Rebel who put the ‘F’ into Four Weddings
As the cast of the hit film reassemble for Comic Relief, John Hind remembers the funny, foul-mouthed Charlotte Coleman
When the original cast of Four Weddings and a Funeral are reunited for Comic Relief this week, there will be one person markedly missing. She is actress Charlotte Coleman, who had her own funeral at the Buddhist Centre in Mill Hill, north London, in 2001. Seven years before her death from an asthma attack, Coleman played Scarlett, the colourful flatmate of Hugh Grant’s Charles. They began that film by waking up late and repeatedly swearing as they dressed and drove frantically to attend the first of the film’s four weddings.
At the time, Four Weddings and a Funeral was the highest grossing British movie ever made and people assumed Coleman – who called herself “Cole” – was set for a successful career. But those that knew her, like me, were never so sure. Her life outside of acting was chaotic. She was a brilliant, funny friend – but permanently on the cusp of one disaster or another.
I first interviewed her when she was only 14. A paid actress since the age of seven, when she starred in a production of Noël Coward’s Cavalcade, Coleman was the eldest daughter of actress Ann Beach (who appeared in the films Notting Hill and Oliver Twist) and Canadian producer and director Francis Coleman.
They lived in Muswell Hill, in north London, a bastion of media types ever since the BBC set up at Alexandra Palace, and the favoured domain of busy middle-class parents who gave their children liberal upbringings in big houses.
Coleman started taking acting classes at the Anna Scher Theatre in Islington at the age of eight (Scher recalled a “bright, gorgeous pixie, just bursting with talent”), and by the time I met her she had already played Sue in the children’s television programme Worzel Gummidge and the eponymous hero in two hugely popular series on ITV about an anarchic schoolgirl called Marmalade Atkins. It was about Marmalade that I wanted to talk to her.
I was running a small magazine called Ego in Nottingham, and wished to feature her in a special “comedy” issue we were doing. We met at her house, with her parents in attendance. Coleman made quite an impression.
Small and dressed in Fifties clothing, she was already smoking Silk Cut and had five earrings in one ear alone. Her favourite phrases were: “She’s a bit of a f---ing wally”, “That’s pathetic” and “Well dread”. She called people in general “fannies”. Her room was graffitied and filled with piles of objects, including traffic cones. She liked raves and attending late-night films until 3am at the Hampstead Classic Cinema.
Cole had a fondness for James Dean and didn’t seem to take her studies particularly seriously. Just before our meeting, she said, a teacher at Camden School for Girls had confiscated a presumably fictional but “outrageous” 30-page letter “about orgies” that she had been scribbling to a friend who’d moved to Canada and who claimed to be a big hit there with the older boys. Coleman thought this amusing. A letter from the school to her parents said: “Charlotte and her friends are obviously going through some teenage experiments”. When I repeated this story in the magazine, the publicist at Thames TV wrote admonishingly. On the very same day, I had a letter from Coleman’s father congratulating me on a wonderful article.
After to the interview, I would receive occasional letters from Cole and after I moved to London I would often bump into her in pubs around Highgate and Muswell Hill. The letters were chatty and displayed a wacky sense of humour. In one she described how she was decorating her room. Another came complete with sketches of moles (one of her favourite animals) and hippies.
But other letters were, frankly, alarming. She had, she once told me, set fire to her bedroom. “You know those big boxes of Swan Vesta?” she wrote. “I’d always fiddle with stuff [when I’m] on the phone… Anyway, I lit a match and put it in the big box and ffftttzz.
I threw it and it went behind this big filing cabinet of papers and I thought it had gone out.” She said that when she’d later awoken and opened her bedroom door she’d been met by a ball of flames.
It probably didn’t come as a surprise to anybody when she was expelled from school. After her expulsion, Coleman used her television earnings to pay her way at the liberal boarding school Dartington Hall, in Devon, but, instead of attending lessons, spent most of her time watching videos.
On one occasion she wrote to say she wished she had more discipline in her daily life. After a year, she was back in London, living in a council flat aged 16. For a while she was happy. She met Jonathan Laycock, a 20-yearold drugs counsellor and fell in love. They moved into their own flat and lived together for three years. But in 1987, Laycock was knocked off his moped and killed. I met her by chance soon after, at the 7-11 in Muswell Hill. Sobbing in the street outside, she told me about the accident, but my abiding
Her drama teacher recalled a ‘bright, gorgeous pixie, just bursting with talent’
memory is of watching Coleman mount a moped herself to get home. It seemed so strange that she would do this after the conversation we had just had, but all I recall doing is telling her to make sure she rode safely.
The next time I saw her, nibbling a pastry at the Pavilion Café in Highgate Woods, she was thinner and gaunter. Friends said she had withdrawn into herself since Laycock’s death and developed an eating disorder. There were also rumours of drug taking. She still had spells of success. At 21, she won a Royal Television Society award for her portrayal of the lesbian teenager Jess, in the BBC adaptation of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And she followed this with Four Weddings.
But you only had to look at Coleman in acting roles after that film – such as the two series of How Do You Want Me? (alongside Dylan Moran) – to know something was going on in her life.
On Nov 14 2001, aged 33, Coleman died after apparently suffering a massive asthma attack. Her inhaler was found just a flight of stairs away from where she had collapsed, but the actress was so weak she had not been able to reach it. She had been a smoker right up until her death and I still have a letter from her featuring a sketch of people smoking fat, conical cigarettes.
“I wrote you a letter which was really good but I lost it,” it says. “Then I wrote you this really weird letter when I was in a psychological mood but I couldn’t send it for lots of reasons, mainly you couldn’t read it as it was scribbled.”
She signed off: “Stay cool, hip and layed [sic] back man…”
One Red Nose Day and a Wedding will air on BBC One during Comic Relief on Friday