The strange thing is, and this is a strange thing to say as an actor: most of my life I suffered from a stammer – a stutter. Apparently the Americans say stammer and the UK stutter; I found that out yesterday. Not many people notice it and one time I met a well known actor who had one. It disappeared when he was working and that's what happens to me.
Most of the time I don't have one but I would be in – shall we say – a town hall meeting and I wanted to say something and as my turn came I would start my sentence with 'err' and then ask my question. I asked a question once when my dad was with me and he said he could see me contorting in the seat as my turn got nearer. I didn't notice that, of course.
My dad had a friend called Kendrick. He had a terrible stammer and one day he wrote his name on a piece of paper as Kackity-Kackity eeegh effing Kendrick. The effing means the F word and this isn't the place for it. Kendrick would use it all the time and my mother would say 'he doesn't stutter with that word.'
He had a sense of humour about it and the other day I saw a comedian who stammered. When talking to the audience one of his comments was 'people come up to me an tell me I have a stammer; as if I didn't know.'
If ever I'm in the company of someone who stammers I feel uncomfortable and feel I might stammer if I say anything.
One of the things I realised is I didn't stutter when I sang. So I kind of sung answers on things I was going to say – it seemed to work and it really only happens now if I'm some kind of insecure situation which is not often.
When I started school I had an Irish accent and when I met the other kids they spoke with Birmingham accents. You many notice that some vowel sounds are the same in each dialect. The 'U' in Dublin, for instance, but that is the same in the north of England too.
At that age I didn't want to stand out so I gradually started to speak the way they did but when I got home in the evenings I reverted back to the Dublin. I think this did me good as I developed an ear for accents and also the pitch people spoke in so I could impersonate a lot of people. I wasn't the best there was always someone else who was a better mimic that me and that goes for when I went to work and even as an actor. Always someone else funnier but I remember all those people and their talents so that has stood me in good stead.
I think the last words to go from Irish into Brummy – or the sounds – were walk, work, talk etc, but when we went back to Dublin for the summer we – me and my two brothers – came back with Dublin accents. It seemed to be okay for the other two as by the time they started school they could hear how I spoke.
One time we got on the bus in Birmingham from the station and heard the Birmingham accents for the first time in months; they all seemed to be singing.
The big trouble for me was when my two worlds collided.
Sometimes I couldn't get any words out at all – the Irish side of my life and the English side of my life coming together almost struck me dumb; which way to speak should I choose; my insides would be panicking and I would be churning up inside.
Many years later when my mother was dying she came to live with us and I looked after her. Of course a lot of the Irish came back but I would go out each lunch time and leave her in the wheel chair watching TV. I would go for a couple of pints of Guinness in an Irish pub close by. I can't remember or didn't notice how I spoke.
But one day I was somewhere else, talking with a load of Londoners and one of the guys from the pub came up and said 'hey Chris: why are you speaking in an English accent?'
I hadn't noticed.
These days if I meet someone from Dublin or Birmingham I tend to slip into a bit of one of those accents.
When we lived in Los Angeles, I knew an Irish actor who brought his English wife and their two children across from London. The children had well spoken London dialects, the mother was quite posh and the husband had a lovely Dublin accent.
After a couple of months we went to their house and the children asked how 'we guys' were doing; we guys!!! I think they'd be between five and ten years of age, and those accents were certainly American which had developed in that short period.
It brought me to mind when I started school, in Birmingham, I didn't like it, I didn't know why I was there and why I was left alone. So I screamed the place down and when the teacher, Miss Jones, picked me up I kicked out and must have hurt the poor woman and didn't deserve the kindness she always showed me.
I was speaking to my cousin over the phone yesterday, who was in Dublin, and my wife said the longer the conversation lasted the more Irish I became. I think it was the same as a child when we would go to Manchester, where my other granny and granddad lived as they had come over to England too.
I would always say 'I don't know' in the Manchester accent. They wouldn't say things like 'I'll be here till ten-o-clock' they would say 'I'll be here while ten-o-clock.' There were lots of other things, other phrases and sayings, and I would get mixed up sometimes.
Last night there was a programme on TV about stuttering and stammering – that's where I found out that the Americans say stammer: hey! They say stammer here too.
They seemed to figure out that it was caused by the way our brains are wired – a bit like autism. I don't know if I agreed with that no matter how clever and well researched they are as I think it has something to do with confidence.
Most of the time I appear confident.
Lately I have a problem remembering certain words or names but I think that has always been the case with me. One time I could never remember the name of the actor Ray Winstone. No reason why I should remember but when you see people on TV you do remember and that's all that's to it.
At the same time I can remember cast lists from films many years ago. Scripts from plays I've been in – I did The Caretaker once by Harold Pinter and I can still remember one of the speeches. This is not unusual when it comes to actors remembering Shakespeare's speeches and I can remember some of them too.
Michael Palin, who played someone with a stammer in the movie A Fish Called Wanda (above) has started a school where they coach or teach a way to rid people of the stammer. I don't know if it works. His father had a terrible stammer and he had reservations when accepting the role but he did and it was funny. But so is falling on a banana skin – especially if you can see the banana and the person walking towards it. A lot of comedy is laughing at other people's misfortunes – I wonder if they all mind.
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