Older, wiser but no calmer
JOHN ALTMAN FOUND FAME AS NASTY NICK IN EASTENDERS. HE TELLS GARRY BUSHELL HOW HE TURNED HIS BACK ON DRINK AND DRUGS – BUT STILL HAS A SHORT FUSE
JOHN ALTMAN is a lot calmer than he used to be. “I don’t drink anymore,” he tells me. “My wife suggested I stop. I can have quite a short fuse.” She’s been his ex-wife for many years, and even sober, John’s fuse is easily lit.
“Twice now I’ve asked people in the Post Office where their masks are,” he says. “It makes me mad. One of them got quite agitated, saying, ‘Who are you to talk to me? Who do you think you are?’
“But when I asked again, his excuse for not wearing one was, ‘I’m not from round here’.” John laughs. “The other guy said, ‘It’s in the car’.”
The Reading-born actor is best known for playing Nasty Nick Cotton in EastEnders. “Someone says ‘Hello ma’ to me almost every day,” he says. “People don’t come close, though. They tend to shout from a distance. They’re probably worried I might have a knife.”
Nasty Nick always did. He was a terrific character, like King Rat in a leather jacket, and he plagued the BBC soap from the first episode in February 1985 until his death from a heroin overdose in 2015.
“He was a horrible, drug-dealing, racist thug who robbed his mother and had the highest murder count on the Square,” John says. “Yet people liked him.”
Altman, born John Stewart, has had one foot in acting and the other in rock since his teens – his album, Never Too Late To Rock & Roll, is out now.
“The Beatles made a real impact,” he recalls. “I heard Please Please Me and my ears pricked up. Playing George Harrison in The Birth Of The Beatles was one of my proudest moments.”
He was 15 when The Who played Dreamland, Margate. “Me and a mate got there early for the Saturday morning pictures then sneaked into the main ballroom and hid in there all day. We even got into The Who’s dressing room and left graffiti – ‘Smash your kit up, Keith!’ The gig was sensational. We were so close to the stage Daltrey’s sweat was flying over us. We went back and got their autographs but missed our train. As we were hitchhiking home, a big Lincoln Continental pulled over. My jaw dropped – it was Pete Townshend and his wife. He bought us chips and lemonade and dropped us home to Herne Bay. We went to school on Monday morning and nobody believed us. By then rock was in my blood.”
A drummer and guitarist, John has been in bands off and on for the decades, including The Hitmen, Resurrection, and most famously the Heavy Metal Kids in 2010 when he replaced his late mate Gary Holton on lead vocals.
“I loved it,” he says. “Gary was a hard act to follow. I saw them once at the Music Machine in Camden and he was climbing the curtains.”
John covers his marriage breakdown in his autobiography, In The Nick Of Time (now also an audiobook). He married Bridget Poodhun in 1986, less than a year after they’d been introduced by his costar Nejdet “Ali Osman” Salih.
Drinking and cocaine consumption played a large part in their 1997 divorce, John admits. He gave up both but by then, it was too late. Daughter Rosanna and her daughter now live in Luxembourg.
Currently single, John has kept busy in lockdown. He’s made an “audio movie” called Unsinkable, about a Second World War cargo ship, co-starring John Malkovich and Brian Cox, and forthcoming radio soap Greenborn.
He relaxes by watching movies and listening to music – he’s a recent convert to Joe Bonamassa. “I also walk, cycle and work out in the open air with Jacob Peregrine Wheller, a Ninja Warrior finalist,” he says.
“I try and do something for someone else every day.”