Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
From Gielgud to Pinter, playwright Ronald Harwood knew them all
The playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood died in September and I went to his funeral, both as a friend and representing HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. In a woke-aware, gender-fluid way, that would have much amused Ronnie, The Prince of Wales was represented by Dame Maggie Smith.
Ronnie arrived in Britain from South Africa in 1951 as Ronald Horwitz, aged 17, knowing almost no one. Seventy years on, as Sir Ronald Harwood, CBE, FRSL, garlanded with every kind of honour, he knew everybody and everybody who knew him loved him. To me, he was both a hero and a role model.
I learnt so much from him, observing his humour, humanity, high intelligence (worn so lightly), work ethic (eight novels, ten biographies and books about the theatre and 46 plays and screenplays), loyalty to friends when times were tough (he stuck with Roman Polanski to the end) and his resilience when times were tough for him.
He was famously gregarious and fun to be with because he didn’t burden others with his worries. He put his worries into his plays. And when a play of his flopped, he didn’t sit around moping. He started immediately on another one.
In 1985, Maggie Smith appeared alongside Edward Fox in one of Harwood’s less successful efforts, a drama called Interpreters, about a pair of old lovers rekindling their romance at an international summit conference. It was not a success. One night, early in the short run, Harwood made the mistake of putting his head round Smith’s dressingroom door. ‘Hello Ronnie,’ she said coldly, ‘and what are you up to now?’
‘Struggling with a new play, darling,’ said Harwood.
‘Aren’t we all?’ was Smith’s devastating retort. company for several years, an experience that inspired his most successful play, The Dresser. Ronnie never tired of telling stories about the great actor manager and kindly gave me several to include in The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.
One of his favourites was told to him by Dinsdale Landen, who was a walk-on at Worthing in the early 1950s when Wolfit was there as guest star, playing Othello. Dinsdale was not told what to do until the dress rehearsal, at which Wolfit announced that it would be a good idea for Othello to have a page who followed him everywhere. He handed young Dinsdale a loincloth and told him to black up.
Dinsdale did not know the play. So he just went wherever Wolfit went, the dutiful page, one step behind, always in attendance. But, at one point, he found himself in a scene in which he felt strangely ill at ease. Suddenly, he heard the great man’s voice booming, ‘Not in Desdemona’s bedroom, you c--t.’
Tom Courtenay, who played the title role in The Dresser on stage and screen, was among the mourners at Ronnie’s funeral. So was the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, the widow of Ronnie’s fellow playwright and friend Harold Pinter. The day after the funeral, when I was filming a TV series with my friend Sheila Hancock, Sheila told me about the time, years ago, when she and Peter Bull had appeared together in a Pinter play in Oldham. On the Saturday night, Peter Bull was frantic to catch the last train back to London, but was frustrated because the train was due to leave at 9.50pm and the play didn’t finish until ten o’clock. ‘It can’t be done,’ said Sheila. ‘Oh, yes, it can,’ said Peter Bull, ‘This is Pinter. We’ll just cut the pauses.’
They did and caught the train with ease.
Ronnie Harwood could do a wicked impression of Harold Pinter. He was a naturally funny man. A committed smoker, he was 85 when he died. While those of us who loved him were heartbroken to see him go, we sensed he would have been happy because he was with the love of his life again, his wife, Natasha, who died seven years ago.
They met when he was still an actor and she was a young and beautiful ASM – the only scion of Russian nobility working in provincial rep at the time. They married in 1959 and were inseparable. At the funeral, Ronnie’s son, Anthony, conjured up the picture of the pair of them at breakfast working together on the Times crossword.
And that reminded me of another of Ronnie’s favourite theatrical anecdotes – the one about Sir John Gielgud, who also loved the Times crossword and famously completed it in remarkably short order. One day, a fellow actor peered over Gielgud’s shoulder as he was finishing the puzzle and said, ‘Sir John, 7 across – what on earth is DIDDYBUMS?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Gielgud, ‘but it does fit frightfully well.’