Downfall of Citizen Smith
His role as the urban guerrilla Wolfie in the 1970s sitcom made him a household name but Robert Lindsay admits he let fame go to his head and paid a heavy price for it
Daily Express Wednesday October 14 2015
ROBERT Lindsay is so associated with the part of Wolfie Smith, the feckless leader of the Tooting Popular Front in 1970s sitcom Citizen Smith, that it’s easy to forget what happened next. In a bid to be taken seriously as an actor Lindsay switched to Shakespeare and, three years after quitting his role as the beret- wearing Marxist, he played Edmund opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in a TV production of King Lear.
A year later he won an Olivier Award for his performance in the West End revival of Me And My Girl but it was when the show transferred to Broadway that he achieved mega- stardom.
“The extraordinary Mr Lindsay, who makes a non- stop charade of intricate vocal and physical details look relaxed, compels us to cherish his every syllable,” gushed the New York Times.
He duly won a Tony award and the man who had taken 10 weeks of intensive tap- dancing lessons to originally secure the role was given the Fred Astaire Award for Best Dancer on Broadway.
Katharine Hepburn, then a grande dame of Hollywood, was so smitten by his performance she invited him out for dinner. “After supper she invited me to dance and flirted with me,” he once recalled. “Then there was the sound of someone in a nearby apartment playing the piano and Katharine called out, ‘ Shut up, Stephen!’ Apparently it was Stephen Sondheim.”
iN SHORT Lindsay had arrived. He was so hot at this time he was even considered for the role of James Bond in 1987’ s The Living Daylights ( eventually played by Timothy Dalton). But, as the 65- yearold tells the latest issue of Radio Times, hubris then took over.
“I was flavour of the month, storming Broadway, and started to believe my own publicity,” he says. “I assumed I’d be a big film star but even then there was a little voice inside going, ‘ You’re not really like this. Stop it.’
“The downfall was immediate. I did three films in Hollywood back- to- back which were disasters. A lot of people tried to get me to stay – Mel Brooks, [ Steven] Spielberg, [ Barbra] Streisand all took me out to dinner and offered things. Dustin Hoffman told me, ‘ Look at all the c** p I’ve done. Stay here’.
“But I was so homesick I hightailed it back to England and made GBH [ the Channel 4 drama series for which he won a Bafta]. That restored my confidence.”
Over the next five years Lindsay rebuilt his career in British TV before making a triumphant return to the theatre in 1996 in the title role of Jean Anouilh’s play Becket, about the relationship between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry II. Playing opposite Derek Jacobi as the king, he won another Olivier Award and got a dinner invitation from Margaret Thatcher.
Lindsay, a lifelong Labour man who had marched in support of the miners, turned it down but the Iron Lady wasn’t deterred. “Mrs Thatcher came to my dressing room and asked me why I didn’t want to go to dinner,” he recalls. “I said, ‘ Actually, ma’am, I don’t agree with your politics’. She quipped, ‘ Well that doesn’t affect your appetite does it?’ I protested lamely that it did.
“It’s one of my biggest regrets I didn’t accept. Even my dad, who was so Left- wing he was almost communist, told me I’d been a b**** y stupid idiot. But in those days I was fired by working- class indignation. I had a chip on my shoulder. I was intolerant of people from a different class; suspicious of those with money; defensive as I hadn’t been to university. But I’ve let go of all that.”
lINDSAY’S contentment is due in no small part to a happy marriage to Rosemarie Ford, the woman he met in the late ’ 90s shortly after she left the Generation Game as Bruce Forsyth’s “glamorous assistant”.
The couple, who married in 2006, have two sons: Samuel, 15, and Jamie, 12. Lindsay also has an actress daughter Sydney, 25, from a long- term relationship with the actress Diana Weston.
His split from Weston appears to have been harmonious but the same cannot be said for his “terrible” 1980 divorce from actress Cheryl Hall, who played his girlfriend in Citizen Smith. “I started using Prozac,” he once said. “A doctor in Ireland put me in touch with a counsellor who released a lot of the rubbish and illusions I had about myself.”
In recent years Lindsay has become best- known for My Family, the sitcom in which he starred opposite Zoe Wanamaker for 11 years. His latest TV show is Bull, a three- part sitcom for comedy channel Gold in which he plays a man who attempts to run his antiques shop aided and hampered in equal measure by his dysfunctional staff, including Maureen Lipman.
With his perma- tan and flamboyant dress sense, Lindsay’s character Rupert Bull looks like Bargain Hunt presenter David Dickinson. The sort of man Citizen Smith would call “a middleclass reactionary” in fact.
Bull starts on October 21 at 10pm on Gold.