Is fad for Eton types in acting and politics finally at an end?
◆ Peter Capaldi is the latest thespian to bemoan the lack of opportunity for working-class actors and Aidan Smith sees his point
As if Gregory’s Girl couldn’t be more funny, sweet and optimistic, you might recall how John Gordon Sinclair was an apprentice electrician when he landed his role in the movie and schoolgirl Clare Grogan worked part-time as a waitress in a Glasgow pasta joint. Bill Forsyth popped into the Spaghetti Factory and right away thought: “That’s my girl.”
But Grogan’s mother had warned about the approaches of strange men and the 17-year-old refused to give the director her phone number. Despite the restaurant manager assuring her that Forsyth was who he claimed to be and there really was going to be a movie, shot on the red-blaze football pitches and roundabouts of Cumbernauld, Grogan continued to play hard to get. It took Forsyth three weeks to break her resolve.
Forsyth’s next film was the equally charming Local Hero, starring Peter Capaldi, who fell for a woman with webbed feet while Burt Lancaster fell for a Highland fishing village. Another working-class Glaswegian unknown, Capaldi went on to great things including Doctor Who and, greatest of all, The Thick of It.
But could he have made the same journey now? You’d like to think that, always, talent will out, but judging by his comments at the weekend, perhaps not. “Plum roles go to smooth fakers from good schools” was the headline on his interview with The Observer.
“There’s less and less of my lot in the arts,” he said. “We had nothing, zilch,” he recalled of his family background. “All this highfalutin life is because I went to art school. My parents couldn’t afford to send me but... the government of the day paid for me to go and I didn’t have to pay them back.”
These days there isn’t the same financial support for artistic aspirants from modest homes. If money’s not an issue and you’ve been privately educated, you can thrive, even if you might actually be a phoney. “This business is full of people who are not the real thing,” Capaldi said.
He added that he “meets those I perceived to be artists ‘cos they had posh accents, but who didn’t have it, they just sounded like they did. There’s a kind of smoothness, a kind of confidence that comes from a good school”. It was wrong, he affirmed, that one strata of society had the most access to the arts.
Smoothness of persona can bleed into performance. Imagine The Thick of It’s human flame-thrower of a spindoctor Malcolm Tucker being played by an actor from – picking a “good school”, not entirely at random – Eton. It produces actors: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis and Dominic West. All good at their job, but smoothness wasn’t required for Tucker.
Doubtless Capaldi will be accused of left-wing chippiness, but doesn’t he have a point? A few years ago, a London School of Economics/ Goldsmiths College study found that only 27 per cent of actors came from a working-class background and that the profession was “heavily skewed towards the privileged”.
Since then it’s unlikely, given Capaldi’s anecdotal evidence, that the playing field has levelled, and he’s been far from a lone voice. Those great thespian dames, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, have voiced concern. So has Julie Walters, reckoning she’d have little chance of making it today. David Morrissey, inspired by seeing his type on screen in Kes, said acting is now a “de facto middle-class profession”. Daniel Mays lamented how film and TV were “awash” with privately educated actors amid a fetish for period drama – the “Downton effect”. Another Scot, James
Mcavoy, who paid his way through drama school by working in a bakery, argued that this wasn’t just damaging for the profession but society as a whole.
But at the time wasn’t the posh actor simply, in one significant way at least, reflective of society? The Eton crowd, along with the Harrow-educated Benedict Cumberbatch, were all enjoying huge success.
If we were prepared to be led by Old Etonians in government, how could we be surprised there were so many Old Etonians on screen? Surely we got the performers – the pop charts, too, had a heavy privately educated presence, music having become an indulgence only the trust-fund troubadour could afford – that we deserved.
There was a comical spat about all of this. Labour’s then shadow arts minister Chris Bryant claimed Redmayne & Co were blocking the rise of talent from humble backgrounds.
Singer James Blunt called him a “classist gimp”, adding: “It is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting which makes our country c**p, far more than my s**t songs and plummy accent.” Bryant hit back: “Stop being so bloomin’ precious. I’m not knocking your success and have even contributed to it by buying one of your albums.”
James Fox, part of the acting dynasty, has recalled how he was the only actor “of my background” to make it in his twenties during the pomp of the 1960s’ Angry Young Men: Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp and Tom Courtenay. He remarked: “No one at that time said: ‘Oi, all those workingclass guys have got an advantage over you posh twits.’ ”
And Tom Hollander – who attended the same private prep school as Hiddleston – has insisted the posh actor is simply a “fad”.
Well, let’s see if fashion dictates a change. Old Etonians and similar are about to take their leave of the political stage. Perhaps those bitten by the acting bug in such rarefied surroundings – hardly surprising at Eton given its two professionally staffed theatres and TV studio – will then have a quieter time of it.
That might depend on writers telling different stories – more relevant to now, more involving ordinary folk. In that, Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a terrific start.