Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
The joy of old stagers, from Ian Mckellen to Maggie Smith
In the run-up to Shakespeare’s birthday on 23rd April every year, I like to remember my favourite Shakespearean performances.
Up there with Olivier’s Othello, Peggy Ashcroft’s Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well and Paul Scofield’s King Lear, I always put Gwen Ffrangcon-davies’s Juliet. I saw her perform only Juliet’s death scene and she was 99 at the time, but her speaking of the lines was so true she might have been 14. Dame Gwen (as she became, aged 100) was a Londonborn actress of Welsh heritage who first played Juliet to John Gielgud’s Romeo back in 1924.
When I was writing his biography, Sir John told me that she was his favourite Juliet. ‘Some actors rather go to pieces towards the end or start repeating their old tricks,’ said Gielgud. ‘Others keep on getting better.’
This is why I have high hopes for Ian Mckellen’s Hamlet, in the production scheduled to open – pandemic permitting – at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in June, not long after Sir Ian’s 82nd birthday. According to the play, Prince Hamlet is 30. Michael Redgrave played the part at Stratford at 50. Sir Frank Benson was still playing it on tour aged 72, and at the same age the Australian actress Dame Judith Anderson gave her moody Dane in New York in 1971 – to mixed notices.
Given that we now live in an era of colour-blind, gender-neutral casting, age shouldn’t be a barrier to anything.
If you are up to it (and, thanks to regular Pilates and a personal trainer, Sir Ian is fighting fit), go for it. I am currently filming Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4 with Dame Sheila Hancock, 88, and given the way it’s going, I think I’d be a perfect Beatrice to her Benedick.
I have been lucky in lockdown because I have been allowed to work and much of my work has been more like play. Among other things, I have been travelling in from my quite crowded West London suburb to a totally deserted West End, where, in the empty Crazy Coqs cabaret room near Piccadilly Circus, I have been filming conversations with assorted theatrical greats.
Derek Jacobi, a boyish 82 (and a totally convincing Mercutio when he played the part in his mid-seventies in a Kenneth Branagh production), told me he thought he had probably played Hamlet more times than anyone else alive (I checked: he has) and still has nightmares about the performance at which he ‘dried’, forgetting four lines in to ‘To be or not to be…’.
Anne Reid, 85, Jacobi’s wife in the popular TV series Last Tango in Halifax, revealed that, next to Sir Derek, her screen idol had been the ‘unutterably handsome’ Hollywood actor William Holden, whose career was blighted by alcohol. Holden died aged 63, after slipping on a rug while intoxicated and hitting his head on a side table. Most of the actors I know are just getting their second wind at 63.
Post-recording, over a glass of wine thoughtfully brought along by Anne Reid for socially-distanced paper-cup consumption, she and Sir Derek wondered out loud what play they might do together on Broadway next year. Their TV series is popular stateside.
Noël Coward’s Private Lives is a possibility. They know they can’t do it here. Patricia Hodge, 74, and Nigel Havers, 70 this year, are taking it on tour in the UK the moment lockdown lifts.
My other recent happy encounters with thespians of riper years have included with the evergreen Virginia Mckenna, 90 on 7th June, who told me that of all her films her favourite, alongside Born Free, is the 1957 comedy The Smallest Show on Earth. Another was with the indomitable Thelma Ruby, who hosted her own virtual 96th-birthday party on Zoom, entertaining more than 70 guests from five time zones with terrific tales of some of her leading men, Orson Welles and Tyrone Power among them.
Dame Maggie Smith, 86, came round to my place to be filmed in London in conversation with her friend Kathleen Turner, 66, online in New York. Turner, celebrated for Body Heat on screen and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on stage, was in feisty form, recollecting directors she had dealt with in no uncertain terms and those performances when you knew ‘somehow, that everything was coming right’.
Dame Maggie was more timorous, claiming still to suffer from ‘impostor syndrome’, not really sure of when it’s going well or why. ‘I never think I’m any good.’
When we were standing in the hallway, getting ready to go into the sitting room to start filming, Dame Maggie put her hand up against the doorway and took a deep breath. ‘I feel like Edith Evans waiting in the wings before going on to play Rosalind at the Old Vic when she was almost 50. Before she made her entrance, Edith would stand in the wings and repeat to herself, “I am young. I am beautiful. And my breasts are firm.” ’