‘Life tastes better when time is running out’
The actor David Haig on intimations of mortality – and why family tragedies have strengthened, not weakened, him
For a man who is discussing his own mortality, actor David Haig MBE seems remarkably cheerful. “A young person says, ‘Yes, I’m going to die’, but understands it only intellectually,” he says. “At 61, I finally understand, yes, it really is going to happen. It ceases to be intellectual and becomes emotional. You realise you’ve been lucky in the lottery so far. And that gives you such a feeling of converse positivity.
“I have moments of walking around Greenwich Park” – near where the actor lives with his wife, Julia, an actress, and the two youngest of their five children – “and I see an amazing sunset go down. I have never had such a placid acceptance before. You taste life better because of this awareness of it running out.”
Haig’s existentialist musings are not driven by any personal bad news. He looks tanned and fit, bright-eyed and bushy mustachioed (facial hair being something of a trademark) and so familiar from roles across television, film and theatre, including The Thin Blue Line, Four Weddings and a Funeral, his self-penned My Boy Jack, and Yes, Prime Minister. Now the Olivier Award-winning actor is appearing as The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard at the Old Vic with Daniel Radcliffe. He loves the role – “The Player has these explosive moments of energy and darkness – he is ambivalent morally. He will sell anything or everyone to stay alive.”
Haig is quick to remind that the play is an absurdist comedy. “You are allowed to laugh, but there is a timeliness to it,” he says. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live in a world without order and that is a bit how it feels now. They are seeking security, which we are also globally at the moment.”
Haig says he finds current politics “extraordinary. It is terrifying that a nation essential to democracy should elect someone like Donald Trump. I watch the news hoping that some information will come out and force him out of power.
“I have never read the news so avidly; I want to know how this extraordinary period in politics unfolds. Because it is not just Trump, it is the Middle East, Europe, Brexit.
“You can ask two friends, both of whom you respect, and they can have diametrically opposed views. I think the world is at a tipping point, on a crucial cusp.”
Talk of mortality and worldwide chaos is not disturbing Haig’s sangfroid. He admits to outbursts of temper, but says his family are used to his staccato bursts of frustration and rage, and barely bat an eyelid. “I get angry over superficialities, but not over anything of profundity.”
In the past he has attributed this steady calm – borderline pessimism – to tragedies in family life. Haig lost a sister, Karen, aged 22, to a brain aneurysm, when he was 26. “She felt unwell and had double vision. Her doctor identified it as a virus and she was told to rest. When she got home, Karen lost consciousness and never recovered.
“It was a huge shock, and after something like that nothing ever surprises you again. Of course, people die every day, but that microcosm of an individual lost makes everything unpredictable.”
Grief, he says, can be polarising. “You have to work things out for yourself, as well as rely on others. It can be isolating for everybody. My family were lucky that it strengthened, rather than weakened, us.”
Like his parents, Haig knows the horror of losing a child. Grace, then his fifth child, reached full term but was stillborn in 1996. “That amplified this feeling of ‘no surprises’.
“My wife realised the pregnancy was different and we raced off to hospital. The situation was appalling. We were in a room with paper-thin walls, and could hear the family next door celebrating the arrival of their baby – as they absolutely should have done – while we were… We should have been placed somewhere else.”
He and Julia are supporters of Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity. Julia has lobbied successfully for hospitals to provide separate birthing suites for couples in that same, devastating situation.
Interestingly, their children are equally divided between the theatrical and caring professions. Alice, 32, is an actress; Caroline, 29, a paediatric nurse; Fred, 25, will soon be in Follies at the National Theatre; and Harry, 23, works with children affected by autism. (The youngest, Connie, 18, is doing her A-levels.)
This split between art and duty may be genetic. David’s father, Francis, was an army officer and frustrated artist, who eventually became director of the Hayward Gallery.
It was the same duality that Haig later identified in Rudyard Kipling’s life, the subject of his 1997 play My Boy Jack. “Kipling gave his son a magical childhood and then sent him off to fight in the First World War. There was a paradox I recognised in this, thanks to my father, who sometimes seemed to be fighting his natural generosity of spirit.”
Haig went to a traditional boarding school, Rugby, which he hated. “I was instinctively rebellious and missed home. I didn’t enjoy living for 12 weeks away from my secure environment.
“There was bullying at school, but I survived. I wasn’t a wilting flower, and I did get lots out of it. But the tightness of the system made me more rebellious.
“I might have grown my hair and been a hippy if I had been in a liberal environment, but I wouldn’t have kicked against the system so hard.”
Needless to say, after a number of minor indiscretions involving illicit cigarettes, alcohol and girls, he was asked to leave. He went on to spend a year on a kibbutz before finding his way into drama school (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), and then that non-stop CV begins – running from Blake’s 7 to The Thick of It, Tom and Viv to Florence Foster Jenkins. It’s hard to imagine him aged 18, as he has previously claimed, “pathologically lazy – I just used to chill out, like girls, get stoned”.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that he is impressed by the work ethic of Daniel Radcliffe, whom he first met when the pair acted together as father and son in a production of My Boy Jack. “He was 17 then, 27 now, and is extraordinarily grounded, clever, a self-deprecating bloke who knows what he wants to do artistically in theatre as much as film.”
During Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Player poses the rhetorical question: “What happens to old actors? Nothing, they are still acting.” Haig admits to indulging thoughts of whether that is how the future will pan out for him, too.
“I’m interested to know: am I going to follow that course? Will I keel over one day on stage? Or will I retire? I would be happy just to write, but that’s not a good enough living and therein lies the problem. It probably means that I will go on acting until the end.”
‘After the shock of my sister’s death, nothing would surprise me again’