Peter: How I finally made mum proud ...when I qualified as a Doctor
Lynda Bellingham’s devastated husband recalls their last hours together in his searing and candid new book
HE is one of Scotland’s most successful actors, and has even won an Oscar during an impressive career spanning three decades.
But Peter Capaldi has admitted that his mother Nancy only became truly proud of him when he won the lead role in cult BBC television show Doctor Who.
She had given her son – a lifelong fan of the sci-fi programme – the official Doctor Who annual every year since he was a boy.
And Capaldi has revealed how, just before she died earlier this year, she loved to hear the ‘happy squeals’ of the nurses when he came to visit her hospital bedside.
In an interview for The Telegraph Magazine ahead of his second season as the Time Lord – which starts on BBC One next Saturday – the 57year-old opened up about how much the iconic character means to him.
He also told how he succumbed to ‘Doctor Who knee’, a condition which left previous incumbent Matt Smith – who was only 26 when he won the role – on crutches.
‘It’s something to do with running down corridors and turning round
‘I don’t feel that I’ve nailed it yet’
very quickly to deliver lines,’ he explained.
While growing up in Glasgow he was teased at school and called ‘Moon Boy’ for being a sci-fi geek. But Capaldi found solace in Doctor Who and at the age of 14 even applied to be president of the programme’s fan club.
‘Doctor Who will always be part of me,’ he said, ‘To me it was like a fairytale. It had that quality of darkness that you find in a Grimms’ fairy tale: this strange creature of a man who takes you on all these adventures but always keeps you safe. That’s absolutely what I want children who watch my version to feel.’
He concedes, however, ‘I don’t feel I’ve nailed it yet.
‘One of the biggest challenges that I’ve found is that you have to sort of be able to spin on a penny.
‘You have to be able to go from pantomime to tragedy, from domestic to epic, within a single scene. You have to keep the ball in the air, and you have to remember that The X Factor is on the other channel.
‘You have to remember that there are people watching in America. You have to remember that, as much as you want to apply your mature acting instincts, there are actually lots of children watching. You’ve got to cover all these bases, and make it exciting and interesting.
‘It’s a great challenge – and I really don’t say that lightly – and one which I care very much about getting right because it’s big, really big.’
In 1995, Capaldi won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for his film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
He later went on to star as foulmouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the Bafta-winning satire The Thick of It.
But Capaldi had never experienced the glare of publicity that becoming the 12th Doctor brought.
Recalling the show’s first season, he said: ‘It was terribly nerveracking for me because not only was the job new, I was also getting a level of attention that I simply wasn’t used to. It can be quite intimidating. You don’t just play Doctor Who, you represent him.
‘You represent the 50 years in which he has meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people.
‘And the weight of it – and I really would never want to seem ungrateful – is that it is continual. It is very, very nice because people always greet you with a certain affection, but it is basically every day, everywhere you go.’
Capaldi, who studied at Glasgow School of Art, always knew that when he grew up, he did not want to join the ‘depressed-looking souls standing at the bus stop in the rain every morning’.
However he described his childhood – living with his mother, father Gerry and sister Stella in a tenement in the Springburn area, as ‘very safe and full of delights’.
Capaldi is based in Cardiff from Monday to Friday but returns to family life in London with his producer wife Elaine and daughter Cecily at weekends.
The oldest Doctor to debut since the original, William Hartnell in 1963, Capaldi is glad he got the role at this stage in his career.
‘Would I have appreciated it as much if it had happened 20 years ago? Almost definitely not,’ he said.
And while his second season has not even aired yet, the actor is already sad about the inevitable day when he films his final scene.
‘It might just be my Scottish melancholia, but the very first day I found out I’d got the job, I started to feel sad that one day I would not have it; that there would come a day, in the not too distant future, that I wouldn’t be Doctor Who.’
THERE was overwhelming sadness and sympathy when, last year, actress Lynda Bellingham told the world that she had only a few weeks to live. As she revealed in her poignant memoir, serialised in The Mail on Sunday, her colon cancer was far advanced, despite months of gruelling chemotherapy. She hoped to last until Christmas – but that was not to be and in October she passed away. Now her devoted husband has written a book of his own. By turns moving and wryly humorous, it is a painfully frank portrait of a much-loved woman – and of the final months and days they could spend together…
STILL half asleep, my arm reaches across the bed and for that split second everything’s OK. Then I suddenly remember. She’s not here… I get up straight away and the first thing I see is Lynda’s open handbag under the desk in our bedroom, where she wrote her four books. Lying at the top is the Filofax diary she lived by. And I lose it completely. I’ve no idea how long I sit there in her chair sobbing my heart out.
I knew, in my heart of hearts, that Lynda wouldn’t make it to Christ- mas, as she’d desperately hoped. But I honestly hadn’t expected her to go when she did, last night at 7.50pm, October 19, 2014, in my arms at the London Clinic.
I arrived home at the North London flat where Lynda and I had lived for nearly six years with my son, Bradley, and Lynda’s youngest son, Robbie, at around midnight.
The first thing I did was grab a bottle of chablis. We must have got through four or five bottles as we sat round the dining table, talking and crying until 4am. Facing up to life without Lynda. How the hell would we cope?
Today was my first day as a widower. How I hate that word.
There was plenty to do, which would have pleased Lynda. For ten wonderful years we’d been inseparable and she knew I’d need to keep busy if I was going to ever manage without her. In a daze, I run through in my mind what needs doing before I meet up with the funeral director, who is travelling from Crewkerne, my hometown in Somerset, to take Lynda back with him.
I start to gather together the outfit she is to be buried in. I locate the navy blue dress but, for the life of me, I can’t find those handmade shoes she loved so much.
Suddenly, habit kicks in. Of its own accord, my hand grabs my mobile and my thumb hovers above number one to speed dial Lynda. Just in time, I stop myself from calling to ask: ‘Where the hell are your bloody shoes?’
Sobbing, I sit back down and wonder if this is how it’s always going to be from now on. Will I ever come to accept that she’s really gone; my Lynda, my B, my soul mate? Will I ever really want to? A PSYCHIC has helped me cope with my bereavement. Less than a month after I lost my wife, I was at home waiting for a car to take me to the Loose Women studios to talk about her.
My mobile rang. It was the medium, Yvonne Williams, returning my call from a few days ago. ‘Lynda is with me,’ she told me. To be honest, I didn’t believe it. But because I was desperate to, I let Yvonne carry on. She told me a couple of things that stopped me dead in my tracks. ‘Lynda’s saying she’s glad you finally found the shoes. It’s a pity they didn’t fit.’
That was scary. It was true. How did Yvonne know?
Then she said that Lynda was sitting with her dog, the black-and-white one in the photo on top of the television in our bedroom.
She was talking about Star, a blackand-white sheepdog Lynda bought for her son Michael. Lynda wrote about Star in her first autobiography so Yvonne could easily have read it. But how the hell did she know about the photo and where it was?
A couple of weeks later, I drove down to Crewkerne for my first faceto-face appointment with Yvonne.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but she was a lovely, very ordinary lady who was working from an apartment in a building that used to be the old grammar school.
After that, I started seeing her every month. Some of the stuff she comes out with – very personal things – is amazing and very comforting.
But there was one thing she said on either the first or second meeting that I am still not so sure about. She drew the initials in the air of a lady she says I will ‘end up with’.
Immediately I laughed and said, ‘No!’
I know I might not feel this way for ever, but at the moment I am not interested in ‘ending up’ with anybody else.
It is interesting, though, that the woman she mentioned, someone in the public eye, was someone Lynda had once asked me if I fancied.
Also, after Lynda’s death I went through a period of drinking two or three bottles of wine a day before stopping again. On my next visit to Yvonne, after I’d quit the booze, she told me that Lynda was really proud of me for locking the bottles away. How could she have known? Bizarre.
There were moments, when I first lost Lynda, when the idea of suicide crossed my mind, though not in any serious way that I’d do anything about. I couldn’t inflict that on my family. Besides, I believe, despite not being a Catholic, that if you commit suicide you end up in purgatory, which means I wouldn’t be with Lynda anyway. When I do go, I want to know I am going to meet up with my soul mate again.
Lynda was a great believer in the afterlife and I always knew that if she had any way of communicating with me, she would do so. I like to believe she has. ON TUESDAY, July 2, 2013, the consultant told us that Lynda had cancer of the colon and lesions on her lungs and liver. After fantastic years of married life, our happiness was shattered.
There was chemotherapy and surgery but by December her surgeon estimated Lynda might have another two years.
And by the beginning of August, 2014, Lynda really started to suffer with the effects of the chemo. Her mouth was so full of ulcers that she couldn’t eat. That famously sexy voice was fading. The palms of her hands had turned black and she was in constant pain.
On August 12 she was told that the chemo was now killing her as much as the cancer.
Lynda asked the oncologist: ‘Can you get me to Christmas?’ He didn’t actually say no, but I knew from the look on his face that it wasn’t going to happen.
‘If you can get me to Christmas, I’ll come off the chemo at the end of November and then slip away at the end of January,’ she announced. We knew that if she stopped the chemo, she’d probably have eight weeks to live.
The oncologist agreed that the chemo would be cut back by half now and stopped – as she wished – in November. Within a couple of weeks, Lynda’s quality of life was much better. The ulcers disappeared and she was buzzing again, planning her perfect last Christmas with a huge tree
Suddenly she grabbed me and sobbed: I don’t want to die