Iconic star captivated in a classic
The hit Channel 4 series brings back Eighties fashion and music and for Michael Cashman, who made waves with the first gay kiss on a British soap, it rekindles difficult memories of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and a dark time in Britain’s history
OSCAR-WINNING actor Christopher Plummer will be best remembered as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound Of Music, despite his initial public disdain for both the role and film. Plummer was an established Broadway star with a supercilious attitude towards movie-making when he was coaxed into auditioning by its director Robert Wise. Famously dubbing the project The Sound Of Mucus for being too saccharine, his on-screen behaviour could be demanding.
He referred to working with Julie Andrews, in the role of Maria, as “being hit over the head daily with a Hallmark greetings card”.
One morning, hungover and grouchy, he berated the production team for not being handed a call sheet for the hours ahead – when it transpired it was his day off.
None of this mattered too much, as he captivated audiences as the stern but charismatic hero softened into submission by Maria.
In his 2008 memoir, In Spite Of Myself, he admitted to a change of heart about the film late in life after watching it at a children’s party, saying it was “the very best of its genre – warm, touching, joyous and absolutely timeless”.
His mellowing perhaps coincided with a late flowering in his career. He won rave reviews in 1999’s The Insider before roles in A Beautiful Mind, The New World and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
He missed out on a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2010 for The Last Station but won it in 2012 as Hal, an elderly man who comes out as gay in Beginners.
He also won two Tonys and two Emmys.
In 2018, aged 88, he became the oldest actor to be nominated for an Oscar for his part in All The Money In The World.
Plummer was born into an influential family in Toronto and was the great-grandson of a Canadian prime minister. He was raised predominantly by his mother after his parents divorced.
Initially destined to become a concert pianist, he segued into acting and theatre at school, impressing a theatre critic so much as Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice that he was cast, aged 18, as Oedipus in Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale for an amateur theatre group. He made his Broadway debut in 1953. His film debut was in 1958’s Stage Struck.
Plummer died following a fall. He is survived by his third wife, actress Elaine Taylor, and his daughter Amanda Plummer from his first marriage.
MICHAEL Cashman is giving me a virtual tour of his Thames-side apartment. Double height vaulted ceilings and full length, tripleaspect windows put his flat firmly into the “apartment” category. “I want for nothing,” says Michael, Baron Cashman of Limehouse no less, sweeping his arm in an arc towards the balcony. “And that’s all thanks to Paul.”
Just minutes into the interview, and throughout the rest of it, Michael refers to his late beloved husband, Paul Cottingham, time and again.
They initially bought south of the river in Rotherhithe, a sacrilegious move for the son of a Limehouse docker on the north side of the Thames – as Michael soon discovered.
“I told my mum we were moving to Rotherhithe and she said, ‘Oh, don’t tell yer dad!’ Then one day I was in a gym I’d joined in Rotherhithe and this bloke came over and said, ‘Oi, you Mickey Cashman? What you doin’ in this gym? You shouldn’t be over ‘ere, your lot ruined our docks’. Which is exactly what my dad said about the Rotherhithe dockers. There was huge competition. And there still is between both sides.”
One day Michael, 70, returned home from Brussels, where he was an MEP, and Paul handed him the estate agent’s details of the apartment – a stone’s throw from where he and his three brothers were brought up – with the price scratched out.
“He said, ‘the price doesn’t matter’. I said ‘it does because I have a rule: don’t look at something you can’t have because it will torment you’. He said, ‘we’ll make it work’. And yeah, we made it work, he brought me home to Limehouse, got me settled.And then he left me.”
Michael smiles and his eyes moisten as he relives Paul’s sudden and untimely death from cancer.
“It was six years ago and I still miss him every day,” says Michael, who adds that Paul inspired to write his memoir, One of Them.
The book tells of Michael’s meteoric rise from his working class East End roots to TV fame and political activism and finally a seat in the House of Lords just four days after Paul’s death.
They met in 1983 at a party hosted by Barbara Windsor, Michael’s friend from EastEnders which he took by storm when he joined as Colin Russell, who co-performed the first gay kiss on a British soap more than three decades ago.
Paul, 13 years Michael’s junior, was a Butlins’ Redcoat and they stayed together for 31 years, entering into a civil partnership in 2006.
IN EARLY 2011, Paul was diagnosed with angiosarcoma, a rare cancer and while he was having treatment, Michael was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Both underwent treatment, but Paul died in 2014.
“The Queen Mother once said, talking of her grief after King George VI died, that it doesn’t get better, it just gets different. And it does,” Michael says. “I speak to Paul every morning and throughout the day.
“It’s a concept I live with which is, it’s only love that sustains you. So yeah, I miss him. There’s been nobody else, I have no hankering for anybody else.”
Michael points out that, besides, he is too well known to go on dating sites and says that he “has to be careful”.
“I have to accept that I have a public role in life and with it comes responsibilities. If I get something wrong in my private life, and it’s public, the things that I stand for are therefore associated with something that is perceived as wrong. And if you care about things, you mustn’t put them at risk.”
The question of risk brings us to It’s a Sin, the hit series written by Russell T Davies, starring Keeley Hawes and Stephen Fry. The show which follows the lives of a group of gay friends during the 1980s AIDS crisis, is the most binge-watched series ever on Channel 4’s streaming service.
“Growing up as a gay man, you’re told you’re wrong, you’re bad, it’s criminal – that will have an effect that you will carry with you for the rest of your life,” says Michael, who was sexually abused by a dockworker when he was seven years old, in an alleyway yards from where he now lives. “It is why I’ve been so open about my life in the book because unless you own everything that’s happened to you, it will own you and you can never become your true self.”
More than 6.5 million viewers have watched It’s a Sin and it has prompted an unprecedented number of people to take an HIV test, according to the Terrence Higgins Trust.
And no one knows better than Michael the power of popular culture to change societal views.
“When I first joined EastEnders it was a dark period in this country,” he says. “HIV was depicted as the gay plague. People were not out about their sexual orientation because it brought about stigma.”
When Colin gave boyfriend Barry a mere peck on the forehead in 1987, it prompted a deluge of complaints.
“The gay kiss outraged politicians and moral campaigners but I got a huge amount of support from within the BBC and from other cast members when I wrote a letter against this anti-gay law. Brilliant Leslie Grantham, Dirty Den, was the first to put his name on that letter,” says Michael. “And now raising that awareness about HIV testing, that HIV is not a death sentence, shows information makes you powerful.
“But I don’t want that for one year, I want that for every year.”
Michael’s father struggled when he came out in his teens.
Eventually he came round and, as Michael puts it, got the son-in-law he would never otherwise have had from four sons.
A gifted raconteur who mimics accents with pitch perfection (he does a mean Alan Bennett), Michael is funny and hugely entertaining but turns deadly serious when discussing the impact of his homosexuality on his family.
“What I am amazed about was after EastEnders, my campaigning against Section 28 (the 1988 legislation which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities) and being all over the newspapers, not once did my brothers say, ‘Michael, can you tone it down a bit, I’ve got kids at school’. You can imagine if your name’s Cashman, you’re a child at school and there’s a Cashman on television playing that queer Colin, things would have been said.
But I think that’s a measure of the way we were brought up – you had your principles and not much else.”
Back then, Michael marched for equality and soon became swept up into politics, supporting the Labour party where he was a member for 45 years until his resignation in 2019 (over anti-Semitism and indecision over Brexit). He was on the party’s national executive committee and served as an MEP for 15 years. It’s a Sin focuses on the causes Michael marched for, the mistreatment of infected gay men who were ostracised and locked away.
“If you wanted to live, you had to protect yourself,” recalls Michael, “and if you knew within the community somebody was HIV positive and they were sleeping around, you certainly made it known to others because you had a responsibility one to another.”
He applies the same caution to today’s
‘Unless you own everything that’s happened to you, it will own you and you’ll never be your true self’
pandemic, revealing that he has had Covid. “I wasn’t really ill but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he says. “You have to operate on the street as if you have Covid and everyone else has it too.
“And I think that awareness of the responsibility to the other, as well as to yourself and to your family creates a much more cohesive approach to dealing with the pandemic, whether it was the AIDS pandemic or today’s Covid pandemic.There are patterns, and there are lessons.”
He also draws parallels between the lack of hard facts surrounding AIDS in the 1980s and the educated guesswork forming the basis of Government policy at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to conspiracy theories and scaremongering.
“There were AIDS and HIV deniers and it affected a lot of people who didn’t have access to gay pubs and clubs because when you went there, and we see it in It’s a Sin, information was beginning to come out,” he says.
“I was made aware of it.We were also made aware of the deaths increasing in America, in San Francisco and New York. But the lack of information was part of the issue of informing behaviour that put people at risk.
“Those with HIV were not getting access to information or to healthcare and there were young men, like in the series, who were locked away and people wouldn’t touch them.”
THIS part of Michael’s extraordinary life and all the other chapters are depicted with searing honesty in his book. But it is not a misery memoir, rather a colourful journey sprinkled with delicious anecdotes of encounters with Joan Collins, David Hockney and Elton John, and his continuing friendship with Sir Ian McKellen, with whom he founded LGBT+ rights group Stonewall and who lives just down the road.
Michael believes British society is much more tolerant than when he started out acting as a teenager and believes the timing of It’s a Sin is perfect.
“Sometimes with distance, the lens of looking back over 35 years reveals how shocking it was that people lived in that way compared to now, in a country that’s changed so much.
“Perhaps simply we are more at peace with one another, more understanding of one another, and more importantly, more forgiving of one another’s foibles.
“I think it’s good to examine the journey we’ve been on – and that journey is not over because we still do not have full equality.”
For Michael that means extending the rights of the LGBT+ community in Britain to all countries in the world.
He counts his proudest achievement in life as when he successfully convinced former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to grant asylum to a young gay man who would have been hanged had he been returned to Iran.
“We’ve achieved equality when we take the difference out of the equation and allow people to live exactly the same way as anybody else. I’m a born-again optimist and I know decency and fairness always prevail.”
●●One of Them: From Albert Square to Parliament Square by Michael Cashman (Bloomsbury, £9.99) is out now. Call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via www.expressbookshop.co.uk UK postage and packing £2.95