Brian Cox on poverty
He is a Hollywood star now, but in his childhood in Dundee, Brian Cox experienced almost Dickensian poverty, says Jane Mulkerrins in The Daily Telegraph. When he was eight, his father died. His mother, a cleaner, suffered a series of breakdowns, and had electric shock therapy from which she never fully recovered. The youngest of five children, Cox would beg scraps from the chip shop for the family to eat. “I survived on nothing,” he says. Having failed the 11-plus, he left school at 15, took a job mopping floors at the local repertory theatre – and found his place in life. “I learnt from great teachers and mentors and people who gave me a value system,” he says. Two years later, he won a scholarship to Lamda, and soon he was acting at the Royal Court in London alongside the likes of Albert Finney. “It was the Swinging Sixties, it was the King’s Road,” he recalls. But Cox didn’t ride that wave. “I’d had crazy times as a child and I really didn’t need craziness. I needed order, I needed discipline. So I got married when I was 21, because it was all too much.”
It’s easy to feel a pang of envy when watching artist Grayson Perry and his wife Philippa at home together, said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph. In lockdown, the couple are presenting a TV show, Grayson’s Art Club, in which they produce their own art, and encourage viewers to do likewise. Of course; the art is part of its appeal – but what is really heart-warming is the portrait it provides of their 30-year marriage. What is the secret to such an apparently harmonious home life? “We never shout at each other,” says Philippa, a psychotherapist. “We just take turns with everything without even needing to think about it. One day I’ll carry the emotional load and keep us buoyant, and the next day Gray will do it, so that we never both moan at once. If we were both feeling dissatisfaction simultaneously we’d get very down, so we instinctively make sure that doesn’t happen.” It’s clear they have masses to talk about, and lots in common – but they’re not two peas in a pod. Philippa, for instance, doesn’t particularly notice people’s clothes, whereas Grayson – a transvestite with an alter ego called Claire – has an “incredible internal dress diary”. “He will go out to a private view and bump into a friend of mine, and afterwards I’ll be dying to know her news, and he’ll say, ‘She was wearing a glamorous 1940s costume with a lace collar.’”