Jonathan Pryce: I was told for years that I was worthless

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time than I'd ever get on the radio with interesting people. Jonathan Pryce, welcome. Interesting people and me. Do you know, it's a mark of a few actors who balk at that grandiose introduction. People from other professions tend not to, but we may explore some of that a little bit later in the programme. It's hiding my vanity. Yes, exactly that. Exactly that. Although, as we will discover shortly as we work our way through your childhood, you didn't display the show off gene very early. A small North Wales village was home.

0:49It was the sort of context into which you were born. Was your dad a minor when you were a baby or had he already taken over the grocery business? I was a late child. so my father went down the mines when he was 13, 14 born in 1905 and rescued by my mother who was the daughter of a shopkeeper and they got married and together they owned and opened a small greengrocers shop near where we lived in another village called Brun Kellen. Yeah. So, when I, yeah, he was a shopkeeper. That's all I knew him as. It feels like an escape, that, almost, for him. I mean, because the life was brutal. Yeah. And everybody else would have carried on, all the people he grew up with, all of the...

1:45Yeah. Yeah, he bore all the scars, the classic scars of a coal miner of those days in that, remember, there was a David Mercer play where David Mercer described his father described his mother as having hair so long she could sit on it which is what my mother apparently had and that his father who was an ex-miner still carried the bruises on his back from a pitfall and my father had blue bruises on his back all his life weird how omnipresent was was was the mine or the mining industry for the whole community and you in particular was it not no you weren't one of those people who grew up in its metaphorical and physical shadow no no it was uh it existed the point of air colliery was the nearest one to us and but what we had was uh courtholds and uh shot and steelworks we had the wool mill and the paper mill and then uh farming and which of those would you have been expected to go into if any no no no because your mother had nobody had any expectations for any of us though in those days and certainly my uh my class which was ostensibly a working class family um although shopkeeper classes i think it's weird you don't know where you are aspirational working um it was a time when and and the kind of parents i had that they they didn't have expectations or ambitions they just and and neither did I really and it was a time when uh you thought you whatever happened you'd always have a job whatever it was um there weren't huge unemployment rates then when I was a teenager you'd be able to put food on the table pay yeah somehow to lead a life yeah so I went to art school in order to pursue yes putting food on the table a form of rebellion really in that kind of background um but let's not jump ahead you're the youngest of three yeah i think but a big gap or not no there were my elder sister is uh kathleen is 92 gosh and my sister margaret for uh told everyone for years that she was my twin sister but she's actually about six or seven years older than me um and they both uh still live in north wales and and Does that mean you were spoiled growing up with two big sisters?

4:18Yeah. Were you coddled and cosseted quite a bit? I don't know about... I was spoiled. Yeah. I was the only boy, and I was late. My mother was 44 when she had me, and I was told that I was a cure for depression for her. No pressure. Well, I was about to say that's simultaneously lovely, but also quite daunting. Yeah, well, I didn't know it as a child. Of course, but subsequently it's been explained to you. Did you work? I think, yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah, we were very close, the two of us, because, you know, for a long time it was just me and her at home. Yeah, my elder sister had, she left home to be a nurse in Liverpool.

5:08I read that your father, and sometimes these little nuggets of information turn out not to be true when I'm actually presenting them to the subject of the nugget. But I read that your father was perhaps uncommonly generous towards some of the customers in the shop and would often let them buy stuff on credit that wasn't necessarily wise financially. It wasn't wise. It culminated in him having, well I didn't say entirely to blame for him giving credit to people. it was not uncommon for a small shopkeeper to extend credit to people in the hope that they would pay them back at the end of the week but he got into terrible debt and in 19, well we say terrible I know the figure, he owed, in 1958 he owed£100 to a wholesaler's Martin and Griffiths and they refused to do a deal and he had a nervous breakdown And he left home.

6:08I was 11 at the time. Left home and got a bus, which he never did. He had a van that he drove everywhere. Got a bus and we think he went looking for my eldest sister. And anyway, I had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a while. And was a huge turning point in his life and all our lives, really. He wasn't allowed to go back and work in the shop. They said it would be too stressful for him. So he got a job in Courtaulds, and he was an electrician's mate, 20 pounds a week. And it was quite a... I felt terrible for him for years because it wasn't high status, but he did have a status in the town.

7:06He was a local councillor. He was one of the people in charge of local housing. And this is not to put down every other electrician's mate in the world, but it was a bit of, you know, he'd always been his, ever since leaving the mines, he'd been his own man, you know. And it was hard for him, I think. although he was a very uh he got on with people all the time he's very sociable very well liked so he wouldn't have suffered doing that job he wouldn't have carried it like a sort of mark of cane or anything no no just me well and well i was going to ask how conscious were you of that at 11 we did you feel that your status had slipped a bit no i didn't know i wouldn't it's only subsequently that you've thought about yeah yeah um more to do with him really um And it was hard.

8:04Then he was, I say he was hospitalized, he was sectioned. Then he was in the Denby Mental Hospital, which at the time was, it was like a Victorian workhouse had been converted to a psychiatric hospital. And I went to see him. He asked for me to go and see him. And I went with my mother in the local taxi, took us all the way to Denby, and we're driving up to this very imposing building. And going through the first door, then the second door, third door, these series of doors, locked doors, looking into rooms, and all I could see was men in rooms. I got to my father's ward, and it was like a wartime thing.

8:57There were three rows of beds, two rows head to head. My father was in a row of beds by the window. No need to be in bed at all. He had psychiatric problems. And I remember standing next to his bed, looking out the window, again at what seemed like hundreds of men, probably about 50, walking round and round this circular courtyard. and I noticed one guy getting to a certain position, and he'd stop, and he'd salute, and then carry on. I think the majority of them were suffering trauma, Second World War, and it was, I obviously will never forget it. It was traumatic for me to be there. I was very happy to see my father, and I remember a nurse, a male nurse, coming and saying uh what a nice man my father was and how he shouldn't be here he should be at home and uh eventually he did come home and it was uh but it was a kind of a turning point for him definitely don't know why i'm talking about it but there you go because it i guess it the impression doesn't go away does it no it made upon you and and given i don't think your father was a demonstrative man i don't think you were raised in a demonstrative era and so probably what you felt that day went a lot deeper than yeah yeah much of what you were sort of encouraged to feel in yeah yeah scenarios and and and so no expectations in the sense of um your mother or your father wanting you to do better than they had done in life this is what you mean by there were a variety of jobs they probably hoped it but they didn't you know get i didn't get home from school and say they'd say you know you've got to get on with your studies and similarly given what was going on with your dad um even if they'd felt that way it would have ceased to be a priority during this period of your life because suddenly they're dealing and you're dealing with the really big stuff so i'm intrigued as to well two things really in a village like yours it would be school and chapel i presume that were your introduction to um a bigger canvas a bigger stage chapel played a big role did it not too big no I went to Sunday school for as long as I had to and we would occasionally go to chapel my mother would have gone earlier on before I think she it became it was a Presbyterian chapel and it altered completely when a huge contingent from the chapel went to London to see Billy Graham right and they came back and they were converted and they were now evangelical Christians so the whole nature of the chapel changed and you'd go there on a Sunday night and it was all to do with bearing witness and holding your hands up and that's I I didn't go up for much after that.

12:08I find it quite entertaining. Yes, but not transporting. No, no, no. So what about school then? I'm trying to picture young Jonathan. Well, young John as you were, I think. Yeah, I still am John at home. Right, and priced with an I because of that old equity thing about there already being. So what were you like at school? Did you enjoy school? Did you flourish at school? No. Neither of those? No, I enjoyed school, but I didn't flourish. And that was my own, I brought it upon myself. I wasn't the, I went to the, I passed my 11 plus, plus, the nose, lad, my ooze and my, get my vowel sounds right.

12:54Went to the Hollywood Grammar School, which the first couple of years was fine. and then I realized that it was more fun not working. I was not constantly but often thrown out of class for larking about. I developed the fine art with a mirror following the teacher's handwriting on the board with that mirror reflecting his hand. I find it funny anyway. That is funny. That's it the rest of the class. and I'd get thrown out. And the architecture of the school was around a quadrangle. And every morning at a certain time, the headmaster, Sidney Davis, would make his rounds. And I was standing up. I'd be standing outside the class, and he'd say, Price, go to my room.

13:56And I would then have to stand outside his room for an hour, however long it took, before he was ready. The rest of the school would, during breaks, would parade past me and point at me and laugh. Did you enjoy that? Did you like being the clown? I suppose I must have done, yeah. I mean, the downside was he'd get me in his room and then verbally abuse me for as long as he felt like it, telling me what a disgrace I was to my mother.

14:32And I remember one day he eventually, he'd circle me like a Gestapo officer and one day he ran out of things to say to me and finally ended up saying, you bottle of skinless pork sausages. I was like, I didn't laugh, otherwise he'd have caned me or something, But so if I do jump non-chronologically, jump to a few years later when he not allowed me to return to school to go to the sixth form. Right. Banned me from setting foot on the premises of the school because I wanted to go and talk to my art teacher, Ivor Jones, who I admired greatly. when I became an actor and I was at Stratford and I'd done a matinee of Anthony and Cleopatra and I got a call from the stage door saying there was a Mr.

15:36Sidney Davis there to see me would I come down to see him and I said no send him to my room and that was and then this old man came in and just lied to my face saying he was proud of me and he always knew I'd make it. And I was, no, you didn't. You told me I was worthless for years. A bottle of skinless sausages. But I didn't. I just thanked him and thanked him for coming. And, you know, that was it. I didn't want to say anything. Well, you weren't nursing by the sounds of any particular resentment. No, he'd probably spurred me to do that. You thought it was fair enough when he decided to exclude you from school.

16:18Yeah. I mean, he did me a favor. I didn't go to the sixth form and instead went to the local art school where I was for two years and had a really good time with really fun fellow students, good teachers. And it was the time of the Beatles and the Liverpool scene. and you were in Lancashire, Edge Hill well before that when I was at the local art school we would go over to Liverpool to the lunchtime session at the Cavern or whatever. So you were enjoying the 60s then Yeah we got to Liverpool, three or four of us and we had as art students we had what was then deemed to be long hair and Liverpool girls would come up to us and say hey you're a group and you go yeah oh yeah were there any I mean was there any plan in place here Jonathan John were you were you thinking art college would lead to something or were you just well I wanted to be an artist as in paint and pictures well I think it would have eventually I'd have got a job as a graphic designer that would have been the plan that was where the employment was and it was a time of pop art and all that kind of stuff so it was that graphic design was accessible and then I sent my folder away to do what would be a degree course or the diploma course it would have been there and my folder came back and was saying they liked my work but I didn't have enough O levels and that being the irony I eventually had enough O levels to train to teach it but I didn't have enough O levels to do it as they changed the rules from when I was 16 to 18 that they changed the rules to you had to have O levels okay so I stayed on or I part time I did an A level and in art and then at the time I thought I've just got to go to a college I just want to go to college if I'm not going to get into art school so I applied to teacher training college right to do art and went to Edge Hill Ormskirk where you had to do a subsidiary course and i was told the easiest course to do that required the least amount of work was the drama course and that appealed to me the least amount of work i mean and uh signed up for that but i mean you'd done stuff before had you i don't know i'd done i'd never had any ambitions to be an actor and that was an absolutely another world um and uh but i'd I always enjoyed mucking about, entertaining people.

19:32I'd done a small part in the school play. I remember my very first part was in the infant school when I would have been seven or less. And it was a play called The Fairy Pot of Gold or something. And I was an elf. and my mother had made my costume in this kind of shot satin stuff and cut the edge all wavy and uh during rehearsals I had a line and it was uh come brothers for it is cold so I did the line as well as I thought I was doing it was come brothers for it is cold and the teacher took the line away from me that's inauspicious if I'd had the you know the language I would have said fuck you but all I remember was being incredibly disappointed and they gave the line to somebody else that's cool but mostly I remember and this is where some of my acting ambition must have started I remember thinking I should have been the king do you really?

20:45yeah never mind the bloody fairy Never mind the elf. I should have been the king. And Melvin Evans, I don't suppose you'll ever hear this. I hope you don't. He was playing the king, and he was, I don't know what it was like when you were a kid, but there were lots of kids who had two candles of snot down their nose burning. And Melvin was one of those. And I thought, you can't play the king. That's snotty nose. You can't even blow his nose. So that was... 70 years ago and I have not forgotten. Nor should you, seriously. These are the things that get us out of bed in the morning. Just to clarify, would you have felt, if you were playing football, that you should have been the centre forward or was there something specific to acting, do you think, that you felt stirring in this moment?

21:35No, it was just having the most important role. So when you took small roles in plays later, You didn't feel anything shifted. Darling, I never took small roles. There are no small roles. And in some ways, it's true. I was incredibly lucky that when I was at teacher training, I had a great man, Jerry Dawson, who ran Unity Theatre in Liverpool and another tutor, Beryl Smith. and while I was there I did work with UNC Theatre and I did a play down the road at Kirby College a girls college that had put a sign up in my college saying that men wanted for the production and I got a part and their tutor a man called William Murray had been an actor and after he saw the performance he said to me, have you ever thought of being an actor?

22:41And I said, no. And he said, well, why should I? And he said, well, I think you should. And I think you should go to RADA, where he'd been. And so I was like, yeah, all right. So he sent off the papers, and he coached me through two audition speeches. And RADA gave me a place under scholarship, so I went there. Can you remember what the audition pieces were? Yeah, the one was from little Malcolm and his struggle against the eunuchs. And the other was Lawrence from Two Gentlemen of Verona with the imaginary dog I was talking to. Yeah, but the small parts thing is not bragging. But I rather my final show, not my final show, my final year, we were doing Oklahoma.

23:35Right. and I was playing one of the poor Judd is Dead barbershop quartet and Tony Haynes who became a great friend and was the musical director and he'd written the music for Caucasian Chalk Circle which was his next production to be done at the Everyman in Liverpool and he wanted somebody who could sing the high tenor role of the narrator and he told Alan Dosser about me and Alan Dosser came to see my final show at RADA and he's the director of the Everyman yeah and left at the interval but he couldn't miss me because a play I'd chosen to do you could and it was Ride a Cock Horse by David Mercer in which it was one man and about four women so he couldn't miss me anyway he left at the interval but he left a note at the stage door saying there's a job for you at the Everyman if you want it.

24:42So I started at the Everyman and then with in the early 72 I went straight from Radha to the Everyman

24:53and going to play the narrator in Chalk Circle and I played Elbow in Measure for Measure that was the small part. But because of the repertory system, you would play as cast in Liverpool. I stayed there initially for two years. And I was playing Richard III, Edgar in Lear, a number of new plays written by John McGrath. It was a very political theatre that occasionally did classics. So John McGrath, Adrian Mitchell wrote for us, and Chris Bond A very fertile place to be, then. A very exciting place to be. Let's rewind a little bit, because I'd want to know what your mum and dad thought when you announced your intention to go to RADA.

25:42Well, they were happy for me. Because you hadn't there. It's not as if you were giving up. I put this very diplomatically. I mean, being an art teacher more by accident than design was not a sort of mighty ambition that you were now surrendering upon the altar of your action. Well, to be a teacher to them would have been pretty damn good. yeah um but they didn't try and talk you out of it or wonder what on earth had happened to you or anything like that no there's security in teaching there's no security necessarily yeah i don't know it was uh it was it was it wasn't the same world as it is now i guess not it was there was a lot more employment about a lot more theaters open and what i mean that might answer my next question actually so just that that sense that this was a I mean did you feel something acting that you didn't feel doing anything else did you ever have we haven't heard you say anything about a sort of moment of knowing that this is what you were put on this earth to do I've uh no that's only only happened recently um what do you mean it's only happened recently well the idea that yeah I'm good at this really?

26:53you have self doubt for years and you get to 70 plus if you've still got self doubt you're doing something wrong no I'm I know I'm okay now and I remember things like when I was when I was painting especially at the first art school I was at I was okay I was okay but I was very self-critical and would look at some of my contemporaries work and think it was so much better than mine there's a guy, if you're listening David Goodyear whose drawing I always admired and always wanted to draw like him and I can draw better than I can paint but I was always kind of they're satisfied with it and then I realized that there was a realization that more people were saying they liked my acting they never said they liked my painting okay so I thought there must be something in this and you didn't have because you worked I mean quite early doors there would have been people at the everyman I think Anthony Sher was probably a contemporary of yours was he and we were together yeah so you didn't have there wasn't a David Goodyear of the acting they weren't actors that you looked at and thought oh bloody hell i'm wasting my time doing this i'll never be as good as them no well there you go see so you did know you were good it's not before you were 70 yeah but it was because people were telling me i was good and i was getting roles that i wouldn't have got if i hadn't been any good yeah yeah um and alan dotter was uh a brilliant he's dead now sadly but he was a brilliant company director and yeah if I hadn't had I mean it set up a whole I mean it became one thing after another and one thing would lead to another and so working with Alan Richard Eyre came to direct at the Everyman and then he took over the Nottingham Playhouse.

29:10So I went to work with him at Nottingham. Then went back to the Everyman where I directed for a while, formed a company because the main company had left to come to London to do the Beatles show. So they wanted a caretaker director. So that's when I formed this company that was comprised of Bill Nye and Julie Walters. and Pete Pottsworth-Waite, Matthew Kelly, Kate Fahey, Kevin Lloyd, Nick Watterson, Uncle Tom Copley, and a great group of actors. I gave, I lay claim to this, Julie Walters, her first job. It's not bad. Bill Nye's second job. They've done all right. Do they thank me? Do they call?

30:07No. No. Fuck them. Nothing. That's your second greatest claim to fame from this era, because I think you painted the dressing rooms, didn't you? Or you were responsible. My dressing room. Yes. I was in a cupboard. Didn't get touched again for decades. It was horrible. Yeah. Okay, so there's a bit of tension here between almost a prodigious talent, because they wouldn't have let you be the artistic director at the age of 27 unless you were displaying something a little bit out of the ordinary. Or paint my dressing room if they didn't know I was going to stay. Yes, exactly. You've always got to have something to fall back on, haven't you?

30:43You knew that time at art school wouldn't be wasted. But they must have, you know, so your self-effacing nature notwithstanding, if you're in the position to hire people like Bill Nye and Pete Postlethwaite and Kate Fahey, who of course went on to marry, you must have known that you were probably all right. I mean, maybe you're right, it's generational, because I'm, my early 50s, I've got a lot of friends who went into acting. Some of them stuck the course. Some of them didn't. But for that generation, it was constantly fraught and frightening. And unemployment was a constant specter. For this first period of your career, that doesn't seem to have been the case at all.

31:20No, no, no. And as I said earlier, there was employment in every major town. And lots of major towns. There was a repertory theater. and I didn't have I had ambitions within the you know the area where I was working and it was all I wanted to do was theatre and then like for a lot of people you did television to make money to pay for theatre and film was what other people did the film was another world although it was waiting in the wings or waiting on the horizon and um i i so i like this i mean the the sort of sense that you were sort of living a really nice and happy and fulfilling life as an actor people perhaps younger people listening to this might be a little surprised by what rep represented because you ran through the sort of classics of the canon but you might also have found yourself i think you did doing the strangest of double bills i read that when you were doing lear you're doing edgar and winnie the pooh at the same time yeah playing owl playing so giving them your edgar on a monday and your owl on a tuesday No, the same day.

32:31Was it really on the same day? Yeah, it was Owl in the afternoon and Edgar at night on the same set. This is when Anthony Sher was doing Christopher Robin and The Fool. I mean, that is almost impossible to imagine as a grounding. It was impossible to imagine then. I mean, this incredibly middle-class piece of work, Winnie the Pooh, and we'd get truckloads of Liverpool school kids in who'd no relationship with Winnie the Pooh at all. And we'd be plugging away there and they'd just start talking and mucking about. And a couple of things. I came on as owl with a long owl costume on and flapping my wings and saying to Tony Share, hello pool hello Christopher Robin hello Al and the kids and I go cut cut cut goodbye Christopher Robin goodbye and just fuck off and Alan Ford do you remember Alan Ford he does a lot of a really good actor he plays a lot of East End characters he was playing Eel and he'd come on stage he'd go Eeyore Eeyore bloody Eeyore and he'd jump off the stage and say who wants a ride on Eeyore's back then and he'd take kids round the theatre while we waited to get on with his lines to come back and carry on with the play we didn't care no I sensed that and speaking of Liverpool school children Willie Russell would write for the every man Alan Pleasdale would be in the sort of early years of his career So it was a magical time.

34:24And then, I mean, I don't sense, well, I know because you've already told me that you weren't yearning for some new gear or some breakthrough or anything like that. But when Richard Eyre came up to direct Comedians, the Trevor Griffiths play, that was written with you in mind, I think, the part of Gethin was written for you. It was written for the company at Nottingham. Of which you were a key part. And I was then a member of the company. Right, so you'd followed him to, and that was probably a bit of a game changer for you? Yeah, absolute game changer. Right, and did you know that immediately almost?

34:57Well, I knew the play was incredible and important, and I had no thought of nothing beyond that, and we came to London with it. It was at a time when Peter Hall was inviting the regions to bring their theatre to London, and I think we were the only one. I think he stopped that plan afterwards. And it was great. It was an absolutely wonderful play. And I left it. Ken Cranham took over for me, did it in the West End. And I have to check with people when they say, oh, I thought you were wonderful in comedians. Where did you see it? I just checked. And I'd think that was Ken, but I wouldn't tell him.

35:46It'll be all right. And then I was offered my first film, Voyage of the Damned, which was an extraordinary experience. I won't spend too much time talking about it. That was incredible. It was a Lou Grade production when he was spending millions, what were then millions, on these large-scale productions. and it was a story of a ship which was allowed to leave Germany before the outbreak of war with a true story with a thousand Jews and it was never allowed to land. It was rejected, including Britain rejected it and it ended up back at Antwerp. I was playing a character called Joseph Manasseh, a real person, who had been released from a concentration camp and then was rounded up and ended his life in a concentration camp again.

36:50But it was like the walk down of people getting on the ship was like murder on the Orient Express. It was Faye Dunaway and Oscar Verner and all these great stars of the day, Malcolm McDowell. Orson Welles was in it. I didn't meet him, but James and Mason What were you like? Did you face up to the sweet shop window at this kind of scenario or were you thinking this is my future or I want some of this? That kind of work wasn't no it was it was an experience shall we say the first two two and a half weeks were spent on the ship sailing off Barcelona doing all the kind of location ship work and depending how high up the cast list you were if you were high up you'd be called specifically to do your scenes if you were me you were called every day and you'd get on the ship and then they'd jump to your scene whenever so we would go out I was what 28 eight or something we'd go out on the town in Barcelona drinking carousing and then go to the get on the ship and set sail and go to your cabin and sleep it off and I remember getting on the ship this one particular day and had the worst headache and hangover imaginable went to my cabin put my head on the pillow it was going down down down down and inevitably the knock came on the door and said, Jonathan, we're going to do your scene now.

38:42And I was like, no. On the other hand, it really played into my character because I was this half-starved figure from the concentration camp. Not being too light-hearted about it. But I was on deck with the other guy, the American actor who was playing also a camp victim. and I could barely speak. And we finished the scene, and Stuart Rosenberg, the director, who was, he directed Cool Hand Luke and all these other things, came up to me. He was quite a short man. And he put his hand on my shoulder. He looked me in the eye, and he said, you are some motherfucker. And my praise doesn't go any higher than that.

39:34and I was like he thought I was doing this real method I was like thanks Stuart thanks and the other actor Paul Koslow he was he was method he was staying at the Ritz and he would either sleep in the corridor outside his room on the floor or walk the streets of Barcelona at night and And little did he know, all he had to do was come out drinking with us. Absolutely smash the night before and turn up for work the next day. To all the young aspiring actors, this is not a lesson. It's great advice. Or maybe it is. It's great advice.

40:19So we're entering the period now, mid to late 70s, around which people will be more familiar with this trajectory. People will start recognising work that you did. Would Hamlet at the Royal Court be the next massive moment? Well, comedians went to New York. Yes, of course. And so that was quite something. So that's not just opening doors. That's knocking down doors you didn't even know existed previously. And I had the option of my, I was with William Morris then, and I said, you have to go to LA and take the meetings. And I duly went. Kate and I went together and did a couple of meetings. It was terrible, terrible.

41:07People had no idea who you were, what you were. I remember the guy, they were casting a new version of The Laugh-In. Remember that? There was this guy called George Slaughter. And I went to his office, and it was exactly the kind of guy, an office that you would think would direct or produce the laugh in. It had inflatable cows, inflatable udders. It had all this junk in the room. And he asked me what I'd been doing, and I said I'd done this play now directed by Mike Nichols for Broadway and explaining to him, comedians, that I was this working-class guy who did this act where I borrowed stuff from Grok where I made the audience laugh with my violin and then I smashed the violin.

42:00And it was all about the repression of the working classes and just lazed over. Told me all kinds of junk. And then he kind of, towards the end of the interview, the meeting, he remembered that I had worked for Mike Nichols so he covered his bases you know didn't want to mess about with Mike Nichols so he was very charming to me but it was terrible I went to another meeting where they said Walter Hill was casting The Driver and I went for a meeting and they said oh great you're exactly what Walter is looking for and I was like yeah sure and I foolishly said what is that and they said tall and thin okay so anyway kate and i got the next plane out and uh i went to work the royal shakespeare company did a season there so you didn't have a lot right i mean this was easy come easy go i mean the money would be nice but in terms of the work i didn't want to live like that no or i mean it's a weird existence isn't it yeah as you yeah so and then it was a time when you know i i wasn't that established and my friend uh john lithgow who had was in comedians with me uh in new york and then left and then uh at this time i saw him in la and i went to a couple of openings and things and you saw the people who would have been your competition i thought no i'm not starting at the bottom yeah and I remember seeing Roy Scheider yeah and people that era so I came home and as I said went to the RSC and then did a season there and then did Hamlet with Richard which was huge yeah yeah I mean it was yeah it was a seminal production and a seminal performance.

44:13Drawing, I think, upon the loss of your father in real life a couple of years, a few years previously, which you were very open about, or at least you have discussed in the past. Yeah, I've talked about it a lot. It was a way of acknowledging his death. He was attacked by a young man, and he kind of survived that but then had a series of strokes. And it was at the time I was at Liverpool and then went over to the time I was doing comedians. And I remember he came with my mother, yeah, my eldest sister, and Jimmy, her husband, and they came to see comedians and then we went to the restaurant in the theatre afterwards.