I Once Met Ralph Richardson Benedict Nightingale
I was in a panic when I went to interview Ralph Richardson for the New York Times in 1982.
Too much of my allotted half-hour was spent in a discussion of how to get to his first-floor drawing room (‘stairs or lift?’). More time went on deciding drinks (‘gin or whisky or gin and whisky?’).
But what of my rapidly vanishing interview? Well, my frantic scribblings told me that he relished his latest role, which was as Tarzan’s titled grandfather in a film about the jungle gymnast.
I recall Sir Ralph leaning forward, face mottled and eyes bulging, saying, ‘I’ve this huge bloody castle and nobody to leave it to, so I want the boy back!’ Also, that his favourite part was as an innocent-looking parson in a film called The Ghoul, starring Boris Karloff: ‘The lady of the house trusted him, but he was getting together firewood to burn the place down – I’ve never had a more amusing part!’ And Sir Ralph looked at his own fireplace, where an electric heater was shining red, with a certain nostalgia.
Then he started to talk about acting, which he declared was a better choice than being a hangman, especially as the death penalty had been abolished. ‘It’s very cheap,’ he added. ‘All you want is a stick of make-up. Difficult to think of a career where you need less.’
He variously saw acting in terms of architecture – ‘You build a bridge between the script and the stage, analysing the soil, deciding how much it will carry, analysing the bridge, ensuring its strength isn’t too much or too little, but just enough to carry you over’ – and painting: ‘You say, let’s put a daffodil there and see if it fits. Everything has to make a point. You add more and more, and then you rub out what you don’t need. Slowly, slowly you construct the thing.’ It was a simile he used again, apropos uppity directors who attempted to deny him the one thing without which, he said, he’d give up acting: the chance to experiment in rehearsal. ‘If a painter is painting, he’s trying to paint,’ said Richardson, himself a skilled amateur artist, ‘If someone comes up to you and says, “I think that cow’s too red”, well, you hit him over the head with your palette and tell him to shut up.’
I duly passed the interview on to the New York Times, telling its readers how Richardson used to give his pet ferret a weekly wash; how he scooted about town on a motorbike, sometimes with a parrot on his shoulder.
But a spurious delicacy led me to omit Sir Ralph’s words as he ushered me back downstairs and into the Regent’s Park murk.
‘Who did I want to kill?’ he asked. Nobody, I feebly answered. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘Everybody wants to kill someone.’ He said his prospective victim was his biographer, the estimable Garry O’connor. He had, Richardson thought, implied that his first wife, Muriel, a sufferer from encephalitis lethargica found strangled by a scarf looped over her bedpost, had allegedly committed suicide rather than merited the coroner’s misadventure verdict.
I did at least report that Sir Ralph hoped to keep on acting and learning how to act, ‘until I get my ticket, which might be any moment, maybe here in this room’. That ticket didn’t come then, but it did a year later, when I found myself writing his obit for the New York Times. A great actor and an almost equally great eccentric, I said. I still think that judgement correct.