Robert Bathurst I’m not the person you think I am
‘Cold Feet’ made him famous, but Robert Bathurst is sceptical of his celebrity status, he tells Victoria Lambert
‘There is nothing,” says actor Robert Bathurst – delightfully conspiratorially – engaging from the off, “more wonderful than to be happy. But I feel very strongly that happiness is like laughter. It comes at you relative to your previous state; and it’s a hit. So you can’t be laughing or happy the whole time because you’re always looking for the next hit. And if you try to engineer circumstances by which you will feel it, you are riding to a fall.”
It sounds like advice Bathurst, 60, should be offering to his most famous role, David Marsden of Cold Feet – a man as devoid of empathy for others as he is full of exhaustive self-concern. The show, in its seventh series having reinstated itself as a cult hit among midlifers, sees him cheerfully ride roughshod over the feelings of his closest friends – even his ex-wife Karen (Hermione Norris), as he tries to win her back.
Bathurst himself is as settled as David is in flux: living in East Sussex, he has been married since 1985 to artist Victoria Threlfall, with whom he has four twentysomething daughters, Matilda, Clemency, Oriel and Honor. After leaving Cambridge in 1979, where he was part of the Footlights alongside Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, he has been consistently in work, from roles in Downton Abbey to King Charles III on stage in Chicago, for which he earned rave reviews.
So, always busy, but is he satisfied with his lot? “Well, my father was Panglossian in his ability to see the best in any situation.” He pauses, half way through pouring out fresh coffee in the library of the chic Ham Yard Hotel. And with a self-deprecating smile, that familiar rangy face slips perfectly into a well-practised hangdog look: “I wouldn’t go that far. But then he’d gone through the war” – Bathurst senior had been an engineer in the 14th Army and besieged at Imphal, Burma – “he had to sink or keep going on a wave of optimism.”
He adds: “I used to think that contentment was a good substitute for happiness but it isn’t. Acceptance is a good place from which to find happiness.”
It’s from that position that he views David Marsden: “I love playing him but I don’t really have a view on him. I don’t see him through myself. I’m sure there are instincts and judgments and colour you give it which inevitably has something to do with me, but I don’t do that consciously. Nor do I worry if I’ll be judged in relation to the character.
“If you start from the standpoint that the part has nothing to do with me whatsoever, then it is more liberating, certainly on stage. You get much less nervous.” Bathurst seems far too urbane and assured to suffer stage fright, but he denies a lack of nerves. “You have to get nervous for theatre, but it is a different sort. The first two weeks are wholly selfish nerves and the nerves after that are just keeping the bubble going. It’s just making yourself feel sharp.
“Acting,” he ventures, “is about repeating yourself plausibly. If you can repeat yourself 20 times in a day’s filming doing a scene, you can do it 500 times on stage, it’s the same juices.” His repertoire is vast, but there remains one box notably unchecked: musical theatre. “I had singing lessons to learn how to breathe really, and emboldened went along to an audition for a musical at the RSC. Half-way through my number I noticed the pianist was wincing, so I apologised and left.”
Bathurst is so disarming yet sphinxlike at times, it’s difficult to imagine him losing his composure
– let alone his temper. “I don’t get embarrassed, and I’m polite,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean to say I’m nice. People seem to think I don’t have critical faculties. So when I do have an opinion, people say, ooh, I didn’t think that of you.” He admits to “shouting at the radio a lot with impotent rage,” concerned by the fact “we live in a time when there’s a generation or maybe two generations who aren’t tired of war. And so it looks as though they’re brewing up another one whereas us oldies are going ‘oh no’. It is worrying; there seems to be a juvenile unsteadiness at bay.” He is concerned, too, for the world his daughters will be left with. “All generations worry about how the world will cope without them.” He laughs. “It’s like school. You get to the top year and you feel the whole place will fall apart without you. Of course,” he concedes, “it never does.”
Bathurst finds his balm in listening to Radio 3, or following the England cricket team, Brighton and Hove Albion football club, and horse racing, but his own attempts at equestrianism haven’t gone down so well. “Last time I did a job in Hungary,” – the TV mini-series Pillars of the Earth – “I was put on this flea-bitten thing. It chucked me in seconds, I landed with a flump, and I thought, ‘I’m not doing this again’.”
The producers rewarded him with a Hungarian stuntman, who didn’t speak English. “On the second day of filming, I saw Donald Sutherland, who was quite offhand. Then he came over and said, ‘I’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to your stunt double.’ He’d been wondering why I was so unfriendly.”
Playing Charles III in Chicago has been much more enjoyable.
Is he a royalist? “I’m agnostic, by which I mean I’m agnostic about the Divine Right of Kings. I’m not sure anyone has a divine right to rule, not even the Pope. When the Queen dies there may well be a big shift in public opinion. But we will miss the monarchy desperately when it’s gone.”
Bathurst is refreshingly uninterested in our fame-obsessed world: “I don’t trust celebrity and applause; I don’t equate it with love. When someone is pleading for love I turn away. I mistrust charisma; I tend not to be impressed by that or worry about it.” His heroes are perhaps not surprisingly brilliant but low key: Michael Gambon, Alan Ayckbourn, and songwriter Nigel Blackwell (of Half Man Half Biscuit). “When I am down, I read his lyrics and put his music on very loud. I don’t care if that sums me up as a lightweight,” he says unrepentantly.
To announce yourself as happy, he believes, is “hubristic. I had a long conversation with someone who is deeply unhappy the other day and he reminded me of what Benjamin the donkey said in Animal Farm: ‘Hunger, hardship, and disappointment were the unalterable law of life’.”
“It’s about accepting and not resisting that. It’s important to find beauty, happiness and joy where you can.”