‘There’ s not an actor who doesn’t think he’ll never work again ... it’ s the most paranoid of professions’
TV star George Costigan tells Hannah Stephenson how living in France inspired his trilogy of novels, which has taken 20 years to write, and why roles get meatier as he gets older
George Costigan is one of those actors you instantly recognise on screen, but whose name may easily escape you. “When I’m out and about, people go, ‘I know you’,” he chuckles. “I remember once, when I was in London, a kid of about 16 poked his head out of a phone box and said, ‘You’re George Costigan’. That means he would have had to have waited for the credits at the end of whatever I was appearing in. I find that unspeakably flattering.”
The actor is probably bestknown for playing a randy, adulterous businessman who embarks on an affair with two schoolgirls in the classic 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, set on a council estate in Bradford.
He’s also been directed by Clint Eastwood in the Hollywood drama Hereafter and played Eddie, the philandering husband of Ruth (Penelope Wilton), in Calendar Girls.
TV roles have got more substantial as he’s got older, he says, with George landing spots in award-winning dramas including Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (in which he played brash businessman millionaire Nevison Gallagher, whose daughter goes missing), Line Of Duty, Unforgiven, Scott & Bailey and Emmerdale.
“The TV roles have got meatier, but I can be choosier now,” he reflects. “If I don’t want to do something, I can be a little bit picky. There’s stuff I did when the kids’ feet were growing because I needed to financially ,and I recognise that.”
He loves working on Wainwright’s projects. “It’s called falling off a log,” George says. “She’s such a good writer — she’s done all the work and the thinking. Basically, you turn up and say the lines in the right order and you’ll look terribly good.”
The actor has been surrounded by good writers throughout his career, including Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale during his years with the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, which spawned such famous actors as Julie Walters, Bill Nighy and the late Pete Postlethwaite.
He’s married to writer Julia North, whom he met while he was at The Everyman, and has himself written plays and collaborated with North on Birds Of A Feather.
But it has taken him nearly 20 years to complete his first trilogy of novels. Last year his debut, The Single Soldier, was published. It’s a love story that begins in the Second World War during the German occupation of France and sees Frenchman Jacques move and rebuild his home for his loved one, Simone, to return to after the war.
Costigan, who has lived in France for 30 years, says it was there he was first inspired to write the trilogy.
“We were out mushrooming one day with some friends who took us through an old, dark wood. We got to the end and they showed us a house perched on an impossible hill,” he adds.
The house, he explains, stood in utter desolation, but with a fantastic view across to the Cathar mountains. “It was sad. We discovered that, at the turn of the 20th century, the owner fell out with a neighbour and moved it from a nearby village to this field and rebuilt it there,” he says.
The image of him moving it, brick by brick, in a cart to rebuild it in a field — a feat that took seven years — gave Costigan the idea for the novel.
The follow-up, The Soldier’s Home, continues the story, with Simone and Enid — two interlinked narratives in one book — concluding the tale. It finds Simone living as a single mother in the US, pining for her French love Jacques, the father of their son, and hoping they can rekindle their love.
But, as time moves on, so does life. They both form other relationships and, living so far away from each other, their dreams fade.
Costigan and his family originally moved to France because of the Thatcher government. “Kenneth Baker was ruining the education system and we had three children going to secondary school,” he says.
“We took a risk. I was the main earner, but I think my wife had a tougher time than I did, raising three children. It was hard for our eldest son to walk into secondary school when he couldn’t speak the language.”
These days, he divides his time between home in the Aveyron in southern France and the UK.
His eldest son, actor Niall, lives in Yorkshire and Costigan gets over when he can to get his fix of his grandson, Felix.
Living away from the UK hasn’t hindered his work opportunities, though.
❝ Most of my work is behind me, but the best is still ahead as I now know my job
“I’m still deeply ambitious,” he says. “The majority of my work is behind me, but if you judge this, the best of my work is ahead of me, because I’ve reached the stage where I know how to do my job.”
It’s not only meaty TV dramas that come his way. The challenging theatre roles are right up there, too. He’s currently starring in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night as angry patriarch James Tyrone at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.
When the play finishes, he’ll return to his French home, where he relaxes by playing the guitar and piano, writing and gardening.
“I know that when I get home I’ll be knackered from doing the play, but then my friend puts that into perspective. He says, ‘Are you tired? Then get down the pit’. I love to do this job, so I really shouldn’t whinge. It’s pathetic.”
Ironically, the longest “resting” period he’s had as an actor was after he got his breakthrough screen role in Rita, Sue And Bob Too. He didn’t work for six months after the movie was released.
“The thing you come to grasp in this profession is that there are no rules. There’s not an actor in the world who doesn’t think, ‘I’ll never work again’, at some point. It’s the most paranoid profession.”
Born in Portsmouth, he grew up in Salford, Lancashire, and has found that a lot of his roles have demanded a Yorkshire accent.
He’ll soon be joining Suranne Jones and the cast of Gentleman Jack, Sally Wainwright’s new eight-part television historical drama set in Halifax, west Yorkshire, and in the meantime is thinking of writing a whodunnit for his wife.
“It started as a present for Jules — I’ve written half of it and now I’m getting stuck on the police procedural bit, so it may take some time.”
But, hopefully, not another 20 years.