Sad story of an actor!

Henry Irving

The first actor to be knighted but nothing to do with this little story.

 
This is a sad story about an actor I once knew. There are plenty of sad stories about actors as we can be sad sometimes; sad through the frustration of the business we are in when we can't do the things we want to do; sad because we're not working or getting the wrong kind of work. I have known very good looking and talented actors who have committed suicide because they were judged by their looks and not their talent. It's no coincidence that movies stars are in Hollywood and not here – movie stars with movie star looks that is.
I had three dealings with this particular actor; he wasn't especially talented, in fact, in some ways, he wasn't talented at all. He wasn't my type of guy, we weren't particularly friendly but I always remembered him. There will be no names here apart from one or two people who have nothing to do with him.
When I first went to drama school there was one student there who was the son of an actor; and that is the actor this little story is about. This student was so good looking he was pretty – so it was irrefutable that he wasn't going to make it here in the land of the nitty gritty drama of Z Cars, Mike Leigh, Tony Garnett et al.
I think a lot of the girls fancied him but he had one problem; he could not say the 'R' sound; I wrote about Jonathan Ross recently - well this fella was 100 times worse.
He may have been tongue tied, I don't know; there are so many people who go through life tongue tied and never get to know it. I don't know if this had a psychological effect on him but . .. well read on and we might see.
I remember he spent hours trying to say an R but his tongue just wouldn't do it for him; his parents should have been horse whipped for letting this situation develop; it is possible to correct when they're young enough; R sounds and lisps – stammering and stuttering need experts, I should think, but when you're an actor you study speech and some people at drama school went on to be speech therapists.
The one big thing we knew about this student was that his father was an actor. It was so important to us; we didn't know where he worked or what kind of work he was doing but he was what we aspired to be; an actor.
In the second year of drama school we were expected to put on plays for the public; these were usually rehearsed for the whole ten week term and performed at the end of it. Not like in the professional theatre where the rehearsal time is a lot less. One play we were doing had the said student in it and everybody knew that his dad would be along. Afterwards students were asking 'what did his dad think?' “what did he say?” I wasn't in that play so I don't know. 
The student once said to me when I asked him what he would do when we left and went in to the big wide world “I'll be all right" he said "I'll sell my arse!”
I don't know whether he did that or not, when the time came, but he was serious.
Going to drama school can be a shock for a lot of people. Some can be knocked down a peg or two as they were the life and soul of the party at the office they worked in but when they arrive at the college they find everybody else is the same – they're all jokers, or rebels or Marlon Brando/James Dean clones. 
Most are a little shocked too by the revelations that some people are gay – it's always been an honest profession as far as that is concerned but at that age it is a shock.
Maybe about five years after I left drama school I was working in a play called An Inspector Calls by J B Priestley. I played the role of the son of a northern industrialist and the role of the industrialist was quite big; we didn't know who was going to play it, then one day the director told us who it was and it was the father of the student I have referred to; I thought the name was familiar.
On the first day of rehearsal he turned up knowing half his lines already; you may think this is promising but during the rehearsal period and the run of the play it never got any better. The truth is that he wasn't an actor at all; he was a conjurer – a magician; that's how he got his equity card.
All his credits – his resumé, his curriculum vitae – were from Rhodesia (which didn't exist at the time although that's what he called it) and were from obscure places; it became quite clear that he had talked his way in to the job and couldn't do it. We helped him, we had to we were working with him, but it was impossible.
Sometimes it felt like we were in the middle of a bull ring with the crowds around toying with us, and we were trying to get out alive. We kind of covered for him on his lines, suggested clues to his next one and some people were getting frustrated. We played to full houses every night and it was quite a big theatre so you can imagine. One time the director asked him what was going on and he said he would take his script home that evening - take his script home!!!!
All the trouble he was causing was going over the top of his head as his friends would come along and 'celebrate' with him; we didn't; we were nervous wrecks. 
It was unbelievable that he would leave his script at the theatre.
I spoke to him about his son, of course; he couldn't remember me from drama school, why would he, and he told me he was in Rhodesia. Zimbabwe, I said and he nodded. It seems his son was a big star there and the next day he brought in some Zimbabwe magazines; they were the very expensive kind and each one had pictures and stories about his son. He was a continuity announcer on television. He sometimes had his own show, I think, and the photos were very glamorous ones and showed him living in luxury. He was proud of him and when his wife came she made herself known to me and we spoke of her famous child and all the things he got up to and how famous he was.
When the play ended I have to say it was a relief to see him go; people in the cast got their sanity back and we carried on to the next play.
Five years or so later his son made the national newspapers in Britain. He had joined a religious cult and he was what some people might call a Jesus Freak. He and another man had seen the devil in some woman and kicked her to death. This happened in England; he was described as an actor and there was a photo of him and his cohort in the press; no mistake.
It was a shock – I spoke to one or two people about it who had known him and eventually it went from my memory until one day I was working for ATV in a situation comedy. We were due to go to Nottingham to film and we rehearsed at the Pineapple Dance Studios in South Kensington. It was a terrible place to hear what we were saying whilst rehearsing as everything echoed and one day one of the old actors complained about it. He was the man who was in Fawlty Towers who played the man with the twitch, Allan Cuthbertson; he would play colonels and he said he couldn't understand the director as he 'doesn't have a consonant in his head.'
Yes you needed to be there!!!!
He was playing a colonel in this particular show and when we went to Nottingham to shoot it, there were plenty of old army colonel types in his scene and one of the extras was the actor; the actor that this piece is about. He was a broken man; the one person he was proud of in his life turned out to be a murderer. I made myself known to him but he couldn't remember me, couldn't remember the play and couldn't remember being in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe or even the continent of Africa; in fact he could hardly speak.