Just Biggins. Christopher Biggins
rivalries either. And today I’m proud to say that we’ve always been good friends.
I cried on my first night at theatre school. I moved into digs in Bristol, for a taste of the full theatrical experience. I had a room high up in an attic in a house shared with half a dozen or so other students.
My mother and father had dropped me off, I had offered shy greetings to some of my fellow residents and then, upstairs and alone, the tears had begun to fall. This was the first time I had ever been on my own and everything felt so alien. All the confidence I had built up with all those talented, older people in Salisbury faded away. How would I cope on my own? More importantly, how would I cope among people of my own age?
Until I got to Bristol I think my peers had scared me. No, I’d never been bullied in school. Yes, I had dear John Brown and a handful of other pals from my various classes. But in the main I felt more comfortable with adults. I think it’s because of that nagging feeling that I was different. Not having a sense of belonging can be quite horrible. If you’re different you always worry that you might come under attack at any time. My thinking had always been that older people were less likely to lash out at me. I wanted them wrapped around me, just like the cotton wool that had made me itch all those years ago as a baby.
Bristol taught me so much. But the first lesson was that no one lashed out at anyone. Being different was fine – in fact, it was something to be applauded if not actually encouraged. Within weeks I realised that I loved being with my own age group. And maybe that’s because we were the most extraordinary group in the theatre school’s history.
Jeremy Irons was one of the first of my fellow students to say hello. Then I met the others. There was Simon Cadell, who came from a real dynasty of actors, Tim Pigott-Smith, Ian Gelder, John Caird, Tony Falkingham, the fantastic Gillian Morgan, who became Gillian Eton, Sheila Ferris, now married to Poirot himself David Suchet, the lovely mad girl Hazel Clyne and so many more. We were a fantastic group and we were in a fantastic place.
The theatre school – opened just after the war by none other than Laurence Olivier – was in a big old Victorian house right on the edge of Clifton Downs at the end of Blackboy Hill. You got to it by sweeping up a grand driveway – it was all very Brideshead Revisited, so Jeremy had a head start when he got into his role as Charles Ryder all those years later.
There were probably only about two dozen students in a year and a couple of years of students at the school at any one time. But the building was always buzzing. Groups were constantly rushing around – and unlike at an ordinary school we were all desperate to learn. We had a focus. We wanted to perform.
Best of all was the fact that we were all pretty much able to concentrate on our classes. Forget part-time jobs. These were the best of times to be students. I got a grant, as did almost everyone else. And my parents were always ready to top things up if I ran short some months, bless them. So I often did run short some months. That, too, has been a story of my life.
Our principal was a marvellous man called Nat Brenner. He was thin, wiry and hairy with a striking face and a good line in smart sports jackets. He and his lovely wife Joan lived in the flat on the top floor of the house and beneath them a warren of ten or so rooms were converted into different types of rehearsal studios and performance spaces.
Dear Nat was a hugely talented and wonderful character. It was because of him that we were so young in 1967. It was an experimental year at the theatre school, with so many of us aged just 18 and 19. They had never gambled on young talent like this before. But look where so many of us got to. And I think we all grew to be one of Nat’s favourite intakes. He was incredibly supportive and I found him very approachable – so approach him I did. He knew theatre. Peter O’Toole was one of his best pals. So I guessed he might be good for a gossip and I was right.
Maybe not every 18-year-old newcomer would have been comfortable spending so much time with their principal. But it didn’t seem strange to me. I also bonded with Nat’s wife, Joan. I sensed that she could feel a bit excluded because Nat was so dedicated to his school and his students. So Joan and I would have coffee together and gossip in their flat. Again, I never thought for a minute that there was anything unusual about a new student sitting having coffee with the principal’s wife in her drawing room. I never saw why some people were supposed to be off limits to others. If two people want to become friends, why shouldn’t they? I didn’t see why age, status, wealth, looks or anything else should get in the way. That’s why I’ve had so many wonderful friends. And why they’ve all been such a fabulously mixed bunch.
‘All right, class. Imagine you’re squeezing a lemon between your buttocks. Now walk around the room without letting it go.’ Rudi Shelley boomed out the instruction in his rich and wonderfully exotic accent from somewhere out in middle or Eastern Europe. Rudi was a small man with big presence. He had long hair, an extraordinarily rubbery face and, of course, perfect posture. He taught us all to stand tall and to walk properly. I’m six foot one and I do still stand and walk properly. I’m proud of that. It’s kept me in good stead and it’s largely thanks to Rudi. His deportment lessons were only the start of our background education. The lovely Lynn Britt, with her scraped-back black hair and angular dancer’s face, gave us two hours of classical ballet instruction every week. It may seem ridiculous, really, to teach us all that. And even then I was no sylph-like ballerina. But ballet is a surprisingly useful skill. So much stems from all that training, all the breadth and depth I acquired in Bristol. It meant I could turn my hand to anything in the years ahead. Just as well, the way my feast-and-famine career would turn out.
But squeezing a lemon between my buttocks and doing a bit of ballet lost their thrill after a while. What I wanted to do most was act. Central to everything at the school was, of course, the dream of playing in the Bristol Old Vic itself. The theatre, a couple of miles away on King Street, is a most wonderful Georgian building. It had it all – an incredibly rich history, a cast list of almost all the greats you could care to name. It even had a theatre ghost, though my booming voice must have scared her away as she never turned up when I was around.
The first time I walked into the theatre I felt its embrace. It was so different to Salisbury Rep. This was a proper theatre, not a converted church hall. This was the real thing, with deep colours, rich brocades and row upon row of seats. But the place didn’t fool me. I loved the fact that backstage everything was just as crowded and chaotic as it had been in my home town. Maybe that’s what I like about theatre: the gap between artifice and reality. The different roles that theatres themselves can play. The magic we can make.
Of course I also liked the outrageous characters I met in them. And the Bristol Old Vic certainly provided them. It had a great front-of-house manager, a fittingly camp and theatrical man called Rodney West who loved the enthusiasm of all us young students. It was just as well because he ended up seeing an awful lot of us.
The marvellous Jacqueline Stanbury and I got the ball rolling. We decided to organise first-nighters for each new performance. Our gang would dress up, the boys in black tie, the girls in long dresses. Most of us might have had to rely on charity shops for our finery. But we made it look a million dollars. Rodney helped make sure we always got the seats we wanted. The theatre has a horseshoe gallery where you sit in a narrow row of seats on the side edge of the balcony. They’re not the best seats in the house by any measure – the view was badly restricted and you had to lean at a worryingly wide angle to see the whole of the stage. But they were where we loved to be. When you sat there you were almost on display yourself – I could always sense it when people in the posh seats of the stalls were looking our way. We loved the attention.
It was in those seats that it dawned on me that theatre itself would be one of the great loves of my life. The company was extraordinary in those years, great plays, wonderful performances. Thelma Barlow, still a dear friend, was at the Bristol Old Vic back then and I remember being dazzled by her performances – she was like a lovely china doll. A lovely china doll who could set the stage on fire when her play demanded it. And leading the company was the marvellous Peggy Ann Wood, the first person I ever saw to get an entrance round when they walked on stage. I was stunned by the thrill of it as I joined that applause. Now, whenever I get an entrance round, I thank Peggy for