In the late 1960s I lived mostly on my own without any steady relationship, and this went on for a further ten years, nearly up to the age of forty. I shared flats with others, first with Richard Kay and Michael Burrell, opposite the Seymour Swimming Baths by Bryanston Square W1, and had been in that flat for a few years when Richard and Mike had moved out, Richard in order to marry.
Then I rented a flat on my own in Sussex Gardens. Mum and Dad with dusters and cleaners would arrive where I lived, and go over the flat with a toothcomb, take away my washing and fill up the fridge, while Dad would clean my car. Mum would never come and just sit down and have a good chat, but would spring clean the entire place from top to bottom. I would go home at weekends to Leytonstone after the show, and they would have coffee and banana sandwiches ready for me. I would drive back Sunday evening to my flat.
During these nomadic times when I was living in Sussex Gardens I made a very dear, new friend. I had always had a great love of ballet, and to begin with I became acquainted with, and then close to, Iris Law, Frederick Ashton’s secretary, whom I had met through Wayne Sleep. Again I suppose she was one of my mother substitutes or surrogates; I used to sit with her and her friend Gwyneth in the staff house box at Covent Garden overlooking the stage, and then be taken back stage afterwards to meet the dancers. Once we went round and Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn had just finished dancing, so Iris said, ‘Come and meet them.’
We stood to the side while the audience screamed and applauded like mad; Rudolf and Margot would go out and bow, then come back and be pumped with drinks, take a glass of champagne, have a little chat with us, and go out again while cheering went on and flowers were thrown. This lasted for twenty minutes.
Nureyev, with his defection from Russia, had a glamour which eluded other dancers. Everything was so dramatic in his life, and with his talent, and looking as he did, he pushed everyone else aside. I saw Rudolf in action, and he had incredible charm, and my, wasn’t he sexy when he put it over – man, woman, or dog! I had a brief fling with someone in Greece who had been one of his lovers. He told me, ‘I learned all I knew about sex from Rudolf!’
When interviewed during the 1970s, I would claim that I had no personal life and for the most part this was true. Always in the background I had Mum and Dad to whom I was as ever deeply and constantly attached, and I had my passion for acting. Every day, all day, I aspired to become a great actor, but it always seemed beyond my reach.
My parents still went on their holidays, but without me now. I had been trying to persuade them to go abroad for years, but they would only go if I went with them. I was hardly relishing the idea: as much as I loved them both I expected to have an incredibly boring time. I dutifully took them away to Mallorca in the summer of 1967.
One day, when sunbathing, I had this absurd notion. I found two big copper penny coins and put them over my eyes and lay back in the sun. When I removed them an hour or so later they had become quite hot and I couldn’t see anything. I panicked. Everything was black. I had gone blind. That’s vanity for you! Dad prevailed on me to stay calm and some time later my sight came back.
Lying on the water’s edge one day I thought I must be hallucinating when I saw Maggie Smith paddling in the shallows.
During the National Theatre years I had been quite close to Maggie. We shared little trysts together. I used to go at the weekends and stay in the house in Kensington where she lived with her playwright husband Beverley Cross: I would be sleeping up in the loft, and we had this covered-over living space where we listened to music together. We used to dance, and one very appropriate number was ‘Up On the Roof’. She had a different room, but it was a sort of chaste flirtation. If I had been straight we would have gone to bed together, but she knew she was safe with me, and when Bob Stephens came along she fell in love with him.
I carried on gazing at this phantom Maggie in the water and then I stood up and looked again, and it really was Maggie.
‘Maggie, what on earth are you doing here?’
‘I came in that,’ she said. She pointed out to sea where there was a cruise launch bobbing up and down at anchor.
She was staying with Robert Graves, and she invited me to join her at the weekend and meet Graves, whose Claudius I was to play ten years later. Mum and Dad didn’t mind my short absence, so I was picked up and whisked off for a wonderful weekend. Ava Gardner was there, and so was Jeffrey Hunter, the actor who played Jesus in the 1960 film King of Kings – the first time we were shown Jesus’s face on screen.
Graves was about seventy-five, a giant of a man, full of energy. His house was on the top of a cliff and he went swimming daily, hurtling himself into the water, and hurtling himself back up the rocks to his house.
I bought a house in Chelsham Road, Stockwell, but it soon became rather like a hotel. When I first bought the house, to help me with the mortgage I had two lodgers from the ballet company. I do not and cannot cook, and I relied on the house guests, who later on were often temporary lodgers from Australia, to do the cooking and washing up. Thankfully I had a constantly revolving coterie of male and female acting friends and I spent many a jolly evening with them and their friends. I was by no means a recluse, and that was the rent the lodgers paid. There was an actor, a trainee accountant, a former secretary to the Australian premier Harold Holt, who had drowned in 1967: all were delightful and eccentric companions.
I am very good at hoovering, emptying ashtrays and plumping up cushions. I like order and pattern. I used to say at the time that this was one reason I would be difficult to live with on a permanent basis. So heavily was I still under Mum and Dad’s domestic influence that I had the net curtains and heavy drapes of home to cocoon me: Mum said Stockwell needed net curtains.
I still smoked very heavily – two packs a day or, to be more truthful, nearly three packs a day, and I was getting quite breathless. Fags were my prop, I would light up when answering the phone and I drank to lubricate my throat for the next ciggy. As for fitness, my preferred exercise was thinking about using my rowing machine.
Michael York wrote in his autobiography that although I shared the usual actor’s insecurities (this was only too true) I was ‘obviously’ marked out for greatness. If this was the case, which I rather doubt, and never would feel it even if it were, so far so good. But when would it come? I could not wait for it to happen!
‘As well as chain-smoking, a self-deprecation about his looks also made him go out of his way to avoid being photographed. Even later, when film acting inevitably embraced him, he would refuse to watch his performances at the rushes.’
This was true of all my performances on film and television, and still is. Maggie Smith and Sir insisted when we filmed Othello that I see the rushes of my scenes as Cassio. They would march me into the viewing room and plonk me down between them so I couldn’t escape. I shut my eyes, although I had to listen.
I wrote to Michael on the subject of films (he was filming now with Franco Zeffirelli): ‘What you’ve told me is very interesting. I think it is quite significant that Franco is not rehearsing you, but directing you on the spot, so preventing you from letting your theatre technique blur your photographic image. In other words his is the technique, yours the expression. As the medium is so individual, what the actor requires above all is the intangible “it”, which, and I’m sure many others tell you, you’ve got.’
Movies are a director’s toy, but movies make you rich. TV makes you known, but theatre is what it’s really all about. At this juncture in my life I could see, increasingly, the way everything was going, namely that I could no longer make a name for myself solely in the theatre.
But did I actually have that intangible ‘it’?