthony Quayle, who was doing eight performances of Sleuth a week, rehearsed and directed The Idiot. We performed a run-through in front of Sir Laurence, who straight away cut several scenes, which meant several actors losing their entire roles. We had a set designed by a famous figure called Josef Svoboda, who wanted to show off his skill and win prizes; while it looked quite impressive, it was hell to work on. This added to the general sense of incompetent direction.
We had only two public dress rehearsals before the first night, and while I am never at my best on first nights it went surprisingly well. The reviews were good (so I was told), but as a whole I’m not sure ultimately it worked in Simon’s adaptation. Needless to say I loved playing Myshkin; I loved his character, his innocence and his goodness.
Tony Hopkins had been cast as Rogozhin, but he left during rehearsals so they upped his understudy, Tom Baker, the future fourth Doctor Who. Diane Cilento, an actress of celebrated beauty and talent, played Anastassya. At the time she was married to Sean Connery and sometimes couldn’t come to rehearsals because of his ‘golf tournaments’ – a euphemism, I believe.
During Wimbledon we were rehearsing round at her house one weekend and after about half an hour Diane said, ‘Let’s call a halt. It’s the men’s finals. Come on, we have to watch.’
We sat down to watch the Men’s Finals. It was Ken Rosewall versus John Newcombe, another Australian, who finally beat him. During the match the door opened behind us. A man came in and sat down. I turned and did the most enormous double take as Diane introduced Lew Hoad.
Imagine watching these two champions, Rosewall and Newcombe, with Lew Hoad sitting right beside you!
After The Idiot’s first night Olivier threw a reception in his flat in Victoria. At one point I said to him, ‘Can I ring my parents to tell them how it’s gone?’ and he said, ‘Yes, of course, there’s a phone through there in the back room.’
I went into the bedroom and rang Dad and Mum; I had just finished the call and was leaving the room when the door opened, and Sir Laurence came in. He wasn’t drunk, but I’d say he was a little bit tipsy. He said how marvellously well the evening had gone. And then he hugged me to him.
‘You’re my third son,’ he said, ‘you’re my third son.’
That was a great moment for me. Of course I melted, I completely melted, and I adored him for it.
Larry was so generous to the younger members of the National Theatre Company. He had lived through some very bad years. He had not long before turned sixty when he began rehearsing Three Sisters, in which I was cast as Baron Tuzenbach, and in which Joan played Masha, while he was playing The Dance of Death, waking three or four times a night wet with pain and worry.
‘Prostate pain,’ he wrote in his diary. Doctors at St Thomas’s diagnosed prostate cancer, which he chose to have treated with radiation instead of having an operation. Not far from his flat in Victoria, his former wife Vivien Leigh, in her flat in Eaton Square, was dying of tuberculosis.
He went on rehearsing. He did a tremendous amount of homework. He had a little stage in his study, and he would come back next day with his idea of where he wanted all of the actors to be. He would bark at us in his famous manner: ‘Walk to the door! Come back!’
You plucked up your courage: ‘Please, Sir, can I try something?’
‘Yes, you carry on.’
But you always ended up doing exactly what he wanted, even if you had the chance to flap around and do your own thing first. I had a natural deference towards him. Even after eight years of friendship I could never call him Larry to his face. Behind his back, of course, to my friends it was always ‘Larry said that ...’
Just a fortnight before Three Sisters opened, he promenaded his two young children on the beach in Brighton, then found at 2 a.m. that night he could not breathe. He was driven with Joan by his chauffeur to London and behaved as if he were dying, shaking hands next morning with stage staff and taking his leave before they brought him into hospital where he was treated for pneumonia. While he was there he persuaded nurses to let him watch a heart operation.
From his St Thomas’s room Sir Laurence had a direct line to the stage manager in the prompt corner, so she could tell him how Three Sisters was progressing on the opening night. After a triumphant performance we went along to his room and brought champagne with us.
Together with courage went extraordinary largesse. He’d invite us down to Brighton for the weekend, asking us in pairs. I went with Louise Purnell. We were dined and wined, plied with nightcaps, and next morning he came into each of our bedrooms with a tray. Just think: this was ‘Sir Laurence’ in his dressing gown, the most famous actor in the world, bringing me up my breakfast on a tray!
In the summer break after The Idiot Diane invited me to the Connerys’ Marbella villa. I stayed there with their son Jason and Graham Hill’s boy Daimen. Sean was not there because he was away on a golf course somewhere – presumably playing golf. Diane and he divorced not much later and she married Antony Shaffer, Peter’s brother, who wrote Sleuth.
I saw my first bullfight with the famous toreador El Cordobés. He had been up drinking all the night before in Torremolinos. He had a hangover, and was not at all on form. At the end the crowd gave him the bird, booing and whistling him. At the exit he turned, strode back into the centre of the ring, stood there, threw out his chest, raised up his fist and started turning and stamping his feet in rhythm.
By the time he had made the next full circle they were screaming with delight: it was a real two fingers to them, and they erupted in adoration. I didn’t approve of bullfighting and I could just about watch the Cordilleros, but not the kills.
One evening we were invited along the coast to what should have been an exclusive celebrity party. The hostess had once had Sammy Davis Junior and orchestra perform for her. The food was lovely, while to follow there was a cabaret. As a curtain-raiser a man wheeled on a trolley on which sat a tape recorder. He switched on and we listened. I couldn’t work it out, but Diane sussed it at once.
‘Come on, we’re getting out of here!’ she explained, and I couldn’t believe my ears: it was the Moors Murders Tapes, presented as entertainment. How sick could you get!
After The Idiot the time had arrived to leave the National and go out into the big wide world. I made an appointment and went along to see Sir.
‘I would like a leave of absence.’ This was the way I put it. He said yes immediately and I was out of the room.
Well, I thought, he didn’t exactly put up much of a fight, did he? I had talked myself out of a job with a single sentence. We did discuss a little about ‘leave of absence’ with the idea I would come back. But at the end of that year he himself was out and Peter Hall was in, so that was me up the spout. I wondered if I hadn’t made a big mistake. It was a leap in the dark: eleven years I’d been in work without a single break, and when they gave me my National Insurance book it was filled up like a collection of Green Shield stamps.
Along came a film job straight away, absolutely out of the blue. I owed this entirely to Fred Zimmermann who, unlike most film directors, was a fervent theatregoer. He had seen practically everything at the National so he had seen a lot of us juniors growing up and must have heard I was leaving.
Zimmermann was making The Day of the Jackal with Edward Fox as the star. He offered me the role of the French detective, Inspector Caron, which was my initiation into big-time movies. I was flown to a hotel in Provence which was to be used as one of the sets. I arrived for my first pure camera work on location.
On my first night I knew nobody. I found my room and took myself down to the restaurant, ate some supper on my own, and went back up to my room. I couldn’t sleep and I had a terrible night for I was in agony with what I thought was food poisoning. I rose at 6.30 next morning, went to the make-up room for the first day’s filming, but I was green, I was so ill that they put me straight back to bed.
Within minutes Zimmermann, with his producer, were up in my bedroom. They called in a doctor and he diagnosed appendicitis.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, explaining I had eaten some fish the previous night and that was why I was bad.
‘It will be all arranged. There will be a helicopter to take you to Cannes. The surgeon will be ready waiting to operate. They’ll whip it out, and all will be fine.’
‘Please, please, please,’ I objected, ‘give it time, I’ll be better soon, I’ll be better!’
They wouldn’t listen. At this point, fortunately, the wife of the producer came in and she took my side. ‘Give him a couple of hours,’ she said to them, ‘and if he’s not better in two hours, take him away and cut him open.’
Two hours later I wasn’t exactly at my best, but I was recovering. Then, by the afternoon, I had improved enough for them to use me on the set. The location was only a hundred yards away from the front gates of the hotel. As I left the hotel to walk only that little distance away, a big limousine drove up alongside me, and the driver stopped, lowered his window, and said, ‘Mr Jacobi, this is your car.’
‘No, it’s all right, I’m fine, I’m OK ... I can walk,’ I protested.
The driver insisted. ‘In the car! Mr Zimmermann’s orders.’
I gave in. Seconds later we were there.
This was my introduction to the film world, and I understood at once that you do as you are told. If there’s anything wrong with you then, ‘We’ve got the surgeon ready, the knife is in his hand!’