Interviews

Actor. Amateur Dramatics; Ambrosine Philpots; Bartholomew Fair; Binkie Beaumont; The Birthday Party; comedy; 'Professor' Jimmy Edwards; Sir John Gielgud; Half-Way up the Tree; A Heritage and its History; Home; LAMDA; Robert Morley; overacting; pantomime, Harold Pinter; Vanessa Redgrave; repertory; Ralph Richardson; Reggie Salberg; Salisbury Playhouse; Tommy Steele; David Story; Eric Sykes, television; H.M. Tennent; Tommy Trinder; Sir Peter Ustinov.

Conducted by Daniel Buckley on 13/12/06

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DB: Can you tell us how you first entered the business?

JC: Well, I first entered the business, I can tell you… I’ve always, ever since I was taken to my first pantomime - it’s a bit of a cliché but it’s actually true in my case, because I can remember it. It was Mother Goose, towards the end of the war, at Oxford, New Theatre – well, I should think it was just after the war – and then Cinderella. I went to these pantomimes and I was, from quite an early age, taken to Shakespeare in College Gardens, because I was brought up in Oxford - my father was professor of English, the Goldsmith professor of English, David Cecil – and so I was brought up on the theatre from a fairly early age, and I always wanted to be an actor. I don’t think I was very good at school or anything, I only got the small parts - I was very stiff and awkward - but I had this sort of idea that I’d have to do it one of these days. And I loved radio plays, and radio was the great thing. In the forties and fifties radio was the great… before television had really got going after the war… I mean radio was what we all listened to and I particularly liked comedy programmes, and if you’d asked me at that time I think I’d have said that I wanted to be a radio actor, because that was the big thing to be. However, well, as I say I wasn’t very good at school, I had small parts in school plays, I used to write sketches and maybe cribbed from off the radio or off the pantomime, which I did with my friends at Christmas as a kind of a fun thing, and they didn’t take it very seriously but I did. I mean, I thought... And I used to shamelessly crib all these comedy sketches from the radio or the pantomime and… Anyway, so it went on, and then I went to Oxford as an undergraduate. It was my hometown but I also was an undergraduate at Oxford, and I found that I really enjoyed doing amateur dramatics there. And that’s when it started,  and when I began to think I wasn’t too bad… I was still stiff and awkward, but this was rather effective for comedy parts, playing sort of comic servants in plays, and in the cabaret nights we had. We had… They were all rather older than me. A lot of the undergraduates had done military service, which I hadn’t - I was just too young to have done National Service - but there were undergraduates like [?] who was an organ scholar and he’d stayed on, Dudley Moore - who became a Hollywood star eventually – but he was there, and Alan Bennett who was a don and we used to have fun doing cabaret. And then after that I went to Stratford, because there was a festival of student drama, which we did in the open air. There was a Cambridge production and there was a Belfast production and there was also an Oxford production, it was Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson where I played two parts, two rather showy parts, though they weren’t by any means leading roles but they were… It’s a great sprawling play and I think it’s better done by amateurs on a great grass… in the open air because it’s not really got much of a plot, Bartholomew Fair! I’m saying all this because this is really how it all started. Because I played these two parts in Bartholomew Fair and one was - they were totally different - and one was the pig woman, there’s a woman who sells pigs, roast pig, and she has a rather dippy assistant called Mooncalf, a boy, and I remember putting on a false nose [mimes putting on a false nose] as we did in those days, and I had a slight limp and I had this curious walk [mimes limping walk]. And I did this character and I also played Troubadour, which is really almost the best part, although it’s a small part, but he’s a lunatic and you’ve got a certain amount of pathos because there’s this poor man running around the fair and asking if everybody… he’s sort of demented… and I can’t remember and it would be boring to describe what the part’s about but I know that I was completely different, I had my hair all fluffed out and I had a beard. And so people didn’t know I was the same person playing the two parts. And in those days undergraduate plays were covered by the national press, and to my amazement I got the best notices of anybody although it wasn’t by any means the leading role, but they said, ‘Jonathan Cecil playing two small parts steals the evening.’ And we did a performance on Sunday night to which a lot of the actors from the Royal Shakespeare, the real professional actors, – it was then called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, it’s now the Royal Shakespeare – but they came to our parties – we had these bottle parties – and I got to know professional actors for the first time. And they’d been to see our play, and again, they said I was the best, and if I wanted to be an actor, well, it’s a rotten profession to… very uncertain and all that - which after forty years I have to say I’m in entire agreement with, it’s so very uncertain. But the thing is that I went home and I said to my parents, who were very tolerant – and they loved the theatre as I said earlier, they took me to see all these plays and they took me to see Shakespeare in Stratford and all the great actors, Laurence Olivier and Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, and the plays at the New Theatre we saw all these big marvellous actors and everything and I became more and more fascinated – and they did nothing to discourage me except they didn’t think I was very good, and I think they were right. But when I came back, I said, ‘Well, the real actors, the real professional actors, have actually said I’m the best, I’m the one that should take it up.’ And so my parents said, ‘Oh dear. Well, it’s a very worrying profession to be in, but I suppose you’d better have a try if that’s what they think.’ So then, after I got my degree at Oxford, I went on to LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where I stayed for two years and I then… Because I was too nervous, unlike contemporaries of mine - well two of them have become knights of the theatre, but I didn’t know them, I know them now but just… but Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi, who were roughly the same sort of age as me, they were so confident – Cambridge is so much more confident I think than Oxford – and they went straight into the business, I mean without… whereas I was too scared to do that, so I went to LAMDA and drama school, I trained. And wonderful, the president, our headmaster whatever you call it, Michael MacOwan, who had been a very big director before the war and after the war, and he was magnificent, and a wonderful teacher particularly of speaking Shakespeare, and he was a superb teacher. And there were others. There was an American called - well he was actually British born, but he was brought up and trained in America – called Vivian Matalon and we had very, very good teachers there, and some not so good teachers like any other academy whatever the subject they’re teaching and certainly the danger is of course that failed actors teach at drama schools because they can’t get a job and they’re not very good on the whole! But as a whole I was happy there. And then, what one did then – and I feel very sad about young people now because they don’t go to into… There aren’t all these repertory theatres up and down the country as there were then – and I remember writing at least thirty, if not forty letters with a stamped addressed envelope and a photograph before I left drama school. And I wrote them saying come and see me in my final play there, they were all invited all the agents… and so that’s really how I got into it. And I went to Northampton, I did one play, The Arsory[?], I did a play at Dundee, I did three plays there, and Hornchurch, I did three plays there. And then I was engaged by writ… and then I was in West End play. I also… Parallel with this I was doing quite well on television because someone had seen me at my final show at LAMDA and they wanted… it was a play with Vanessa Redgrave, and it was almost her first television play funnily enough, although she was a well, well established stage actress by that time. I’m talking about 1963 I think. Yes I am, ’63, ’64, that sort of time. And in those days, well-known actors of the sort of Gielgud and Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, didn’t do television, I mean, television was thought… They would do major movies, but they were definitely theatre actors, and I don’t say it wasn’t quite the thing to do television, but it was thought to only be a stepping stone, only something which actors did as a stop-gap between engagements at the theatre. So I did rather well on television when I started, because somebody had seen my last performance at LAMDA, they thought – the director Naomi Caper – thought that I was rather good… they wanted to play opposite Vanessa Redgrave… the part was very dull, and it was just an ordinary young student… she was a working class girl and I was a student who was a welfare officer and I took her about and showed her bits of London, and there’s a near, near relationship between the two but it never got to anything, because she’s married with children and all that, but it was a nice part, only a dull part because it’s meant to be rather a dull and not very… And they thought, ‘We don’t want just an ordinary, handsome looking juvenile lead’, as we called then in those days, ‘We want somebody,’ – because I’ve always been a comedy actor – and they want somebody with a touch of comedy, a touch of something amusing, a little bit eccentric, and so that was terrific, it was a big start. I mean, to play a leading part on television as your first… So I did that and then I was also a play that started at Oxford called A Heritage [mispronounces word] – difficult to pronounce even now – A Heritage and its History and – I sound like Eliza Doolittle, ‘the rain in Spain’ and all that! A Heritage and its History, and it was adapted from a novel by Ivy Compton Burnett, and I started off in that.

Interview continued...

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