‘I act to prove to myself that I actually exist’
A soul-baring memoir by Tim Pigott-Smith, who died last month, offers candour, humour and melancholy, says Simon Williams
Do You Know Who I Am? by Tim Pigott-Smith 224pp, Bloomsbury, £18.99, ebook £11.04
With such a title, it’s easy to picture the late Tim PigottSmith in his most famous role as the odious Captain Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown, his jaw thrust forward, snarling at a subordinate: “Do you know who I am?” Instead, we find in the final chapter that it’s a question Tim asked himself in the mirror. His reply? “I’m not sure that I do.” So soon after his sudden death last month at the age of 70, the question and its answer are especially touching. But we do get an eloquent impression of who he was: in this charming and engrossing memoir, he has no qualms about baring his soul for us with candour, humour and an undertow of melancholy.
He gossips and philosophises as he takes us through the story of his busy life, giving us some wonderful analyses of acting, his own and others – and some splendid theatrical anecdotes. I liked the story of the make-up man’s revenge on a homophobic star – in future, whenever I see Kirk Douglas on screen wearing a bushy moustache, I’ll be happy in the knowledge that it was made from the aggrieved make-up artist’s pubic hair. I also loved his story of an old lady who, towards the end of a 1999 matinee of Death of a Salesman, took out her mobile and called her driver, saying for all to hear: “You can bring the car round now. It’s nearly over. She’s having a breakdown.”
Of his own acting, he tells us: “I think I do it to prove to myself that I actually exist.” To understand what a subtle variety Pigott-Smith offered, we need only consider his most recent roles, as Charles III and as the eccentric Sniggs in the BBC’s Decline
and Fall. He wonders whether he was born with “an audience in my head” and attributes his love of theatre to his mother: “Someone had to do Mum’s acting for her.”
Fortuitously, his secondary education was in Stratford-uponAvon, just when Peter Hall took over the Royal Shakespeare Company at his “local rep”. Tim could see that “the theatre was an exciting, optimistic place to be – both a reflection and an engine of social change”. It was the Sixties, heyday of Jennie Lee, who held the purse strings of the Arts Council, then at its most extravagant.
In the summer of 1964, his father got him a “30 bob a week” job in the Stratford theatre paint shop, from where, if he’d been diligent, he’d be allowed to cross the road to the theatre, where he would watch Hall “in shirt sleeves… cracking the whip”. After drama school in Bristol, he returned to Stratford in 1972 to join the company.
PigottSmith’s love of language sprang from the psalms he sang as a choirboy, but it was from Hall and John Barton, another RSC director, that he learnt the discipline of speaking verse: “You cannot enjoy the freedom until you honour the form.” This is a memoir that young actors should read to understand the graft needed to succeed.
It is also a history of British theatre, its fun and its folklore, as it emerged from the drawing-room comedies of his youth. There are some good tips, too – on the much-vaunted instruction to do “nothing” on screen, he advises “that it should look like nothing, but nothing is not what you are doing : you are doing everything invisibly”. He also warns against making moral judgments about the characters he’s played – “leave that to the audience”. Similarly, as Gielgud declared: “If an actor is crying, the audience will probably not be.”
Ultimately, Pigott-Smith admits that acting is smoke – a mystery. A scene would work for him “if it smelled true” or “when you’ve pinned the demon down”. In a chapter called “The Bitter Smell of Success”, he writes that he couldn’t cope with the stardom that came with The Jewel in the Crown. “It froze me… I don’t have glamour and you can’t be an unglamorous star.”
He tells us without sanctimony that “the least bit of self-importance is destructive”. Instead, he was a team-player who wanted to do quality company-based theatre. To this end, he took on the artistic directorship of Compass, Anthony Quayle’s theatre company, but despite early success it was scuppered by underfunding. (As in many theatrical memoirs, there are several kicks at Margaret Thatcher.)
Pigott-Smith tells us that this failure brought him face to face with his limitations, and “it hurt”. He reflects: “I didn’t ask to be driven the way I am.” Perhaps he envied the flippancy of Ralph Richardson, who said: “The funny thing about acting is, one day it’s there. The next, nowhere to be found.”
In the last decade, however, we have seen Pigott-Smith at the very top of his game, as Lear and Prospero, as Henry Higgins and Charles III. It is difficult to review the memoir of a colleague who has so recently died without it sound like a eulogy, but Pigott-Smith writes as he acts: with precision and panache.
‘The success of Jewel in the Crown froze me… I don’t have glamour, and you can’t be an unglamorous star’
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