Thought thesps were all right-on luvvies? Meet Peter Bowles, still suave, still filling seats . . and riotously un-PC at 81!
LOUNGING back on his sofa, Peter Bowles is resplendent in coffee - coloured two -tone shoes, peacock-blue shirt and a pair of skinny designer jeans, which I admire.
‘Thank you. Very kind. I can’t remember the name. If you want to know , I’d have to take them off so you can look at the label.’
I have to confess it is tempting. If only to see those long, lean legs, which he is forever crossing and uncrossing as we speak.
Occasionally, he jumps up and strides across the room, all 6ft 4in of him, as he recounts, with perfect diction, his endless stories.
Why Rex Harrison always had it in for him, how John Gielgud couldn’t bear him towering over him, and that time when someone, God forbid, introduced him at a thespy ‘ do’ as ‘Peter Bowles, the TV actor’, and he gathered up his wife Susan and left in a huff. ‘I’d starred in about 14 plays in the West End!’ he roars.
Peter is 81 years old. It is nearly 40 years since he became an overnight star after appearing as Richard deVere in the BBC’s To The Manor Born, alongside Penelope Keith as Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, in September 1979.
He wasn’t expecting anything . He hadn ’t even been invited to the show’s press launch.
But the next day , he was tooted at in the street by fans driving past and, later , given a standing ovation when he walked on stage in the West End.
‘It did not go down well with the rest of the cast!’ he says delightedly. The much-loved TV show, which attracted some of the highest viewing figures in the Seventies and Eighties, jump - started his flagging career and soon Peter was a huge star on TV, as well as on stage.
Other than a quietish period in the late Nineties, he’s never slowed down.
In december, he opened in the new stage version of The Exorcist which attracted excellent reviews, while much was made of his being the oldest leading man in the West End.
‘In the West End?!’ he bounds up off the sofa again. ‘It was announced at The Oldie magazine that I’m the oldest man [to star above the title] in British theatrical history!’
And today, his latest film, T ogether, is released. Starring P eter and his good friend Sylvia Syms (‘one of the great actresses’), it tells the story of a devoted couple, married for 60 years, who are parted by the 21st- century bureaucracy of carers, councils and ridiculous health and safety- conscious officials when she breaks her leg and he is moved temporarily ily into care.
It is a wonderful film — poignant, oign nexquisitely acted and based d on a true story.
‘There was no money , I knew that,’ Peter says. ‘But it is about love! It is about two people who o want to be together. I can relate e to it.’
Peter and his wife, Susan, have e one of the most enduring g marriages in showbusiness.
They will have been married for 57 years next month and, after three children and six grandchildren (and, reading between the lines, a good deal of self - sacrifice on Susan ’s part), are still madly in love.
‘Love love love love love love!’ he trills. ‘That’s what makes it work. No competition, no ups and downs — I’ve never looked at anyone else.’
When I arrive at their home in Barnes, South-West London, there is a gleaming black P orsche sche (‘my eighth! A dream to drive!’) !’) with personalised number plate on the driveway. Inside, the heating is cranked high, and there are flowers and artwork everywhere.
Susan — a vision of fragrant femi - ninity — is busy in the kitchen. She has been unfailingly supportive.
Every night of his run in The Exorcist she waited up to share a postshow Irish whiskey and debrief with Peter when he got home. Just as she has done for every single theatre performance he’s ever done.
ANdshe listens patiently and soothingly to his views on the madness of modern life. ‘It all started when they changed the temperature from Fahrenheit to Centigrade,’ he says darkly . ‘It’s a whole new world. Where young people use words I don ’t under - stand, and they put notices outside theatres, warning “characters in this play smoke”.’
‘I mean, really! If I go in there I might get lung cancer!’ he cries.
He blames the obsession with health and safety and political correctness. ‘You can ’t even say manhole any more. Or postman!’
He and Susan met at RAdA when she was 16 and he was 18 and shar - ing a converted garage with Albert Finney. Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Richard Briers were also in their year. ‘It was a school for gladiators!’ cries Peter.
He loved RAdA and, fresh from a very modest childhood in a two -up two- down with an outside loo in Nottingham, embraced everything it had to offer.
‘I’d never seen women who looked like the ones in the advertisements in Woman’s Own. I’d only seen the sort who worked in factories, and at first I was far too nervous to talk to them.’ Not for long.
By the time he spotted Susan in the chorus, he was engaged to a former circus strong woman. P eter was keen on the strong woman — other than a few worries about her behaviour. ‘Something didn ’t seem quite right — she kept speaking in different accents.’
The first night they shared a bed, things took an alarming turn. ‘She went mad. Stark naked, she started screaming and shouting , accusing me of trying to murder her.’
He took her to hospital where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and the doctor told him not to marry her, so Peter punched him.
‘I’m not going to tell you her name, but she was very beautiful,’ he says. ‘Staggeringly so. Greta Garbo would have had to have put her very best on to beat her. And she was strong, very strong! She could bend iron bars and tear the telephone book.’
Gosh, she sounds a bit scary . ‘No woman has ever scared me,’ he says. ‘I was not daunted by her strength, because I was strong, too.’
Of course! P eter has famously been following the Charles Atlas workout programme — or a varia - tion of it — ever since he was a spindly 12-year-old and admired his best friend’s more muscular physique.
Soon he was lifting weights, devouring body-building magazines and bulking up.
‘That’s how I met Sean Connery — he was junior Mr Scotland, my aunt came second in the Miss Scotland and they went out together.’
He still works out for 20 minutes with dumbbells every day.
‘I look after my body. It’s the only thing I have to sell,’ he says.
Anyway, things didn ’t work out with the strong woman and, four years later, Peter found himself at the Bristol Vic playing a fat, 84-yearold butler (‘ with padding’) to Susan’s leading lady.
At the time, Peter’s career was not progressing as he’d hoped. ‘It had
been made clear to me that I was not leading man material — too tall, too dark and my teeth were too crooked,’ he says.
Not that his lack of prospects stopped him seizing a second chance to woo Susan. This time he moved quickly. Rather too quickly — on the first day of rehearsals, he asked her to marry him.
‘She thought I was insane and she thought I was gay [she’d seen him play a gay man in a previous play] and she edged away big time. Big time!’
Undeterred, he pestered and phoned until, eventually, her parents called the police.
In desperation, he shipped in an old flame to make Susan jealous. ‘Incredibly beautiful. Incredibly, and no, I’m not telling you her name either. I’ve only ever had three girlfriends in my entire life — all have been incredibly beautiful.’
It worked, they were married in London in 1961, and had a onenight honeymoon in Maidenhead — just as Peter’s latest West End play was bombing.
He might have been struggling, but Susan was in demand.
Soon after their wedding, director Peter Hall offered her a succession of parts with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford — something Peter would have killed for. ‘I asked her not to go,’ he says.
‘I knew there would be 40 randy actors there, let alone Peter Hall, who was pretty attractive then.’
Amazingly, she said: ‘Fine, Peter, I’ll stay.’ But wasn’t that a teeny bit selfish, I ask him.
‘Selfish?’ he looks baffled. ‘Well, that would have been the end of the marriage.’
She might have stayed constant? ‘Oh, come off it!’
SOSUSAN stayed at home, had their three children and took a position as a secretary to pay the bills. She never made it back to the day job.
‘She knew who she was at home,’ says Peter firmly. ‘ She was an incredibly talented actress and I encouraged her, but she didn’t want to have to sell herself.’
He can’t say who was the more talented of the two of them. ‘I don’t think like that,’ he says. ‘She’s a woman, I’m a man!’
Susan’s sacrifice, it seems, was worth it. Thanks to a combination of talent, self-confidence and ‘100 per cent focus’, Peter triumphed.
He tells me Peter Hall once described him as ‘ the greatest speaker of verse in the English language’. And his run-ins with Rex Harrison, he says, were because Rex was worried about being eclipsed by him. He bought a Rolls-Royce, a succession of Porsches, kept up his exercises, smoked heavily, went drinking with his actor friends — ‘they’re all dead now’ — and worked hard.
Some parts, though, still eluded him. ‘I was trained to be a leading Shakespearean actor. The voice! The presence! The size!’ he says grandly. ‘But I never had a lead.’
He has high hopes for the new film, Together, and tells me that shortly before he was sent the script, Susan broke her leg, just as Sylvia Syms’s character does.
‘The first time she was able to get out of her hospital bed to go to the loo, she put a hand on the nurse’s shoulder to steady herself and was told: “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to touch us!” I mean, really! The world has gone mad.’
Unlike the couple in Together, he and Susan have a detailed care plan for their later years. ‘We’ve signed all the papers,’ he says.
Of course they have. Frankly, I’d be surprised if Peter left anything — not even his choice of very jaunty socks — to chance.
‘I dress for my wife, and she dresses for me,’ he explains.
Naturally, their set-up wouldn’t suit everyone, but Peter and Susan do seem blissfully happy — she the soothing balm to his occasionally rather hot head.
Towards the end of our chat, I ask if he loses his temper often.
‘No. No I don’t,’ he says with a straight face. ‘I can’t think when I last lost it.’
I try not to tot up the endless fall-outs with fellow thespians and directors he’s just recounted. ‘I won’t be bullied!’ he says. He was, finally, offered King Lear about five years ago. But it was too late. ‘I turned it down — I was too old!’ he huffs.
He wasn’t too old for The Exorcist, though, and had ‘absolutely no trouble’ either learning or memorising his lines. But it will be his last West End show. Partly because of the time commitment, he says, but more because Susan is sick of waiting up to share that Irish whiskey every night.
‘I couldn’t bear another [play],’ she stage-whispered to me earlier in the kitchen.
An hour or so with Peter Bowles is wonderfully entertaining. The time flies. The stories flow. And the tantrums have long been forgotten. He is funny, charming, beady, self- obsessed and almost scarily on the ball.