Mcgowan still eager to make an impression – as a concert pianist
ALISTAIR MCGOWAN, the impressionist, has reinvented himself as a classical pianist and is about to start a UK tour, despite having only begun playing seriously shortly before his 50th birthday.
The 54-year-old may be best known as a comic actor, but after rediscovering his love for the piano aboard a cruise ship he has not looked back.
Having learnt to play as a child after watching the comedian Les Dawson, he reached Grade 2, but gave up at the age of nine.
He toyed with the piano again in his 30s, during a successful career in television in which he won a Bafta award and appeared in the BBC dramatisation of Bleak House.
Yet by the age of 49, Mcgowan could play only two pieces. All that changed after an encounter with a pianist on a cruise ship, he told The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine.
“I met a wonderful woman on a cruise ship and she heard me tinkling on the piano one night and she said: ‘You’ve got some talent, you should play’.” he told Classic FM in 2017.
“I said: ‘It’s too late for me, Lucy, I’m 49. And she said: ‘I knew someone that was 60 when they started playing, and by the time they were 80 they were playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto. I can teach you if you’d like?’ I said: ‘When do we start?!’” He now practises for up to four hours a day, and performed at the Proms with his Satie show in 2016.
An album, Alistair Mcgowan: The Piano Album, reached No 1 in the classical charts in 2017. His new show, called Introductions to Classical Piano, is on tour from April 3.
Mcgowan’s reinvention as a professional pianist has echoes of other celebrity transformations.
Prof Brian Cox, the particle physicist and face of BBC science programming, first acquired fame as a keyboard player in D:ream, the pop band that supported Take That on tour and had a No 1 hit with Things Can Only Get Better in 1994, a song synonymous with the Tony Blair’s New Labour election campaign of 1997
Hugh Laurie, who became the highest paid actor on US television for his role in the hit series House, released his debut blues album Let Them Talk in 2011, which reached No 2 in the UK chart. A follow-up, entitled Didn’t It Rain, got to No 3.