An honoured outsider

Sir Antony Sher may be one of Britain’s greatest theatre actors – and a knight of the realm – but he still feels like an outsider. Growing up gay and Jewish in South Africa left him crippled with shame. “I grew up in a very intolerant and racist society. Being gay was not just illegal, it felt unheard of,” he told Serena Davies in The Daily Telegraph. Doing a year of national service only made things worse. “I wasn’t built for it. I wasn’t able to do sport at school. I was so weedy and short. Bespectacled.” The army was brutal. “We would routinely be called ‘f***ing Jood’, which unfortunately has a close relationship with the German ‘Jude’. There were terribly savage things done to you physically. That was done to everyone, but when it was done to the Jewish boys it would be accompanied by ‘F***ing Jood’. There was a thing where you had to be punched in the stomach. Or woken at night and taken into the showers and laid on your back naked and cold water sprayed at you. It was meant to make you tough.” In Sher’s case, it just made him want to run away. He came to Britain in 1968 and found his niche in the theatre. But he didn’t come out until 1989, having met the love of his life – Gregory Doran, now director of the RSC. They got married last year. “We already had a civil partnership. To get married, they called it upgrading. It was a very unromantic thing. We just sat in an office with a woman typing. But we came out and said, this is incredible, things have come such a long way.” R.J. Mitte is a tall, dark and handsome actor, whose CV includes a star turn in the acclaimed TV series Breaking Bad, as well as a Gap poster campaign and a catwalk turn for Vivienne Westwood. Yet at 25, he already knows he is not destined for the A-list. “I will never be hired as a leading man,” he told Jane Mulkerrins in The Daily Telegraph. “Because I don’t sound like a leading man.” Mitte has cerebral palsy, which means he has trouble with physical coordination and slurred speech. “Casting agents want a leading man who sounds crisper,” he shrugs. “It doesn’t stop me – I am working all the time.” In fact, he has been working for most of his life. Mitte was adopted as a baby by a health worker, Dyna, who raised him and his younger sister on her own. But when he was 11, Dyna’s spine was fractured in a car crash, and she could no longer be the breadwinner. Mitte stepped into the breach, mowing lawns, selling sandwiches at school – and then taking small roles as a film extra. “I realised there was real money to be made, and I wanted to make a lot of it.” He never went through a teenage rebellion – “If you’re responsible for other people, that’s just not a luxury you have” – and he still lives with his mum and sister. Dyna is now fully restored to health, he says proudly. “She dropped me off here on her way to run some errands. I put her to work these days.”