Dame Harriet Walter - ‘I wish I’d had all this attention when I was 40’

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0:35welcome to how to fail the podcast that firmly believes that failing better can help us succeed better too before we get to my wonderful guest just a reminder about my subscriber podcast Failing With Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and offer advice on some of your failures too. Here's a bit of Dame Harriet to pique your interest. Probably the best way to conduct yourself at the party is to ask other people about themselves and then they sort of don't notice you because they're too busy talking about themselves. That's one way of doing it. Or they'll find you incredibly charming.

1:09Yeah, they'll love you. Do send your failures in to get advice from one of my esteemed guests. follow the link in the podcast notes or look out for my call outs once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Thank you so, so much. When Harriet Walter was a young woman, she was so curious about other people that she once trailed someone in the street, followed them into their house and got trapped in the cupboard under the stairs. Her insatiable interest in others is arguably what makes her one of our finest actors. She's the recipient of a clutch of awards, including an Olivier and five Emmys, as well as a Damehood.

1:50Determined to act from a young age, it was perhaps in her blood, her uncle was the horror star, Christopher Lee, she turned down a place at Oxford in favour of drama school. She began her career at the Royal Shakespeare Company. On stage, she has embodied everyone from Prospero to Elizabeth I. On screen, she has acted in films including Sense and Sensibility, Atonement and The Last Duel. And most of the Anglo-American Emmy-worthy TV sensations of the past decade have included a stellar turn from her. You've probably seen Dame Harriet in Killing Eve or Ted Lasso or The Crown or as the emotionally dysfunctional matriarch Lady Caroline in Succession.

2:35She is also an author, and in her latest book, She Speaks, Dame Harriet cleverly imagines what Shakespeare's female characters might have said had they been given half the chance. In Dame Harriet's hands, Ophelia does not actually drown but escapes to a nunnery, and Lady Macbeth rhymes dagger with nagger. Now in her 70s, Dame Harriet says, I wish I'd had when young the fuck-it-all confidence I have now. The paradox is that you get more confident at the point where the parts have run out. Dame Harriet, not in your case. Well, I'm still crossing my fingers. It can all peter out anytime soon. But welcome to How to Fail, first of all.

3:21Thank you. What a wonderful introduction. I didn't know I'd done so much. I love that story about you ending up under a And she just stares. This guy was loading his car. They were going away the weekend. And I snuck into the house and then sort of had to hide under the stairs. And it was a totally useless exercise because, of course, because they were loading the car, they were going away. So I wasn't going to be able to eavesdrop on a conversation or anything. You know, I'd intended to sit there and listen to a dining room conversation or something. But, of course, they were going out. So, you know, I sat there and then I thought, my God, they're going away.

4:00They'll lock the door and I'll be here for life. So I had to find a way of sneaking out again, which I managed, you know. But I sort of thought about it three minutes afterwards and collapsed in giggles at what I'd just done and how useless it was. But you're right. It was to do with being curious about other people. And I had this combination of nosiness and curiosity about what other people were like and what made them tick alongside such ridiculous shyness that I could never have asked anybody, you know, what makes them tick. So the only way I could sort of find out about other people was by getting into their skin and, you know, imagining I was them, which is very inadequate because you really only ever interpret people through your own filter.

4:51You don't really find out what they're really like. And that's the frustration of acting. I can try and figure out what it was like to be Lady Macbeth, but ultimately it'll be Harriet Walter's Lady Macbeth. Anyway. Well, that is a seamless link into what drove you to write She Speaks, this desire to give voice to the things that have been silent or are incapable of being communicated in some way. And I mean, you cite this extraordinary fact that when Shakespeare's characters are put in order of the number of lines they're given, only 15 women's parts fall into the top 100. And Lady Macbeth comes in at 138.

5:31I know, I know. But she has huge impact and people project onto her and have done for centuries. You know, people talk about someone being the Lady Macbeth, you know, the power behind the throne, the evil women that sort of make men do things they wouldn't otherwise do. And it's almost impossible to dent that kind of story that people have written. And so that was partly what I set out to do. I thought, gosh, now I can act all these parts. I can express myself through all these other people. I can find out what these other people are like. And the job of acting is that you do spend an awful lot of time preparing, thinking, imagining, writing notes about them, analyzing them, answering questions in interviews about them.

6:17And you've worked out this elaborate backstory and this elaborate sort of psychological pathway. and yet nine times out of ten you don't have the stage space or the screen space to express it. So out of habit one has been building up these pictures inside oneself that haven't really had a proper outlet and without my realising it that's what fuelled this book was really just sort of all the years spent thinking about people that I hadn't actually had the time to express them or the stage space to express them. Which of Shakespeare's women did you find most frustrating in that respect to perform?

6:58I suppose Lady Macbeth is one that, you know, I feel a through line and I've worked out a through line. And no matter how much, it's not that I apologise for her, but I explain her inside myself and still people project the same old thing onto her. And that is very frustrating. When you say that you imagine how these women might speak, what you fail to say is that you do so in verse. It's actually so extraordinary and such a talent. And we were chatting before we started recording about how a lot of that came quite naturally because you're so accustomed to Shakespearean rhythms. It's quite a strange thing because I suppose so many lines come into your head.

7:44and I'm not very good at remembering lines. I'm rather awful about it. I mean, I'm fine when I have to do the job, but I forget them and scrub the tape as soon as I've done it. Whereas I know people who can quote huge chunks of Shakespeare and I can't really, but I know that the rhythm of a thought or something that is very moving, it's almost like a piece of music that's a phrase and that it sort of stays in your skin, it stays in your mind like a piece of music. So my subconscious was always throwing up these phrases that were in Shakespearean rhythm, because that's how I had thought and spoken those characters.

8:25And so I didn't set out to say, I'm going to write verses. It sort of came that way. Now, I don't want to sound mystifying, but it basically came from the fact that I'd thought in those rhythms and felt in those rhythms as those characters and therefore that's how they express themselves to me. Do you have bad dreams where you forget your lines on stage? Yes. Because I do and I'm not an actress. I can't imagine how much more terrifying that is if you do act. Yeah it's more that you know you've got to go on in an hour in some play you did 12, 13 years ago and you can't remember it and you know you can't remember it and you're not given any time to practice all you need is to look at the book and and go over it in a quiet room but what happens is you can't find the book nobody's giving you any peace and all the time you're going I know I've got to go on in an hour in this play that I haven't had time to look at so it's more that really something getting in the way yeah and if you want to be Freudian about it there is that sort of people pleasing aspect that, you know, if somebody comes, you know, not asserting myself and saying, I need a room with the book, please leave me alone.

9:40And I never do that in the dream. I just get drifted along into these other situations where I'm sort of smiling and yakking and being sociable when I actually should be sitting in a room on my own studying. And that is the story of my life. That's very interesting because I read somewhere that I think it was your grandfather who said, well, Harriet's mad to want to act. Yeah. Even though your uncle obviously made a great success. Yes, they were on different sides of the family. And so that was significant, I think. I think my father's father thought that my mother's family was sort of histrionic Italians.

10:15I mean, we did have Italian blood and we did have a line of sort of, you know, other performers in the family. And I think he sort of regarded them as sort of unreliably foreign. but um yeah one of my regrets is that I didn't get to know now we have partly because it's the profession I'm in but partly it's the way things are now there's much less of a barrier between old and young and you can have very good friendships with people who would be your grandchild I was born into a time when there were rigid structures about age and I would never have asked my grandfather anything personal or, you know, or revealed anything personal about myself.

11:00So he knew me very little. He hardly knew me. But he did know my school reports and I'd sort of been quite academic and he thought I should do something academic. And that by its nature, the acting profession was totally unacademic. And what I've lived to find is that the two sides of me can come together, you know, and more and more, you know, my brain has been researching, analysing, doing whatever I'd have done at university in order to do my job well. Before we get onto your failures, I want to ask you about intimidating women, because you are so profoundly brilliant at playing intimidating women on screen.

11:45and yet you said earlier that you had this crippling shyness and someone like Caroline in succession who has that emotional cauterization and yet you're able to because of your acting so to see and and the writing see through to some sort of vulnerable core of her it's a it's I imagine it's a fascinating process to to play but tell me why those sorts of women appeal to you It's funny, I don't think, it's not that I proactively go out looking for those parts, it's that they come my way because like it or not in the acting profession, you are cast according to how you appear. And by fault of biology, nature, whatever, I look probably much more intimidating than I am.

12:40And therefore, people think, oh, she can play that. And I can, because I would say not because I am like that, but because I've observed people like that, if you see what I mean. And I've got this feeling that, you know, this sort of thing I've had since a child of looking across the tube train and going, I wonder what they're thinking. I wonder what their day's like. and if that person then catches your eye and you sort of feel gosh I've been looking into your soul and I shouldn't have been doing that you feel this sort of terror on the receiving end and I think there were teachers at school or friends of my mother or people that came into my sphere who behaved like Lady Caroline to me and I was intimidated by them.

13:44So I observed sort of like cat and mouse, the mouse gets very familiar with how the cat behaves. So it's not so much that I'm frightening as that I know what it's like to be frightened and what it is that frightens me about those people. And I became very good at reproducing that. And then having to find out what, because that's what I like to do, getting inside that person and seeing why are they like that. And in every case, it's a different story. And that's what I get slightly frustrated that they get lumped together when actually they're all very different, but they're lumped together because they all look like me.

14:23And what can I do about that except change my wig, you know, and change my accent slightly or change, you know, I hope change my demeanour. But some people will just lump them together, which is the frustration is you're trying to break stereotypes. And some people resolutely maintain their hold on those stereotypes. Before I get into the meat of this interview, which is the failures, please indulge me and talk to me about succession. If you're not sick of it. Did you know when you were acting in succession that it was going to be what it was going to be? Did you feel that you were in the presence of something special?

14:59I suppose I did. I mean, I didn't know it would be that special because to get your head above the parapet when there's so much out there now, so many, you know, reams of stuff out there, to get any show up above that parapet is extraordinary. And I don't even think that the writers involved have full understanding of why that of all shows should have risen above so many others. But I saw the pilot. I had that advantage. They sent me the pilot. They'd shot one episode and they said, do you want to be part of this? Well, forget it. You know, of course I did. It was already sharp, witty, extraordinarily well acted, just a sphere of life that I had no idea about.

15:53But at the same time, as it grew, you became more involved in the people and you started to actually find you were pitying some of them or you know rooting for some of them and you thought you know and that is something to do with its power and so suddenly being parachuted into this family that was ready made and I was part of what had made them the way they were sort of rather you know intimidating but at the same time you know exhilarating it was exciting and although I knew I was surrounded by great actors um with a brilliant script I thought it would be good but I didn't know it would be sort of above good yes as a viewer who's your favorite Roy Roman I still think of as my baby although in fact I got that wrong I think Shiv is the youngest um you know so I should know shouldn't I but it's rather it's rather characteristic of Caroline that she doesn't even know which is the child she had last but I think of him as my baby because you can't really mother Shiv no she's very hard to mother and just physically she's so unlike me that I imagine she's very much her daddy's girl.

17:15And Kendall is so messed up. I love Kendall. I love Kendall, but as a mother, I always think he's going to accuse me of being a terrible mother. He's the one who's sort of, he's been to, there was a tiny bit that was cut that would have been very useful to me in season one, where he says, you know, I've been seeing someone, a therapist, and I want you to know that I forgive you. And in an improv, which Jesse said he wanted to keep in, I said, have you forgiven your father? And I thought, why should it always be the mother who gets the blame? And also in the scene that a lot of people quote, where I say, let's talk about it over eggs tomorrow morning at breakfast, and then I'm not there.

17:55To say in her defense, she thinks he's going to give her another great whole harangue about what a dreadful mother she is. She doesn't know he's just in a terrible tizz because he's caused the death of a young man by drowning. She doesn't know that. So she's not being insensitive as in, I know you need to talk about that and I'm walking out on you. She thinks she's going to be given a whole sort of mother, what you did to me when I was a child. And she can't be bothered to go through all that again. Let's get onto your failures. So your first failure, and I share it, is your failure to master the piano or music theory.

18:33when did you attempt to try as a school kid I was did piano lessons when I was really young and I'm going to sound pretentious here but I have a deep deep love of classical music um a complicated music it can be modern but complicated I love what it does to the brain to have to follow several strands of music that are emotional and intellectual and my first impulse as a child was to dance to music. That was my first sort of look at me, look at me thing. So I got very familiar with Chopin's Etude and this, that and the other. Then I'm going into a class and I'm going da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, bing, bong, you know, and I can't, and the distance between what I've heard and what I'm playing is just giant.

19:22And nobody really understands that, Harriet, if you practice that every day, one day you might be able to do that. And I couldn't bear the difference between what I heard and what I was doing. And so my big regret is that, you know, I'm blaming other people, that nobody actually said, this is what you do, you practice so that your fingers learn how to do it. It's not just in your head. And I think it was partly to do with a sort of story of my school life was that there were lots of things that came very easily to me that I didn't have to work hard at. And then when I was 20 onwards, I've been trying to catch up.

20:01Do you think you had an innate resistance as a child to doing things that you weren't good at? Yes, I think I did have that. There were enough things that I was good at that I sort of sailed through exams. You did your A-levels two years early. I know, ridiculous. I mean, that is ridiculous, but very impressive. Well, no, it's partly because I was born in September. So I was, you know, you were either in a form where you were the oldest or you were the youngest. And I was usually the youngest. And they got us through our A-level school sort of 17. Therefore, I was 16. And, you know, then what was I going to do for a couple of years?

20:41and because I was at boarding school I couldn't wait to leave and and get out there and um you know join the swinging 60s rather late in the day that was really all I was interested in I'm very fascinated by your family your mother I believe did something top secret with the admiralty during the war yes I mean she was junior but she was working on the ultra secret you know the enigma machine had cracked the german codes and we we were trying to pretend we didn't know them. If you sunk a U-boat, you had to pretend there was a plane flying over at the time that spotted it. You know, you couldn't say we knew that U-boat was there because we've tapped into your codes.

21:23So it was a very complicated operation, which she was a minion in, I'm sure. And she worked in that building that's all disguised by ivy next to Admiralty Arch, which was known as the bunker or the citadel. I can't remember anyway. I wish I could have talk to her more about it. But there was such, not only were my parents of that generation and that ilk that didn't talk about themselves, but they'd gone through a war where you never talked about what you were doing. So that culture of secrecy and untouchableness and you don't probe, you don't ask questions. It was very frustrating now when I look back and say, God, I wish I'd asked them.

22:02I wish I'd known more what they were doing. But she was vaguely connected to Ian Fleming and Peter Fleming who was Celia Johnson's husband and Ian Fleming's brother was high up in the in the in that department of admiralty. Celia Johnson the actor? Yes. Right. So and Ian Fleming was connected to my mother by steps I mean my my my mother's stepfather was Ian Fleming's mother's brother got it okay so they were cousins by step step cousins and um i think that's how indirectly she got that job and she was just a sort of secretary shoving things around on a board you know but i then much later i did a tv play written by ian mckeon called the imitation game long before the film and it was about a woman working as a minion interpreting the coding It was written by Ian McEwan.

23:02In his screenplay, she discusses it with a friend and then gets sort of court-martialed. And, of course, I asked my mother, I said, you know, was this sort of what you were doing, what you were doing? And she said, you would never, ever, ever have talked to your best friend about it. Numero uno. That is unbelievable. It wouldn't have happened. And of course, in fiction, you have to sort of go with things that didn't happen.

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24:47This idea of secrecy and that feeding into a certain emotional remove makes me think of your parents splitting up, which they did when you were quite young. Yeah. I was 12 going on 13 or 13 going on 14, that sort of age. I wondered if it was ever spoken of. You did not ask. And I remember sort of saying to my mother, why did daddy leave? And she said, darling, you better ask him. So I wrote him a letter saying, why did you leave? I think actually I did find it amongst his things years later. He'd actually kept it. And he wrote back to me a very sweet but totally unenlightening letter. And I almost think he doesn't know why he'd done it.

25:30That generation had almost a sort of taboo about self-analysis, looking into themselves, asking questions about the very opposite of how we are now. They would hate this podcast. Absolutely. They would hate this podcast. They would spin in their graves. And he came back with sort of a few platitudes about, you know, I still love her, but we can't live together kind of thing. I wondered whether it was a sort of midlife crisis on his part. He was 53 or something when he left. So that sort of rings a bell. And he always had lots of girlfriends. Not during the marriage, I don't think, but before and after.

26:10Do you think that part of your desire to get under the skin of other people is because you want to get to a truth that you weren't allowed to ask about. Exactly that. As I said, it's sort of a mixture of curiosity and shyness. So you leave school, you have this place at Oxford, which you turn down, and then you apply for drama college and you get rejected five times, which must be another sanitary experience in not having been good at something. I mean, that you turn out being fantastic at, but that must have been difficult. That does fascinate me. I got into Oxford to do modern languages and I just passed my 17th birthday.

26:54I mean, and I had to wait to go. And it wasn't my desire to go to university. It had come down from my grandfather, who was actually, I now, you know, I learn now a champion of women's education. my father was not pushy was very laid back and said oh well if you don't want to go never mind and somehow I was able to say no to something I knew I could do and say I've got to pursue this thing that after the decision about not going to Oxford I then tried to get into drama school so it wasn't like I got into drama school already and therefore turned down Oxford and I found a diary this sounds so self-indulgent but I wrote a diary the year that I was trying out for these drama schools and I found this entry saying four names were called out mine was not among them went home with the other losers but I know I'll get there in the end and I don't remember thinking it and I cannot think where I got that thought from.

28:05Gosh. How influenced were you by your uncle Christopher Lee? Sort of not very. I mean, he was in this very glamorous film world and I was going into fringe theatre. So our lives didn't cross over until much later. Although, you know, know, I say that, but it was films that I first wanted to do because I saw Hayley Mills on screen and she was like a little bit older than me, but the same sort of person. And the camera was focusing on someone of my age and saying they were important and they were effective and they could make things happen and they could have adventures. That was very influential, I think, in where I wanted to be.

28:52There was that feeling of, you know, the duality, which I still have, of feeling very unimportant and wanting attention and wanting to count and wanting to matter because I was the youngest in my family. And it was a family that already didn't say, you know, everything you do is important. I was actually small. I wasn't tall like I am now. So that feeling that somebody small and so supposedly unimportant was on the big screen in close-up. I think that was probably quite selfishly, that's what I wanted. I wanted attention. You were right. Your diary self was completely correct. You got into Lambda.

29:33You became the phenomenal actor that we all know and love. And your second failure is your failure to get roles that you auditioned for. You say too many to enumerate. Who knows where any different path might have led, but this is the norm for any actor. Absolutely. But getting used to that kind of rejection must be challenging. It's almost like, you know, a tightrope walker goes through the fear of falling to their death. You know, it's like it comes with the job. You hear people say, I wanted to be an actor, but I couldn't face the rejection. And you go, oh, there are some people who really can't deal with that.