Downton echoes Brideshead
The doings of the Crawley family and its below-stairs retinue may be required viewing for many, but not for Diana Quick.
“I’m afraid I haven’t followed Downton Abbey because it is too much like Brideshead Revisited,” she says. “I watch my friend Lizzie McGovern (who plays Cora, Countess Grantham) out of loyalty, and think her splendid, but I’m not interested in period drama. The trouble is that if I tune in to one, I will know at least a third of the cast, so for me to suspend disbelief, to lose myself in the story, is much harder.”
A busman’s holiday, then. So what does she like on television? “I have a secret passion for The X Factor, though the music the contestants are encouraged to perform is pretty dire.”
Quick, 66, is still haunted by the ghost of Julia Flyte. For people of a certain age, it is difficult to divorce the actress from the role that propelled her into popular imagination: the quietly tortured aristocrat, forever staring into the distance, cigarette positioned perfectly against a backdrop of Art Deco, uttering an agonized, “Oh, Charles.”
“Men of a certain age say to me, ‘When I was a schoolboy I had a picture of you on my wall,’ and I suddenly feel quite ancient,” she laughs.
Hard to believe it was 31 years ago — that televisual outbreak of sulky upper-class pouting, teddy bears and quail eggs gorged under Arcadian skies. Brideshead was an antidote to the Britain of 1981, a land long on lines of the unemployed and short on glamour.
The lavish Granada adaptation of Waugh’s paean to a lost England coincided with, and possibly contributed to, a cultural shift.
Poshness, a quality despised and derided throughout the radical Sixties and Seventies, was suddenly back in fashion. As the shop steward retreated, so the Sloane Ranger advanced.
Quick, until then a respected but hardly stellar stage and television actress, found herself being mobbed in London and New York.
“Is this the most beautiful woman in the world?” inquired one magazine, inevitably. Cecil Beaton had certainly thought her a contender, and recorded her looks on film. Bailey and Snowdon followed.
She reflects on her career, on fame, family, feminism and facelifts. “I still get asked to play parts that are quite glamorous,” she says. “But I also get asked to do things because of what I can hopefully bring to the part.”
Quick remains in demand for television and has acted in three low-budget films in the past year, including the recently released Mother’s Milk.
Based on the novel by Edward St. Aubyn, it is another tale of upper-class dysfunction in which Quick plays a malevolent motherin-law.
A call from Hollywood would still be welcome, but not at all costs. “I’m not going to slim down to size 6 for anyone,” she says.
Quick divides her time between London and her home in Suffolk, where her maternal family is from. Raised in Dartford, Kent, she won a scholarship to Oxford at 17 and enjoyed a glittering social life, becoming the first female president of the dramatic society. She considered a traineeship with the BBC, but success on the stage and in television came quickly.
Actors have occupied centre stage in her private life. She was married (briefly) to Kenneth Cranham and was involved in a long relationship with Albert Finney. In 1980 she met Bill Nighy, then an unknown actor falling into the grip of alcoholism. The couple had a daughter, Mary, now an actress, and remained together for 28 years. A reversal of fortune has seen Nighy rein in his addictive side as his star has gradually eclipsed that of Quick. The two remain good friends, however.
“When you have spent 30 years with a person, and unless something has gone horribly wrong between you, hopefully that loving friendship survives,” says Quick. “There are reasons why people decide to live separately and they are not always scandalous ones. There are far more couples splitting up in their sixties now, and one reason is that they can. Economically, they have more independence.” She delves no further. “I’ve done a very good job of keeping my private life private. There is an assumption in this encroaching celebrity culture that every aspect of one’s life is up for consumption. My family and I happen to think that there are some things that are just for us.”
It may come as a surprise to schoolboy admirers of the ethereal Julia that she was played by a committed feminist.
As a young actress fresh from Oxford, Quick entered into the spirit of the late Sixties and abandoned a lucrative part in a West End production to work with a left-wing collective called Red Ladder, for the democratic wage of $59.74 a week. Since then, she has fought against the stoning of women in the Muslim world and lent her support to a number of other causes, including a charity that seeks to reduce mortality among pregnant women in the Third World.
She is also rushing to complete her contribution to a collection of essays marking the first halfcentury of the feminist publishing house Virago. Fifty Shades of Feminism will be a kind of counterblast to Fifty Shades of Grey. In the cause of research, Quick read the opening chapters of E.L. James’s erotic novel. She is polite about it but obviously less than overwhelmed. What will she say in her essay? “I’m going to write about how women define themselves in regard to men, whereas men do not need to define themselves in terms of women. There is this huge pressure for women to look right, to look very much younger than they are. The average glossy tells you how to look gorgeous, how to be a good cook, how to be fantastic in bed. In other words, how to be a good partner.
“Fifty Shades of Grey is not going to be my guilty pleasure. It must feed a fantasy, I suppose. Women collude to a huge extent in perpetuating relationships as they have always been — being reactive instead of equal. I don’t want to be a termagant, a virago, but I do want to be my own person, with some help from my friends.”
Meanwhile, her Suffolk home is a sanctuary, a place for normality.
“I try to be down here for the summer — I love the English summer. I’m out digging up my potatoes and painting the garden wall and making my curtains, like anybody else. And when I’m in London I travel on the bus with my Freedom Pass,” a free transit card for seniors and the disabled.
“Bill Gaskell, one of the first directors I ever worked with, said to me quite severely when I was about 21, ‘If you want to be a good actor you have to live in the real world.’ Celebrity is a doubleedged sword. A degree of recognition and approbation means you are offered the parts you want and get projects green-lighted, but too much means a loss of privacy. I have always tried to steer a course that allows me still to get lost in the crowd.”
Despite her best efforts, Diana Quick will remain Julia Flyte in the eyes of those aging schoolboys, trapped in the amber of television repeats.
And in the hierarchy of upperclass television, Brideshead will always be a cut above Downton.