So farewell, Queen Vic

So incredibly sad about Victoria Wood, a comic genius who has been taken far too young. I first interviewed Queen Vic back in the 1980s for a Daily Express series called Funny Girls and found her to be very like an old friend of mine called Sue Coleman, who also came from Morecambe Bay and who ran off with a Morris Man (that’s Sue, not Victoria). Dry, a bit dour, slightly scary (until you warmed her up with jokes) and very funny.  That’s Lancashire for you. Although I will say this for her, she didn’t keep examining her split ends like Sue did.

I took her to the Waldorf for afternoon tea and then to a matinee of Me And My Girl with another Funny Girls interviewee, Emma Thompson. Or did we have tea afterwards instead of first; I can’t remember. She was quite low-key with nothing showbizzy about her. Some writer/performers are pure tinsel, with showbusiness running through them like  words on a stick of rock, but not Victoria – she was quite a serious person. A complete one-off, of course; and what she did for the cause of women in comedy is incalculable. She taught the men quite a bit too: her timing, her camp Northern consonants that she pronounced with such relish, her arch looks, her musical talents.  It’s such a shock that she’s gone; but this is one who will never be forgotten.

Rickman and Bowie – simply the best

He was the most singular talent…stopped by the finality of death, but preserved forever by the finality of film. And that goes for Bowie as well, of course, in his brilliant musical sphere.

Alan Rickman and David Bowie were two great stars who managed to keep it real throughout their lives. They were remarkable men who performed countless acts of kindness, staying human throughout all the stardom.

With Alan, one of many examples of his empathy and compassion was the time when he quietly organised a lunch for the actress Sheila Gish to welcome her back after she had been fitted with an eyepatch following a major operation to remove a facial tumour. It was Sheila who told journalist Nick Curtis in 2003 about the occasion; Rickman would never have revealed it himself.  Another journalist, Professor Roy Greenslade, reminded us yesterday how Bowie had staged a concert in 1987 in the then divided city of Berlin; when he was singing Heroes, he heard the people on the other side of the Wall, who couldn’t see him, join in with the lyrics.

When I was updating my Alan Rickman biography for a new edition in 2003, the writer Stephen Davis talked about his old friend’s “incorruptibility”, telling me: “Alan doesn’t confuse the illusion with the reality in what has become a virtual-reality society. He’s not looking for the quick payday, the smash-and-grab raid on the BAFTA awards…he is indifferent to these things.” That, I found, was what made him such a satisfying subject for biography: he was his own man, to the end.

And how typical of Alan, as I discovered from talking to his friends and colleagues, that he thought actors should be the servants of the writers – who didn’t get the credit they deserved in an age that is obsessed with the image on the screen. He even stuck his head above the parapet at one awards ceremony for acting prizes by standing up and saying, “Can we please spare some thought for the writers?” When your face and your body are your instruments, it’s only too easy to become completely self-obsessed. Not Rickman and Bowie, however.

We won’t see their like again.

 

 

 

The allure of older women

And while on the subject of Daniel Craig (I know, I know), much has been made of him romancing a Bond Woman over 50, heavens to Betsy, as if this was some kind of public-minded outreach programme designed to tick a diversity box that makes 007 seem less of a dinosaur. Yeah yeah, like he’d need to be persuaded to pucker up to Monica Bellucci. Yet Daniel has admirable form when it comes to romancing older women on screen – specifically, Anne Reid in 2003’s The Mother, in which she played a grandmother who didn’t look a bit like La Bellucci but who nevertheless got to bed the delicious Daniel (who was also sleeping with her daughter). Both Reid and Bellucci are equally beautiful in their different ways, however, so why should we be surprised that they attract the kind of man portrayed by someone as seriously sexy as Mr Craig? There is a strange, lingering sexual prejudice against older women that seems linked in some primeval way to female fertility – but what better way (and tested down the ages) for a man to relax in bed with a woman who emphatically won’t get pregnant…?

Strong but silent (he wishes!) 007

Photos of Daniel Craig at a press conference show him looking as uncomfortable as an SAS man forced to break cover – or let daylight in on the magic, as it were. And an SAS man is, of course, what James Bond fundamentally is – so at least you can say he’s in character.  But actors are often embarrassed by their own fame, and understandably so; it’s a very odd process for any human being to go through. And a press conference confronts them head-on with that fame, with questions ranging from the fearsomely erudite to the frankly nutty. Bill Nighy acknowledges the necessary absurdity of these international junkets with his own dryly witty take on replying to “Iceland” or “Germany” or “Britain”, but then he doesn’t usually play a man trying to save the world. An impossible ideal for poor Daniel, who I still remember fondly from his vulnerable breakthrough role in Our Friends In The North.

Rickman and Rima’s marriage

So what does Alan Rickman and Rima Horton’s wedding after 50 years together tell us, apart from the joys of delayed gratification – and that you should never rush into marriage?? As Alan’s unauthorised biographer, I discovered a rare picture of them together as teenaged cast-members of a local West London production of Emlyn Williams’ Night Must Fall: a beautiful pictorial proof of how long they’ve been together. Many of my contacts for my book, Alan Rickman: The Unauthorised Biography, couldn’t wait to tell me how good Alan and Rima were for each other as lifelong soul mates; as their playwright friend Stephen Davis put it, “they emerged out of the diesel and smoke of West London, cosmically entwined”. Alan clearly appreciates a woman with a brain, just like George Clooney with Amal. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing more attractive than a man who likes and loves a clever woman…

It’s toff at the top

No denying that Old Etonians are everywhere at present, and not just in the Coalition Government. They seem to be dominating showbusiness right now, with Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Stephen Hawking in the running for an Oscar and Damian Lewis about to unveil his Henry VIII in the BBC’s dramatisation of Wolf Hall this week.

Doom-mongering class warriors are wringing their hands (or whatever they wring) as they wonder where the new Albert Finneys will come from, but they needn’t fret. The thing about the acting profession is that it’s classless, with Old Etonians having to overcome the considerable disadvantages of their birth by learning Estuary accents at RADA in order to fit in to today’s world. Meanwhile, the comedy actor Paul Whitehouse (Welsh working class, washed once a week in a tin bath to prove it) does the best toff accent outside of the Garrick Club, so who needs the real thing?

Tony Curtis in drag

Even Miranda Richardson’s comedy teeth in the new BBC1 version of E.F.Benson’s Mapp And Lucia can’t quite compete with the sight of Geraldine McEwan in the original Channel 4 adaptation, looking (in her cloche helmet) like Tony Curtis in drag in Some Like It Hot.
Besides, Miranda is almost upstaged by those teeth – which leave her sounding like an audition for Margaret Thatcher. Yet the performances are astute and it’s still a delight, even though the books were a patronisingly sexist view of bitchy women by a male novelist. In my experience, men are ALWAYS bitchier than women.

Angelina can act; it’s all in the eyes

So much for the Sony executive Scott Rudin’s comment about Angelina Jolie being a minimally talented actor; just check out the killer look she gives Rudin’s colleague Amy Pascal when Pascal tries to make up with a hug. That’s acting; it’s all in those expressively arctic eyes

Rickman’s all-conquering conk

After seeing him/herself in close-up in a student film,  an anxious wannabe performer has consulted the Careers Clinic column in this week’s Stage newspaper about whether a nose job would be a good career move.  Leaving aside the inevitable jokes about Elephant Man auditions, may I point out that a somewhat moose-like nose never hindered Alan Rickman’s career?  As the former RSC artistic director Adrian Noble said when I interviewed him for my biography of Rickman (Virgin Books, 2003), he has the kind of big conk and big hands that create a dominant presence on stage or screen.  Now that’s what you might call an all-conquering conk.

And that goes for actresses too: the stronger the features, the more likely they are to be in demand for a variety of parts. If we’re talking in purely aesthetic terms, sometimes a big nose can even make the difference between bland prettiness and real beauty: the latter is dramatic (Meryl Streep) whereas the former is not.  Unless your nose upstages your face to such an insane degree that only Elephant Man auditions beckon (sorry), save the money and leave it well alone.

Victoria’s non-smiling secret

Like everyone else confronted with stony-faced pix of  #Victoria Beckham, I do wonder why she never seems to smile in public. And I’m talking about official photos, not those taken by the paps.

Surely there’s nothing wrong with her teeth that her kind of stratospheric budget couldn’t fix? In which case, show them off, why don’t you? She’s rumoured to have a very dry and wicked sense of humour, so there must be lots of grinning going on in private. Yet for some strange reason, when on parade in public she looks as if she’s trying to emulate those dreary, blank-faced models who always look as miserable as sin as they shuffle down the catwalk.  They’re far too cool for school to crack a smile; heaven forfend that they should look normal.

As for Victoria, one can only conclude that being rich, famous and fabulously talented doesn’t make you happy – at least in public. Such a relief for the rest of us.