Joan Greenwood, my Mama, was born 100 years ago
Jason Morell remembers Joan Greenwood, his dear Mama, 100 years after she was born
My mother could stop a black cab at a hundred yards. I witnessed her doing it in 1978, across the entire width of Trafalgar Square. Time froze and everything went into slow motion as her diminutive form hurtled, me panting in her wake, past the fountains, up the steps towards the National Gallery, as her one bellowed utterance ‘TAXI’ – part command, part plea – richocheted off pavement, statuary and architectural masonry, hitting its chosen target with military precision.
The taxi screeched to a halt, my mother announced our destination, flung herself with Bacchic abandon across the back seat and proceeded to rifle through her vast black crocodile handbag.
‘It’s Joan Greenwood, isn’t it?’ exclaimed the traumatised driver.
‘Probably,’ growled my mother in bored, Cleopatran mode as she extricated the inevitable, vital cigarette, lighting it and inhaling those sustaining fumes in one fluid movement. Like many of the most commonplace actions – entering a room, licking an envelope, or sitting down – she lent even this an arresting, heroic panache.
My remarkable mother, Joan Greenwood – whose voice was likened to the sound of someone gargling with champagne; the voice Variety described as ‘one of the wonders of the modern world’ – was born on 4th March 1921 and died in February 1987, just before her 66th birthday. I blame the cigarettes.
To me, she was ‘Mama’, with the stress on the second syllable.
Her birth (and death) place was Chelsea, when it was properly rackety and bohemian. Her father was the artist Sydney Earnshaw Greenwood and her mother Ida Waller, whose ambitions as an actress had been quenched by marriage and respectable relatives.
My grandfather’s studio was next door to the great sculptor Jacob Epstein’s. Consequently the families were close. Peggy Jean, Epstein’s daughter, was Mama’s first friend and playmate.
Epstein made a bust of my mother when she was ten, a gilt, bronze version of which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum. In 1948, when she was 27, and in the first full flush of fame, he executed another. I don’t think he sculpted anyone else twice.
As a child, she was allowed to read anything and everything. So she did, hidden behind a curtained alcove in the studio, sucking Farrah’s Harrogate toffee.
She would emerge only when my grandfather played Caruso on the gramophone, to sit under a table and sob, because it was so sad and beautiful.
At 16, she left school and went to RADA. Her two voice teachers had diametrically differing views about her.
Their contrasting reports were unhelpful: ‘She has a light pixie-like appearance, which is, unfortunately, marred by the lower tones in her voice’; ‘She has deep, resonant lower tones, which she must do her best to cultivate.’
The resulting confusion found her spending hundreds of pounds on vocal training throughout her young adult life, until the renowned voice coach Iris Warren said, ‘That’s the voice you’ve got. Leave it alone.’
The combination of apparent physical fragility and vocal oomph was her trademark, along with talent, beauty, brains and bravery.
She left RADA at 17, went straight into the West End and didn’t stop working. Thank God, because her parents had run out of money – and art, as usual, wasn’t paying. I suspect, from that moment on, she supported them entirely.
In 1938, she encountered my father, the actor André Morell. My father’s education had stopped at 14, when he was apprenticed as a motor engineer. The amateur-acting bug hit him in 1934, at 25 and, four years later, he was at the Old Vic, playing leading Shakespearean roles. He had finally been able to afford his first tailor-made suit when he strode into his agent’s office to find my mother reading a script.
He flashed what he considered an impressive smile at her and marched into their mutual agent’s inner sanctum, only to be told, ‘Her name’s Joan Greenwood, she’s only just 18 and you keep your hands off.’
Mama merely thought, ‘What a disgustingly over good-looking, overconfident young man – how dare he smirk at me like that?’ He pursued her on and off for 22 years, hoping against hope.
They finally eloped to Jamaica in 1960, and were married until his death (those bloody cigarettes again) in 1978.
In 1942, Mama was discovered by Leslie Howard for his film The Gentle Sex, a high-end propaganda piece about the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her bloom into stardom began. The British film industry, for indeed there was such a thing then, was in a renaissance, providing opportunities we can only look back on as a strange, lost dream.
Between 1942 and 1955, she made 19 films, a good handful of which are some of the most beloved and enduring Britain has produced. Three are Ealing comedies.
The most celebrated is the brilliantly black-hearted Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), in which an impoverished Dennis Price murders his way to a dukedom, slaughtering Alec Guinness repeatedly, in eight different incarnations.
My mother played Sibella, Price’s mistress and nemesis. She’d never done anything quite like it before, and in the public imagination it in some senses defined her, as a mocking, wilful, witty, ruthless, sophisticated siren. Her enormous eroticism was heightened by her apparent obliviousness to its effect.
The film also marked the beginning of her lifelong friendship with Alec Guinness, with whom she made four films, including her last, Little Dorrit, released a few months after her death. Alec had himself narrowly escaped death at her hands in Ealing’s The Man in the White Suit when she nearly ran him and an entire camera crew over by accidentally putting a car into violent reverse, despite a strenuous effort to do the opposite (very like my mother).
One of her chief joys on Kind Hearts was the hats. Ealing was a world brand, but it had a typically British budget – ie nearly non-existent. She and the costume designer, Anthony Mendleson, delighted in creating increasingly extravagant pieces of millinery out of airy nothings, ribbon remnants and pipe-cleaners, as Sibella’s headgear extends and expands with her increasingly monstrous demands and blackmail. In life, my mother was indifferent to hats; on set, she appreciated their impact.
After this first zenith, including The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) and Whisky Galore! (1949) – which Ealing’s legendary head Michael Balcon sold to her as an opportunity for a holiday on the Isle of Barra – she made an international career in France (she spoke impeccable French), in Hollywood and on Broadway.
She also re-established her London stage roots with a definitive, notorious Lysistrata, and an acclaimed Hedda Gabler.
In 1962, Laurence Olivier invited her and my father to join him as leading members of the prototype National Theatre company, at the first Chichester Festival, where I was conceived.
I had the best nine months of my acting career to date in the maternal womb. On stage, I was in Chekhovian love scenes with Olivier and Michael Redgrave. In the film Tom Jones, I shared a bed with Mama and Albert Finney and participated in high-comedy scenes with Edith Evans.
For this, and much else, I have to thank her.
Happy centenary, dear Mama. May we all gargle champagne in your honour.