Читать книгу As Luck Would Have It - Derek Jacobi - Страница 15

At the age of seven – as a schoolboy with my satchel and shining morning face – I discovered acting in front of others; or it discovered me. Here, I knew, at once instinctively, was the reality of playing a part that brought me alive.

I had the lead in The Prince and the Swineherd, a pantomime staged at our local library. I played both roles, something I loved doing later on when I could bring out the differences between two characters, or both sides of a dual personality. My favourites among these were in the film of The Fool, when I played a nineteenth-century poverty-stricken clerk, ‘the fool’ who sells tickets for the vaudeville, and Frederick, a City of London speculator, whose fortunes tumble when a great financial bubble bursts.

I was bullied at this time by a boy at Capworth School, because I wasn’t aggressive, nor was I a toughie. He knew I would not retaliate. I asked Mum and Dad to save me, so after school they’d come to pick me up. I was probably seen as soft, girlish and a bit fey, and I much preferred the company of girls, and they mine, again because there was nothing confrontational about being with them.

Karen, a teacher at Capworth School, who was young and unmarried, took me out to the West End to see my first professional show. It was her personal choice to ask me, so I have no idea how it came about, except that she must have asked Mum. The show was the musical Oh Marguerita, which had the famous song ‘Bella Marguerita’:

Her lips have made me her prisoner

A slave to every command

She captivates and intoxicates me

With one little touch of her hand.

It stimulated the romantic lover – the dreamer inside me – but also a nagging awareness of how I appeared to others. I’m not sure which came first, but the other side of show business, the glitz, exerted its pull on me when Mum and Dad bought tickets for the London Palladium Christmas panto, which was Cinderella.

‘I’m coming down there to pick one or two of you to come on the stage,’ Evelyn Laye royally announced to the audience. She was Prince Charming, with Noëlle Gordon as Dandini, the other Principal Boy. Miss Laye tripped down the stairs into the stalls and selected me, so here I was up on stage with the world-famous music hall star: my first professional appearance clocked up at the Palladium! Thrilled to bits, I was given sweets and a balloon.

Fast forward to Westminster Abbey in the 1990s. A plaque is being laid to Noël Coward and at the ceremony I read out an extract from his War Diaries. There in the front row I spot Evelyn Laye, a great friend of Coward’s, now eighty-six. I go over to her.

‘You won’t remember, but we have worked together before – at the London Palladium.’ Naturally she didn’t remember me at all, only the panto!

After this I felt proprietorial about the Palladium, so sometimes for visits to the West End I’d save up pocket money, take the Tube west to Argyle Street, summon the maître d’ outside to hail me a taxi to drive me to a theatre nearby: just for the sheer joy of the taxi-ride.

At the age of nine I wrote to Sir Michael Balcon, the Ealing Films boss, asking him outright if I could be in a film of his, and received back a very sweet letter.

If you are that keen, you should pursue your dream and get in touch with us again in a few years’ time.