MoviesAt age 16, it was Henry V's rallying cry that clinched Edward Woodward's place at Rada and he has been diving into the fray ever since. He's done the classics, spent years on TV as a renegade secret agent, now he's playing the 'rudest man in Britain'. It's a question of passion, he tells Sally VincentWhile an actor is in the process of creating a new role, you can never be sure who you're going to meet. Glimpsed through the iron gates of his little private quay on a pretty bit of the Thames, this one might be Mr Mole, furry-faced under a battered panama hat, whiling away a hot afternoon where the river bends. The sound-track is wrong, though. Westbound motorists, charmed by a sudden sun, have come off the M4 to take the scenic route in second gear, which is extremely noisy of them.
"Nobody told me anyone was coming!" Edward Woodward shouted, struggling to unlock his gate and make himself heard above the traffic. "Nobody tells me anything!" He's trying not to be cross while we bandy apologies and explanations and he calls me "m'dear", an epithet reserved by mid-20th century gentlemen for strange women they don't like very much. Mr Woodward had planned to study his lines for Goodbye Gilbert Harding for the remains of the day and now he must lay aside his highlit script in order to be nice to m'dear. Something sad and baleful hangs in the air, doubtless the ghost of Gilbert Harding.
Woodward has found no difficulty identifying with Harding. But line-learning, always a matter of acute anxiety for him, is being a total swine. Not because of intrusions, m'dear, it's just that the wretched fellow's speech patterns are impossible. Never use one word when three will do, never speak in parentheses, always hold forth in this pedantic, verbose, pompous way and God help anyone who doesn't respond in the same punctilious style. "Playing this man is hhhahha... " Halfway between a laugh and a sigh, words fail. But he'll get there. Oh yes. He'll get him right. It's a great piece, fascinating, a darn good script. And this is precisely the moment for it, in his opinion, now that most people believe the poisoned chalice of "celebrity" is a recent invention.
Unlike those of us who have either forgotten or were born too late, Woodward remembers the heyday of Gilbert Harding, the sheer Beckham/Blair ubiquity of the fellow. But then most of us have either forgotten or never knew the potency of sound radio half a century ago.
In those days the nation solemnly and habitually tuned in to such entertainments as ventriloquism, mind-reading and magic acts, quite oblivious to the absurdity of having only aural contact with the goings-on. They'd stay in to listen to other people playing the sort of infantile parlour games they could easily play among themselves. Some people even went so far as to queue up for tickets to be in the studio audience and breathe the same air as such luminaries as Mr Harding.
Twenty Questions was the big one. Gilbert Harding and three other personalities of indeterminate cachet were called upon to guess the identity of what was archly known as "the object on the card" - a bunch of daffodils, green ink, Winston Churchill, whatever - through the simple expedient of asking said number of questions of a question-master. You wouldn't miss it. In the fullness of time, of course, such capers ascended on to television, where the elite would wear full evening dress to sit in a row and sleuth out the occupations of members of the public with faintly outlandish jobs. My, how we laughed.
And that is how we either remember or never knew Gilbert Harding: a grumpy, middle-aged fogey, his raddled face glowering above his dicky bow, looking as though he didn't know whom he detested most, himself or the damn fools he was obliged to mix with. A schoolteacher by training and inclination, he pit-fell into celebrity, knew his own folly and stayed to take the money while it ate him alive.
While Woodward internalises poor old Gilbert, he expects himself to curmudgeon up a bit, which won't be much fun for his loved ones. But steeping is what works for him. He doesn't know how his wife puts up with it. The poor woman was actually with him on stage when he did Richard III and had to come home with him every night while he went on being a tyrannical monster. So she says. Personally, he didn't realise.
At this point his actress wife, Michelle Dotrice, arrived with a tea-tray, looking as sweet as she did in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em when we were supposed to believe she was married to an idiot in a beret and a belted raincoat. They briefly debate which of them will meet their daughter off her train; he calls her "Lovely", which tells us all we need to know about their marriage, and she departs, perhaps taking Gilbert Harding's ghost with her.
At all events, Woodward seems to have had a weight lifted off him. He even looks more like himself. Sharper, younger, more blue-eyed. When he starts to talk, his voice is softer than the one he works with. Not that it lacks authority. He says what he wants to say, ignores intrusive promptings and generally has you sitting back in your seat, being amused.
By way of a curtain raiser, he embarks on the story of The Silver Penknife. Woodward made his theatrical debut in a talent contest in a place called Grange Park, Wallington, Surrey. He was five years old. He had learned by heart a quaint little roundelay from a Victorian collection much prized by his grandparents. He stood there in his tiny trousers and did A Bucket, A Spade And An Air Balloon, with one eye on his mum and dad exuding pride in the front row and the other on the handsome silver penknife promised as the winner's trophy.
Well of course, he won, didn't he? And it wasn't a kiddies' show, either. As memory serves, and allowing for the fact that 12-year-olds look grown-up when you're five, he was the only child in the running. He remembers, clear as the day it happened, the mayor's presentation: "I hope you will receive this silver penknife, Master Woodward, and that you will carve your way through life, blah, blah, blah... " then himself saying thank you very much in a loud voice so as to reach the back of the hall, then taking the precious penknife home and, well, owning it.
He wasn't allowed to take it to school, of course, but in the privacy of his own small room he made it into a sort of shrine he could gaze upon and think of victory and promise and all the wonderful things to come. Then one day, about three weeks after the silver penknife became his, he noticed the silver was peeling off the handle and beneath the silver was this dull, base metal. Disillusion, he says now, these 67 years down the road, doesn't begin to say what he felt.
He took the penknife to his dad and his dad looked at it and said, well, never mind, you can still use it, it can still cut. All that glisters, he says with the sighing laugh. It was over between him and the silver penknife. The end of innocence, since when he has never really believed anything anyone of an executive status tells him. "You start doing deals with Americans, particularly the big Hollywood ones, you'll appreciate the one about the silver penknife."
Woodward says it was his hometown of Croydon that gave him his first sense of theatre. Specifically the Surrey street market, an event of unsurpassed drama, featuring fruit, knicker elastic, unimagined gizmos and the full panoply of working-class exuberance. They'd all go down there at least once a week, him, his mum and dad, his grandparents, his cousin, mob-handed, for the joy of it.
Sometimes his grandma took him to the Croydon Empire to see the variety acts: Wilson, Keppel and Betty, Jimmy James, Norman Evans, Robb Wilton. He thought he was in heaven. It wasn't just the turns, it was the whole thing, the audience, the sense of involvement and vitality. Even when someone bombed and got booed off the stage, the passion was still there.
His grandfather was probably the greatest single influence in his life. You know that painting The Boyhood Of Raleigh, with the two little boys, one of them the young Walter, gazing up at an old sea salt, who's pointing to the horizon? Well, that was Edward and his cousin John and their grandad. Grandad had lived. He'd joined the army at the age of 11 when they took him to Africa as a drummer boy, where he drummed away in the thick of it till he was big enough to join the cannon fodder.
The Royal Artillery had him till the end of the first world war. "I was like a bleedin' yoyo," the old man was fond of saying. "Up and down, up and down, sergeant, corporal, corporal, sergeant." Later he took up a career as a ganger on the railway who gave him a lovely cottage to live in, with about three-quarters of an acre of land on which he planted the most astonishing array of chrysanthemums. Prize chrysanthemums, in all these fantastic colours, thousands of them, just waving there as far as a boy's eye could see. And then he'd cut them and give them all away to hospitals and old people's homes and start all over again.
Then one night, when Edward was staying with his grandparents, he remembers a lot of banging and crashing and cursing going on, and the next day, when he got up, seeing about 20 men lying around in the garden with bottles of beer and, where once there had been chrysanthemums there was now a playground with a big slide, a swing, a seesaw and a roundabout. Oh, and a boxing ring. His grandfather had changed his mind. The former heavyweight boxing champion of the British Expeditionary Force, his grandad was to train boxers in his own back yard.
Edward grew accustomed to the spectacle of grown men beating the living daylights out of each other on a daily basis. He even tried his best to be a boxer himself, to please his grandfather. But he always lost. Always. Never won a bout in his life. But the touching thing was his grandad never gave up on him. One thing he could always rely on, Grandad would be there in his corner rooting for him through every crushing defeat. The oldfellow wasn't best pleased when he took up acting, but as he told him, it was he who planted the idea, with the stories and everything, and taking him to the Croydon Grand to see a proper play.
He couldn't believe his luck when Rada allowed him to audition. Perhaps it was callow of him, what with Olivier's Henry V packing them into every high street cinema at the time, but to recommend himself to the power-brokers of Rada, he chose to throw himself into "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" and bugger the consequences. They gave him a scholarship for his cheek, which was just as well as he couldn't have gone otherwise. He was 16 years old, the youngest ever Rada student, a palm he still bears alone.
Like all nervous but ambitious souls, he made up with bravado what he lacked in sophistication. The place was teeming with second world war returnees on government grants who, in his considered opinion, were only there for the girls and a bit of fun. Before long, he fell into the hands of a Scandinavian gentleman who persuaded him to chuck in the cushy student life and sign up for a Shakespearean world tour.
As rehearsals got under way, he couldn't help noticing something odd. The director worked from a Swedish copy of Twelfth Night, freely translating as he went along. However, when you're 17, you keep your head down and take your chances. The great world tour opened at the Royal Theatre, Norwich, soldiered on to the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, and folded to the sound of one hand clapping. And that was it - too late to go back to Rada and say sorry, can I have my scholarship back.
"Actors," Woodward gazes down the river, "actors can't plan their lives." He waves the back of his hand towards the prospect: "You have to go with the flow, accept market forces, take what comes." He is most emphatic about there being nothing qualitatively different between being a Royal Shakespeare Company actor, a popular TV character, a nightclub crooner, or, what? A Punch & Judy man. You forget you're only a room to let, you get pretentious and snobbish, not to mention unemployed.
He made a living. Classical theatre, not very good films, revue. Some of it was quite humiliating, but we don't want to go into that. At one point he suffered some kind of identity crisis and changed his name to Oliver Ward in the vague hope that the Oliver part was close enough to Olivier for his idol's magic to rub off on him. It didn't, so he changed it back again.
But behind the scenes something else seems to have been going on. As the story goes, Noël Coward was supposed to have said to Laurence Olivier, "Have you seen that young man with the name like a fart in a bathtub?" Of course no one can vouch for its authenticity, but it is true to say that during the late 1950s, Woodward went to New York with a musical called High Spirits, based on Coward's Blithe Spirit, plus, needless to say, Edward Woodward does sound like a fart in a bathtub.
Woodward was starring in the musical Two Cities, based on A Tale Of Two Cities, at the Palace Theatre, Hove, when the call came. Laurence Olivier wanted to see him in his office at the Old Vic, from which he overlorded the National Theatre. You can tell by the way he keeps chuckling to himself that this was something of a high spot in Woodward's life.
Recounting it, he slips unconsciously into character, now the theatrical giant, all clipped vowels and snazzy consonants, now the overawed ingénu, wondering when he'd wake up. Hello, he thought to himself, I'm sitting here and he's asking me what I'd like to play in his theatre. He heard himself babble something about, anything, I'll play anything, what are you doing? Then Olivier chipping in, I'm asking the questions, I'm asking you what role you'd like to play? It was, you might say, a moment to shit or bust. I want, he said, to play Cyrano de Bergerac. "Good God," Olivier snapped, "Ken [Tynan] will go mad. That needs 70 actors. Ken only likes to use three or four." Then, with a languorous flourish, Olivier took up a piece of paper and scrawled across it, "Cyrano de Bergerac starring Edward Woodward". "There," he said, "will that do you?"
He picked up a couple of other roles at that meeting. Olivier tartly informed Edward he'd be playing the most evil man ever written in The White Devil and Sky Masterson in Guys And Dolls, in which, he added, "I, myself, will play Nathan Detroit." Not a bad day's work, Woodward told himself as he legged it across Waterloo bridge.
After a couple of years at the National Theatre, it is necessary for an actor without a private income and with a family to support to recoup. As he sees it, Woodward is jolly lucky to have been blessed with a pleasant, light-tenor singing voice. It came in handy for Shakespearean roles demanding the odd hey nonny no, and when push came to shove he could always take it on the road and sing in cabarets and clubs. He quite enjoyed it.
Well, he quite enjoyed the actual singing and the audiences; nice people, out for the night, mums and dads taking a party for their daughter's 21st, couples celebrating their wedding anniversary. But sometimes the thought would creep into his head, What the fuck am I doing here? Ten weeks ago I was playing Cyrano de Bergerac at the National Theatre to standing ovations. Plus the parallel thought, "Money!"
Woodward comes from a generation of theatre actors who were pleased to scorn television and film work for reasons of purity rather than of sour grapes. A self-respecting classicist might occasionally be obliged to lower himself to those media, but he'd be sure to bad-mouth them afterwards. They seemed to forget that British television drama, unlike its American counterpart, grew directly from theatre.
Series such as Callan, which ran from 1967 until 1972, was pure theatre; written, directed and played by theatre people. Which explains why it was so bloody good. You can see why America would want their own Callan and, while they were at it, they'd want the real, British actor to lend gravitas. Hence The Equaliser, with our Edward playing another renegade ex-secret service chappie with a mind of his own and his heart in the right place, all fine and dandy except it was absolute tosh, written with a knife and fork and as irredeemably banal as it was hugely successful.
Looking back, he wishes he hadn't done it. But what's the point of hindsight? The Equaliser ran for five years and made him a lot of money. Unfortunately, it almost cost him his life. He was, he can now see, a heart attack waiting to happen. He worked 17, 18 hours a day, ate junk food and smoked a hundred a day.
Then, the New York producer received an edict from the Los Angeles producer announcing the imminent arrival of a personal trainer for Mr Woodward, who had apparently grown a touch too portly for his heroic role. This meant he had to get up an hour and a half earlier in order to speed-walk all over Central Park - he wisely drew the line at actually breaking into a trot - then he'd sit down on a bench for a fag, get up and speed-walk some more, bicycle off to breakfast where he'd have lots more fags to make up for the ones he'd missed while he was exercising.
Between Equaliser series, he belted back to England to make Codename Kyril, towards the end of which he went down like a tree with a heart attack. He knocked off the smoking and the junk food, felt great, lost weight and went back to The Equaliser feeling so fit, he insisted on doing his own running and falling and diving about. The experience left him a more sanguine sort of character. He felt the peaceful stability of a man to whom the worst had already happened.
Surviving his own professional eclecticism has been a far more vexed struggle. "There's this strange thing we Brits have," he says. "We admire success while we simultaneously loathe it. It gets so that you're guilty of being successful. The ambivalence sticks to you." He feels now that had he had the foresight, he would have been more sparing with the time he spent in television and, most of all, he'd never have gone to America.
When he returned, there was a whole new layer of directors who had never seen his work, young men who wanted their own, younger people around them. In with the new. "After 60," he says, "you can count working actors on the fingers of four hands." Add to this the fact that when you're getting on a bit, it can be wonderful not to work at all. "And you do get picky," he says. "I'm not just going to do some crappy little guest spot somewhere, just to keep going... "
Yet the passion is still as powerful as it always was and just as impossible to describe. There are, for instance, no words to convey the horrors of stage-fright, no explanation for the tricks an actor's mind can play on him when he stands in the wings waiting to go on and knowing, with deadly certainty, that he hasn't the faintest idea what comes after "Now is the winter of our discontent... "
The only thing worse than stage-fright, he says, is vicarious stage-fright: the stark agony of watching your children making their debuts. All four of his were determined to go into the business. "It's not like being any other parent," he says, "just sitting there lapping it up, whatever it is. I was honour bound, I had to be a critic. I knew that, whatever else I did in my life, I had to be honest with them. If they hadn't got it, whatever it is, I'd have to tell them." He would have, too. Except God was good and he didn't have to.
All mellowed out by the riverside, Woodward turns his attention to what he calls "a continuation of work", without which he can have no peace of mind. "I'd like to do Coriolanus," he says. "And Julius Caesar, I've never done Julius Caesar... " He thinks for a moment, then remarks that not too many people know this, but more people listen to the radio than watch television. Radio is excellent, he says. He rather fancies radio.
He says he feels his life has changed a lot. He is less of a worry-guts, less - what was it he was always accused of? - less irascible. He supposes he is still a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly, but he's not proud of it. "Most of us," he says sagely, "are fools." He thinks of Gilbert Harding, who has never been far away. "Bad temper comes from fear, doesn't it? It's just a cover-up for a sense of inadequacy, insecurity, unresolved grief, dread, self-loathing. It's only human." And he picks up his script.
· Goodbye Gilbert Harding is at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge (01223 503333), today, 2.40 and 7.45pm; the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne (01323 412000), from October 21 to October 26; and the Theatre Royal, Brighton (01273 328488), from October 28 to November 2.
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