Martin Shaw - The Biography. Stafford Hildred
loved it. ‘Sometimes it was just brilliant when the kids would follow us until we found some open land,’ he said. ‘Then we would set up shop and give a performance. It really was like being a Pied Piper, a fantastic experience. The children were our sternest critics but they loved the company.’ He even began to look like an actor. Sloppy-Joe sweaters, tight jeans and sandals were his usual mode of dress and he made several trips to nearby Stratford-upon-Avon to, as he put it, ‘eat up the Shakespeare’ – more than once with his girlfriend at the time, who was his first real love. She was quite a character and Martin said later: ‘She would embarrass me when we would haunt the actors’ pubs afterwards by wearing a green bowler hat. I think she must have been the first genuine eccentric I had ever met – she was quite a girl.’ The strong theatrical influences combined to give him the increased momentum to want to try to make acting his career.
‘I auditioned for some London drama schools and got into LAMDA [the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art],’ says Martin, ‘which was more than a little lucky because in 1963 it was the best in the world – I didn’t know that at the time, of course.’
It must be said that in his late teens Martin Shaw was not at all the clean-living, non-drinking, non-smoking picture of health that theatre and television audiences have come to know and love over the years. He says: ‘I started drinking halves of bitter when I was 14. I always had quite a weak frame as a younger boy, but at 15 I started to fill out and when I was 18 or 19 I got really bulky, thanks partly to the beer I suppose. As soon as I got my freedom to go to places on my own I started to frequent jazz clubs and for a while I became a beatnik. I also started to drink even more heavily which is probably why I kept putting on weight.’
‘Somehow the school discovered a sensitivity beneath my roughshod, drinking, big-headed character and they brought this out. It altered my personality completely’
Martin Shaw on his student days at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art
Martin Shaw might not have realised it but he could hardly have headed for drama college in London at a more exciting time for a young man. Not for nothing had the Americans dubbed the capital Swinging London: youth held sway amid a colourful explosion of creativity in music, art, fashion, photography, movies and the theatre. They were exciting times, and it was ‘Cool Britannia’. David Bailey was the photographer of the day, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy ruled the world of modelling, Mary Quant had launched the mini-skirt, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp were the two young London actors the film world was talking about, the Rolling Stones were pop gods and clubs like the Scotch of St. James, the Speakeasy and the Cromwellian were packed every night with peacock males dressed garishly by Carnaby Street, who were dancing the night away with dolly-bird girlfriends who felt liberated by the advent of the Pill. The feel-good factor was tangible: England had won the World Cup at Wembley, all over the world the Beatles were top of the charts and at the box office with Yellow Submarine, and Paul Scofield was on his way to winning an Oscar for his role as Sir Thomas More in the movie A Man For All Seasons.
Martin arrived in 1963, not so much in style but astride his closest companion – his aged but lovingly restored motorbike, an A7 Combo that had cost him all of £15 back home. ‘It took me a whole year to get the bike into mint condition,’ he said nostalgically, years later. ‘I must have visited every breaker’s yard in Brum.’ Of course, in those days Birmingham was the motorcycle capital of the world so that must have meant a lot of breaker’s yards. ‘It was a beautiful bike – bloody beautiful,’ he recalled.
At the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he was able to mingle with other like-minded students drawn from all areas of the country. The days when rounded vowels were de rigueur for entry to top London drama schools had long gone, and a Birmingham accent would be no drawback. He could also pride himself on being a student at one of the very best drama colleges in the world. LAMDA had a proud history that dated back to 1861, making the Academy the oldest of its kind in Britain. Apart from moving to Hampton Court for a brief period during World War II when its studios were bombed, the Academy had always been based in west London and when Martin was a student its home was in Earl’s Court. Among its notable Alumni are the late Richard Harris, David Suchet, Maureen Lipman, Brian Cox (a contemporary of Martin’s) and Patricia Hodge, who was much later to play a somewhat upmarket girlfriend of Martin’s character Ray Doyle in The Professionals.
Martin proved to be an exceptional pupil who frequently stood out from the others and the LAMDA course also became a passage of personal discovery. The Academy prided itself, as it does today, in neither seeking to teach skills superficially, nor to deconstruct the individual in order to rebuild a LAMDA product. Rather, the aim was to encourage and develop talents already innate in each student, all of which suited him perfectly. ‘Somehow the school discovered a sensitivity beneath my roughshod, drinking, big-headed character and they brought this out,’ he was able to say on looking back. ‘It altered my personality completely.’
He will always be grateful to LAMDA, where he learned so much of his craft. ‘It changed me from an adolescent into a man,’ said Martin. ‘The timing was perfect,’ he later observed. ‘The extremes of Method acting were starting to go away, the “scratch your arse, kick pebbles and mumble” techniques were on the way out. I just happened to hit a wonderful couple of years – I was very lucky.’
Martin’s trusty motorbike faced a pretty comprehensive change as well. Years later, in a hilarious interview with a motorbike magazine, he recalled: ‘I went out to Hampton Court one day with a girlfriend and it was incredibly hot weather. I was showing off and really thrashing it (the bike!). One of the nuts came loose on the carb through vibration. It dripped petrol on to the exhaust, which was already overheating and, whoosh! The bike went up like a torch. We only just got off in time!’
This happened in Fulham on the way home, just a short distance from Martin’s flat. ‘A bus stopped and the conductor rushed over with a fire extinguisher to put it out. I pushed it back to my flat and then went out and got drunk. I came back in the early hours of the morning and saw my poor bike outside the flat and, because I was tight, I thought I would kick it over and see if it would start.
‘I switched on the ignition and it all came on, so I thought “Great!” I turned on the petrol and kicked it over, but the fire had burnt all the insulation off the HT leads. Whoomph… the whole lot went up in flames again! I ran into the house and did the worst possible thing – I got a bucket of water and threw that over it – a petrol fire! It spread worse than ever! Luckily, a nightwatchman came out with a fire extinguisher, a very big one and he turned it into a wedding cake!’
The bike was slowly rusting outside when a passer-by stopped and bought it. ‘In the end,’ Martin said, ‘he gave me 13 quid for it and I waved it off down the road. I’d had all that pleasure for just 2 quid.’
He emerged from LAMDA in 1965 full of hopes for the future and soon afterwards headed for his first job with Hornchurch repertory company in Essex where he was taken on as an assistant stage manager. As an ASM, he was essentially the theatre company’s general dogsbody and he was paid the princely sum of £7 a week. To save money, he lived for a while in a shed at the bottom of someone’s garden where he had an electric ring to cook on and just about nothing else. While some thought his unusual choice of digs was bizarre, others admiringly considered it “Far out, man”.
Martin found he could rent the shed for 30 shillings (£1.50) a week, which left him with just over a fiver for food and cigarettes and to buy fellow members of the company a round or two. ‘I was 22 before I could afford to buy cigarettes in packets of twenty,’ he once recalled.
His hard-drinking lifestyle often brought him close to conflict and he can recall lots of narrow scrapes with violence as a young man in London. However, the worst beating he ever suffered happened in his early twenties – and he can’t remember a thing about it. He was attacked by a gang of thugs in a London street, just after he had been to his drama school graduation. He had been drinking with a pal when they were set upon in an