Читать книгу Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask - Justin Lewis - Страница 10

When Andy Serkis met fellow actor Lorraine Ashbourne in the last days of the 1980s, it was unlikely that either of them thought for a moment that they would become a couple, marry, have three children, and still be together more than 20 years later – especially in the entertainment business, where there are often unwelcome whispers about the security of celebrity marriages. But, then, neither Serkis nor Ashbourne behaves like a celebrity in the first place. Both are principled, hard-working and acclaimed actors who don’t tend to give interviews unless it is to discuss their work. Just occasionally, though, both have offered an insight into their lives together away from acting.

They first met at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in December 1989, when they were cast in the same play. Both were familiar with the venue in different ways. Ashbourne had worked as an usherette there some years earlier. Serkis had trodden its boards in 1988 in a tense and radical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was performed as a play within a play: a group of concentration-camp prisoners, all with cropped hair and dressed in striped pyjamas, are forced to mount their own production of the Shakespeare play. With no other costumes or sets to refer to, it became a play for voices, as performed by a nervous company who were in fear not of negative reviews, but of their own lives at the hands of the Nazis.

‘It’s an incredible theatre, an indoor round space,’ Serkis said of the Royal Exchange, which, despite seating a maximum of 750 people, felt like a very intimate venue, because it was in the round. ‘You can really sense every single, individual member of the audience – especially with Shakespeare. It worked perfectly in there. I could relate to the audience, too. I was very much feeding off of who they were.’

At the turn of the 1990s, then, Andy and Lorraine opened at this same venue in She Stoops to Conquer. Written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773, the play was a ‘comedy of manners’, in which characters carefully endeavour to maintain the utmost politeness and etiquette, despite the disasters that unfold around them. It was intended to provide theatregoers with an alternative to the many pantomimes dominating Manchester’s other theatres over the Christmas period but, despite its unseasonal flavour, it sold out its entire seven-week run before setting off on a national tour.

Sharing a stage with a cast that at various points included a Yorkshire terrier and a Border collie, Serkis played Tony Lumpkin, an impish playboy with a liking for practical jokes. His mother, Mrs Hardcastle, was portrayed by Una Stubbs, perhaps best known for her long-running role as Rita, daughter of bigot Alf Garnett, in the TV sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part and In Sickness and in Health. In fact, She Stoops to Conquer was not the first time that Stubbs and Serkis had explored the mother–son dynamic: earlier, in 1989, they had done so on television in the BBC comedy series, Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors (see Chapter 4).

Lorraine played Mr Hardcastle’s lascivious daughter Kate in She Stoops to Conquer, so, as she and Andy were playing, essentially, siblings, there would be no sexually charged encounters onstage between them. Was there love at first sight between the pair backstage, though? Seemingly not, as Ashbourne would recall a decade later. ‘There was no spark between us at all. I wouldn’t say I disliked him. I just didn’t get to know him.’

Relations between the pair were very different just over a year later when they shared the stage in another Royal Exchange production. Your Home in the West was an angry, gutsy new work by Rod Wooden, set on a rundown estate in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. Ashbourne played Jean Robson, a woman trapped in a vicious circle of prostitution and with a daughter likely to follow her into the same line of work. As Jean’s Irish boyfriend Sean, Serkis was a club performer with ambition: one scene found him accompanying himself on the guitar as he sang the song ‘Your Little Grey Home in the West’.

Your Home in the West was sombre fare all in all, but had it been at all light-hearted, it would have stifled audience empathy for the characters’ unhappiness, and been little more than a contemptuous cartoon. And it didn’t seem the most obvious environment for romantic relations to flourish between them, but flourish they most certainly soon would. Their personal relationship grew out of a professional need to explore their roles in the play. ‘We actually decided to meet in character,’ Andy recalled 20 years later. ‘So we met up at this pub at the back of the station and began talking.’ Though, as he admitted, ‘I think subconsciously it was just a way of getting off with one another.’

‘Meeting Andy wasn’t a life-changing experience,’ Lorraine emphasised in retrospect. ‘Our relationship developed gradually. We would do a play together, then not see each other for a few months, then work together again. We just became closer and closer.’

Lorraine Ashbourne is three years Andy Serkis’s senior. She was born in 1961 in Manchester, and trained at the Webber-Douglas Academy drama school in London, where her contemporaries included Ross Kemp, later Grant Mitchell in EastEnders and the star in the ITV action series, Ultimate Force. While at Webber-Douglas, she was told by one teacher that she faced a difficult time as a professional actor. ‘I was told that I wouldn’t be commercially viable until I was past my twenties, which for a woman of 21 was a pretty terrifying prospect.’

She would prove that teacher wrong. Gaining her Equity card by singing in clubs, in 1985 she made her professional stage debut in Steaming, a play by Nell Dunn set behind the white tiles of a Turkish baths. Further roles followed in everything from farces to pantomimes to musicals. The late 1980s found her graduating to film work: Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (a series of vignettes about working-class Britain in the 1940s and 1950s), and then, in 1989, Resurrected. There were guest spots, too, on television, including cameos in The Bill, London’s Burning and Casualty. The nature of long-running TV dramas about the three emergency services – police, fire, ambulance – with essentially a standalone story meant that there were many vacancies for young actors to portray suspects, eyewitnesses and victims of accidents or their relatives. In turn, those same actors were trying to gain a foothold in small-screen work. We’ll see in Chapter 4 how such TV guest spots would also help Andy Serkis.

During the 1990s, both Lorraine and Andy became used to the mad whirl of trying to maintain a relationship while separately having to attend film or television location shoots, or stage work. From time to time, their professional commitments would coincide and they would be in the same geographical area. Very occasionally, they would end up in the same play – Steven Berkoff’s Decadence or an English translation of the Hungarian musical Doctor Heart, in which Serkis starred as a physicist who discovers a way of turning dreams into reality. The two of them had an especially close relationship with the Royal Exchange, usually working on productions with the director Braham Murray.

Time spent apart was made up for with trips away. Holidays were crucial for the couple, from their first break in 1991, when they travelled out to the mountains over the border from Chamonix in Italy. Another subsequent journey abroad saw the pair jump into a Volkswagen camper van and drive from their home in Hackney, east London, to the island of Sicily. The pair would take some adventurous holidays around the globe during the 1990s, from backpacking in Vietnam and Thailand, to paragliding, to scuba-diving, and ice-climbing on glacial peaks. ‘I got into ice-climbing through Andy and we’ve been to the Alps, places like that,’ recalled Lorraine. ‘It’s not as dangerous as it seems. I did lose my nerve once and couldn’t move for about half an hour, but I forced myself to get going again, by which time the mist had come in and we had to camp on the mountain for the night thousands of feet up.’

By the late 1990s, after a string of stage successes and supporting roles in films such as Jack and Sarah (with Richard E. Grant) and Fever Pitch (with Colin Firth), Lorraine Ashbourne was a mainstay of two peak-time BBC drama series: the Manchester-based police series City Central and Kay Mellor’s Playing the Field, about an all-female football team. Just as both became recommissioned for second series during 1998, she discovered that she and Andy were to become parents for the first time, but it was only very shortly before the baby was due that she took time off from hectic shooting schedules.

It just so happened that Geraldine Powell, whom she played in Playing the Field, would herself give birth at the start of its second series. Geraldine’s fictional birth scene was filmed only two months before Lorraine’s real one, and it was an interesting dress rehearsal. ‘Filming the birth scene was amazing because I knew I was going to have go through it for real two months later. If anything, I felt more responsibility for making it look as genuine as possible.’ But, with Lorraine seven months pregnant in real life, midwives were standing by just in case. ‘I was actually quite far gone when we filmed the scene. I was told not to push too hard but to show it more in my face than down below.’ So how did her real-life partner feel about the pretend birth? Lorraine believed that, for Andy, who was used to making acting an authentic, intense experience, the fictional delivery was perhaps slightly traumatic. With a giggle, she told the Mirror, ‘I think those scenes were more disturbing for him than if I was doing a love scene.’

There was tension when it came to the real-life birth of Lorraine and Andy’s daughter in October 1998. Defying the fears of doctors, Lorraine opted to bring Ruby into the world in a birthing pool in the kitchen of the family home she shared in London with Andy. To begin with, she wanted Andy to join her in the pool, and so set about looking for the largest one she could find. ‘But, when it came to the day,’ she told the Daily Mail, ‘I decided I wasn’t going to share it with anyone.’

Surrounded by candlelight, Lorraine lay in the birthing pool for many hours – 16, maybe 20 in all – with a team of three midwives, who at one point were granted the surreal sight of watching tapes of Lorraine’s TV labour from Playing the Field. A supportive Andy was next to her throughout. ‘He was my emotional rock,’ she said. ‘I must have squeezed his hand for about 12 hours as he willed me to be patient and strong. The idea that men are useless at birth because they don’t know what to do certainly didn’t apply to Andy – he wanted to be involved right from the outset.’ Having attended a course on mind over matter, Lorraine endured the ordeal – ‘a wonderful and hideous experience all at once’ – with no pain relief, and recommended birthing pools for all expectant mothers. ‘It’s not that you don’t feel pain, because you do, but you learn to cope with it. I was physically sick at one stage and feeling awful, but the water soothed me.’

Even after Ruby was born, Lorraine was back at work within little more than a month, with near-sleepless nights and 6am alarm calls for long days of filming. ‘I thought I’d have no problems coping,’ she told the Mirror when the child was still only a few months old, ‘but I definitely underestimated how difficult it was all going to be.’ Help was at hand, thanks to fellow cast members and production staff on City Central who converted a storage cabin into a comfortable, beautifully decorated nursery. ‘All the rest of the cast helped and they filled it with soft toys,’ said Lorraine. ‘It’s known as Ruby’s room. It really was so nice of them.’ But most important to Lorraine was her family (who hailed from Manchester, anyway) and, of course, Andy, whose working schedule on various film and TV projects enabled him to be flexible with visits up North.

Parenthood for the couple did force them to rethink their passion for activity holidays. Ice-climbing in the Alps would be less easy, even though they had adored seeing French families there crossing hazardous glaciers with all their offspring in tow. Lorraine reflected in 2000, ‘I thought that was so fantastic that I determined that’s what my children would do too. I could picture them with their crampons on and their ice axes at the ready, all raring to go climbing with us. But, now that I have Ruby, I realise that it was all a bit of a romantic vision.’ At least when Ruby was a little older, and she was joined by younger siblings Sonny (in 2000) and (in 2004) Louis, Andy and Lorraine started to introduce them – in a more modest way – to the joys of the mountains, even if it was just a spot of gentle hill-walking or a journey on a cable car.

Even Andy was starting to slow down a little with his climbing. His spirit of adventure was still there well into his thirties – his climbing conquests included the Matterhorn and even the Eiffel Tower – but, as he would tell the Sunday Times in 2005, he began to feel, as the years flew by, that he couldn’t quite take the risks of old. ‘It’s harder now the kids have come along. I did notice, when I was climbing in New Zealand as we were just about to have our second child, feeling I didn’t quite have the edge I once had – just not being willing to take that little extra risk.’

So, with a new baby, such excitement would have to be put on hold for the time being. ‘Now we’re hoping we can balance work so someone is always there for Ruby. I think that’s important,’ said Lorraine to the Mirror. When the question of marriage between them was mentioned, she would not dismiss the idea. ‘We haven’t made a conscious decision, it’s just that we haven’t had the time,’ she told the Daily Mail in 1999. ‘If I thought it would affect Ruby, I would get married tomorrow. But I think that if you can demonstrate to a child how much you love each other, then that is more important than being married.’

A year after Ruby was born, Lorraine was keen to have more children. ‘Family is the most important thing to me now. You hear some actresses say they had better not get pregnant as they’ve signed for so-and-so series, but I don’t see things that way. If anything, being pregnant has made me more ambitious than I was before. Andy has been working with a couple of actresses who are pregnant and are very worried about losing their ambition, but I’ve told them they shouldn’t worry at all. Acting is not just about my ego and my vanity any more.’ Lorraine would always stress what a great source of support her boyfriend was. ‘He’s a wonderful dad and very much an equal partner when it comes to childcare,’ she said in 2000.

Attempts were made to incorporate Ruby into Lorraine’s onscreen work. ‘I thought it would be so easy to have her with us, even at work,’ she told one newspaper. ‘So, when there was a party scene for my screen son in Playing the Field, I got my mum and dad and Ruby in as extras. But it just didn’t work. Whenever she spotted me, she would shout, “Mama, mama”, and as I am obviously not playing her mum we had to stop.’

An alternative plan was hatched. Andy had an idea to sneak his infant daughter into a closing scene of the film Five Seconds to Spare, a screen adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s thriller novel The Dwarves of Death. ‘She was brilliant during all the rehearsals,’ sighed her mother affectionately. ‘Then, when it came to the take, she became fascinated by the sound boom. They had to cut the whole scene.’ Ruby’s screen debut, for now, would be delayed, although when she was 10 she and her siblings would feature as extras at a birthday party scene for the Ian Dury biopic, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.

Combining the filming of two major, fast-paced television drama series with motherhood was, inevitably, very draining for Lorraine. As she finished a third run of Playing the Field, and a second one of City Central, she was looking forward to some time at home with her small daughter in the spring of 2000. Unfortunately, this coincided with the very point where Andy Serkis had to journey to the other end of the world, to begin the arduous work on The Lord of the Rings. One paper quoted Lorraine as saying, shortly before Andy’s departure, ‘We hate being apart, so I’ve asked him to get me a part as a goblin or an elf.’

The couple’s second child, Sonny, was born in June 2000. A few months later she told The Stage, ‘Ruby adores her new little brother, even if at times she can be a wee bit rough with him. But watching them together is a treat for Andy and I. We love having them around.’

Later that year, Lorraine travelled to New Zealand with both children to join Andy, now hard at work on the adaptation of Tolkien’s epic trilogy. ‘I thought that it was about time that we all had some quality time together as a family,’ she said, ‘and, with Andy being away for so long and the children so young, it seemed appropriate to pack our bags, put the house in the hands of some friends who will take any messages, feed the cats and open the mail, and take off.’ By the time her appearance as Sue Cratchit in A Christmas Carol was broadcast on ITV during the festive season of 2000 – for which she was reunited with Ross Kemp from her student days at Webber-Douglas – she was temporarily living in South Island with Andy and the children.

But it had now been a decade since Andy and Lorraine had worked together professionally. In the autumn of 2001, just a few months before The Lord of the Rings’ first instalment (The Fellowship of the Ring) opened around the world, they collaborated on Snake, a short film written and directed by Andy. A dark comedy about the National Health Service, it concerned Matt (Rupert Graves), a young medical student frazzled with exhaustion, who carries out backstreet operations in order to help fund himself and hopefully qualify as a surgeon. When a man called Maurice (Bev Willis) tells him that his wife is in urgent need of a kidney transplant, he arranges a meeting with sex worker ‘Jennifer’ (played by Ashbourne) in a hotel room near King’s Cross in London. Matt intends to drug Jennifer, then remove her kidney and sell it to Maurice (who is hiding in the hotel bathroom) for £2,000. But, while Matt’s plan seems watertight on paper, it turns out to be a disastrous one for him from the moment that Jennifer arrives at the hotel.

In order for the small cast and crew to make Snake, Serkis set up a temporary office in Soho with producer Paul Viragh, who would later pen the screenplay of the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. It was later premiered at a film festival in New Zealand in 2002. Andy and Lorraine have since co-written a feature film screenplay together under the title Frankly My Dear, while Andy has co-directed Ride (a short film for Lorraine to star in).

By the end of 2001, Andy and Lorraine had been together for a decade. They had intended to get married for some time, but they did not want to delay it any longer, and wanted to start 2002 with a wedding ceremony of some kind. ‘I’d always wanted us to get married on top of a mountain,’ Andy remembered. ‘So we went to the Lake District, where we’d spent our early courting days. Unfortunately, we were all hit by a stomach bug and spent every day in a hotel room, while it rained relentlessly outside.’

An alternative day was named. On 22 July 2002, Andy and Lorraine became husband and wife. Their love of holidaying in Italy meant they felt there was only one suitable location for them to tie the knot. They married at a twelfth-century church just outside the Italian city of Florence. The ceremony was followed by a reception at a castle near Fiesole, overlooking Tuscany. More than a hundred guests were in attendance. The celebrations went on for several days, but work commitments for the newlyweds meant that the ‘honeymoon’, such as it was, took place in the by-now very familiar confines of the Royal Exchange Theatre’s rehearsal rooms. They were about to open there in a new production of Shakespeare’s Othello, which reunited them with director Braham Murray. Lorraine was to play Emilia, while Andy was to tackle Iago (his first attempt at the part since his days as a student).

Serkis’s diary was bulging by this point. After weekdays in Manchester with Lorraine rehearsing Shakespeare, there was no letup at weekends, when he would zoom down to Pinewood Studios for long hours recording dialogue for Gollum in the postproduction marathons of The Lord of the Rings. Then, just as Othello was about to premiere, he happened to injure his lower back. He managed to struggle through almost its entire two-month run, thanks to painkillers, but it only served to postpone the inevitable. During one matinée, after 40 Othellos, he passed out on stage in front of an audience of 750 people. The play’s director had to go on instead. Serkis could barely move for three weeks, but was helped back to recovery by an acupuncturist and physiotherapist, meaning that he would be able to attend the New York premiere in December 2002 of The Two Towers – perhaps the most anticipated screen performance he had given so far.

Family life has relaxed Serkis to some extent. He now cares about work in a different way. ‘I have to work quicker, really, and I have to work more instinctively now, because I’ve got family, and they feed hugely into my acting.’

Since the arrival of their third child, Lorraine has often proudly accompanied her husband to his movie premieres, but her own acting career has continued apace. She remains interested in socially aware writing, and returned to the big screen in 2011 with Oranges and Sunshine. Directed by Jim Loach (son of Ken), and co-starring Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving, it was a sensitive investigative drama about the child migration that took place between the UK and Australia during the 1950s, and the families who were kept in the dark. Television work continues to keep her busy, most notably from writers of the calibre of Victoria Wood (the BAFTA-winning drama Housewife, 49) and Debbie Horsfield (BBC1’s True Dare Kiss series in 2007), and projects from Jimmy McGovern for the BBC such as The Street and Moving On. Her husband would also grace a McGovern story in 2010, one of the crowning glories of Serkis’s two varied decades of television work, which all started at the end of the 1980s.