‘Britain needs a national musical theatre’
Stage star Janie Dee tells Ben Lawrence why musicals should be taken seriously, and why her new play strikes such a chord
It’s 7.30am and in an austerely beautiful church hall in north London, actress Janie Dee is having her hair and make-up done. This is common practice when someone is to be photographed for the newspaper, but Dee finds it faintly ludicrous.
“I am so past painting my face,” she says. “If you had Dominic West or someone talking to you now, he would just get up and have his photo taken.
“When we’re on stage, playing make believe, it’s fine. But this is sort of a lie, and I don’t want to lie anymore. I have got to a point where I want to say, ‘This is who I am’.”
That sounds like a line from a musical, which isn’t surprising, as Dee is one of the few actors in Britain who could be called a theatre star and it’s her gifts in musical theatre that set her apart. Most recently, she wowed the critics in last autumn’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the National in which her sinuous, very moving performance as Phyllis, a showgirl, stole the thunder of the peerless Imelda Staunton.
But Dee, who has won two Oliviers and been nominated a further three times, has also triumphed in straighter roles – in the works of Ayckbourn, Chekhov and Pinter, with whom she struck up a strong friendship. After appearing in a revival of Pinter’s
Betrayal, she cooked him and his wife, Antonia Fraser, an Irish stew (which fans will know is a nod to the play). It was at the time of the Iraq War and the conversation turned to Tony Blair.
“I said that I had seen him talking and, though I hated to admit it, found him very reasonable,” explains Dee. “Harold then turned to me and said, [Dee affecting Pinter’s stentorian baritone] ‘Janie, let me make one thing absolutely clear, ‘Tony Blair is a c---’.”
Dee is now 55 and I sense during our interview that she is at a turning point in her life. We are meeting to talk about her part in Monogamy, a new play by Torben Betts in which she plays Caroline Mortimer, Britain’s second most famous TV chef, whose life starts to unravel when she is hounded by the paparazzi.
“I sometimes feel I am not really acting doing this play,” says Dee. “I feel I am this woman. A woman who is struggling to hold her household together, who has a husband who is not present for her in the way she’d like…”
When I inquire further as to life parallels, she clams up. “Well, I’m not going to say anything about that,” she
‘I sometimes feel I am not really acting doing this play. I feel I am this woman’
says of her marriage to fellow actor Rupert Wickham, with whom she has two children. “But [the play is familiar to me] in the way that it’s about a child coming home from university with new politics [Dee’s daughter Matilda is studying at Cambridge] that she doesn’t think are right, but as a mother she tries to take them on. I get that.”
The play has made Dee reflect on her relationship with her own children. When they were young, she worried about her availability as a busy working mother, but in retrospect she has realised, with some relief, that she was sufficiently there for them. She remembers reading the entire Harry Potter series to them, all the Roald Dahls and, perhaps more surprisingly, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. “I was always making up stories, too,” she says.
Dee is a consummate artist whose performances often provide lots of surface theatrical dazzle – while also digging deep to find something more profound. “The connection has got to be alive, but it is so painful sometimes… Sorry,” she says, tears starting to run down her newly
made-up face. “This play is a bit… I mean. It’s amazing. It’s about family, time, mistakes and regrets.” She turns to the sympathetic make-up artist. “Look, I’ve just undone all your work.”
If Dee is laying bare her vulnerability at this moment, I am left in no doubt that there is a vaulting tenacity to her, too. She was born in Windsor, one of four children, and her parents made many sacrifices to send them all to the highly respected Arts Educational Schools. She remembers looking in the larder at home and seeing nothing there but a packet of lentils and a box of cornflour. Once, she stole a cabbage from a field.
“It was awful, and the man rang up my mother and said he’d seen me stealing it. She said she couldn’t replace it, but she would pay for it, which she did. It was embarrassing, but really, that level of sacrifice.”
Dee loved school, although not all of its regimes. “The problem was that we were all weighed and, at 13, that is very dangerous. It got very serious and misguided. The point of dance is that you need your strength and I lost mine. I lost a year of my life as a dancer because I was too weak and I couldn’t lift my leg off the floor. I went too far.”
When she got an acting job at 17, the school persuaded her to leave, knowing that her parents were struggling to pay the fees. She soon found herself starring in Cinderella alongside a then-unknown David Jason. “I fell madly in love with him. He was playing Buttons and he was so wonderful. He was so lonely – I wanted to look after him and for him to be the one. I remember lying on my bed and promising my virginity to him. He was unaware of this, the poor man. I told Sylvester Mccoy that I’d been horse riding with him and he said, ‘How disgusting! He’s 40’.”
Dee’s versatility was spotted early on. She hoofed magnificently through Showboat, Guys and Dolls and Cats before moving on to more serious work. Nevertheless, Dee hates the snobbery that surrounds musical theatre, and is determined that it should be taken seriously. “It is the most popular art form in the country and I really think we need a dedicated national musical theatre. How wonderful would it be for every musical to be given a full orchestra and a proper space? I will try and make it happen.”
After Monogamy, Dee will have a break before returning to Follies. She’s looking forward to spending time with her children and sometimes visits her local church in Kensington. Dee, it seems, has been on a quest for some sort of answer throughout her life. At 18, she was recruited by the Moonies and nearly ended up as one of their overseas missionaries. Today, she is more pragmatic about her faith.
“I find the Old Testament quite a challenge,” she says. “I said to the vicar that this wasn’t the God I wanted to believe in, all this vengeance. I suppose I am wary of religion because it’s often used as a weapon. But I know God is love, and love is complicated.” She pauses. “I have demons. I have failings, as a mum, as a wife, as a person.” What sort of failings, I wonder. “I worry that I said this or did that, that I lost my temper when I shouldn’t have. But talking to God is helpful. When I get down on my knees, it reminds me how lucky I am.” At that moment the photographer arrives and Dee, with her make-up now beautifully reapplied, smiles warmly. Whatever her reservations about painting her face, you know she was always going to put on a good show.