Читать книгу Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask - Justin Lewis - Страница 6

Long regarded as reliable, resourceful and adventurous, Andy Serkis has always been interested in the power of stage and screen acting as ‘a transformative experience’, seeing how drama can transcend entertainment and actually change people’s lives. He has often spoken about acting being a service to the community and a responsibility, which may explain why stardom has – albeit belatedly – found him. As we will see, at no point in his career has he consciously pursued celebrity. ‘Working for others is something my parents instilled in us,’ Andy said in 2010. ‘There was a strong sense of the importance of helping other people.’ And Clement and Lylie Serkis’s separate but tireless career paths had set a clear example of service and responsibility to their three daughters and two younger sons.

English-born Lylie taught children with special needs, but continued to raise all five of her offspring almost single-handedly. Clement, whose surname had been shortened from Serkissian, was of Armenian descent and worked as a doctor in Iraq throughout the time that Andy and his siblings were growing up. Clement had already qualified as a gynaecologist when he first met his future wife; she was recovering in Baghdad after contracting tuberculosis back in England. Following the couple’s marriage, Clement continued to live and work in Iraq, while Lylie and their children would relocate to Ruislip Manor in Middlesex, 13 miles northwest of central London.

Clement and Lylie’s fourth child, Andrew, was born on 20 April 1964. In that same year, Clement was one of four medics who co-founded a private hospital in Baghdad called Ibn Sina. The founders had expressed grave concern that the city, despite its size and population, had no hospital with sufficiently modern equipment and facilities. Although it had been founded for the benefit of the ruling class, Clement and his three co-founders fervently believed that Ibn Sina should provide free treatment for anyone in need, regardless of their race, religion or social status.

Until the mid-1970s, the Serkis children would see their father only during school holidays. They would travel to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, where they would be reunited with him and other relatives. Clement’s absence from home life in Ruislip could make Andy a tense youngster.

The boy’s unruly nature would mellow with maturity, but would be accompanied by a resigned sense of sadness about his absentee father. ‘I always mourn the fact I never got to know my father, or spent time with him,’ he told The Times in 2009, as Clement was entering his 90th year. To relate to him now was ‘unfathomable. It’s like, Where do you begin? So much has gone on. So much.’ Yet this regret was tempered by an admiration for his father’s belief in justice, supporting those people who needed it. ‘Times weren’t easy for him in Baghdad,’ Andy told the Guardian, ‘but he carried on going there because he believed in what he was doing.’

The childhood trips to the Middle East were certainly enlightening, and would help to give Andy and his siblings a sense of acceptance and flexibility about different countries and cultures that were very different from west London. These journeys, coupled with being brought up by his mother alone, also made Andy start to relate to the idea of being an outsider in society, something that he would explore a great deal in many of his stage and screen roles, from Gollum to Ian Brady. ‘We were outsiders,’ he said, ‘and I’ve always sympathised with those who feel excluded, probably as a result of this.’

From the age of 11, Andy attended St Benedict’s, a Roman Catholic school in the west London district of Ealing. The school’s other former pupils have included the biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd, the former Conservative MP and Hong Kong governor Chris (later Lord) Patten, who was appointed chairman of the BBC Trust in 2011, and the comedian Julian Clary. Clary was already entering St Benedict’s sixth form when Serkis enrolled at the school in the autumn of 1975. Although it was strictly a boys-only school at that point, some girls were admitted to its sixth form by the end of the 1970s. Serkis remembers ‘lots of gangs and lots of fights’, but was not on the receiving end of bullying. He did, however, gain a nickname: perhaps inevitably, ‘Billy Smarts’, after the famous Billy Smart’s Circus, whose spectacular shows were a mainstay of festive television at the time.

Andy’s passions during his formative years were diverse. He spent his pocket money on model kits, was a lover of cricket (the Australian wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh was a hero) and, before becoming an accomplished saxophonist, he learned to play the clarinet. The first record he ever bought, when he was about eight, was Acker Bilk’s clarinet instrumental, ‘Stranger on the Shore’, which was already around 10 years old at the time. He would become a fan of jazz later on, but the musical soundtrack to his boyhood was heavily influenced by the contents of his older sisters’ collections – the soft rock of Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp and Steely Dan. Then, when he was 14, he would first hear the music of Ian Dury, the man he would later portray to great acclaim on the big screen in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. He was travelling on a coach for a school trip when he heard ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. ‘You could hear this voice that wasn’t saying anything that you’ve ever heard before, something that was exotic and magic and weird, and yet dangerous and thrilling.’

Summer visits by the Serkis family to Baghdad – and other places too, including Damascus, Beirut and the ruins of Babylon – had ceased by 1978. Four years earlier, Ibn Sina had been converted into a military hospital by Saddam Hussein. It was now considered too dangerous an environment for their holidays. ‘Things began to get dodgy, and we couldn’t travel out there any longer,’ remembered Andy 30 years later. It would be some time before his dad returned to home turf, though: after being imprisoned briefly by the Saddam regime, Clement did not permanently relocate to the UK till 1990 (the year before Operation Desert Storm), by which time Andy was in his mid-20s. Clement’s sister was still resident in Iraq in 2007, when Andy explained to Wired magazine, ‘People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalised in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.’

At around the age of 14, then, Andy Serkis may have no longer been able to have exciting trips to other continents, but a sense of adventure had been planted in his mind and body, and he needed to continue that thirst for new challenges. It was at this point that an interest in climbing became apparent. Before long, the interest became a passion. With a few friends, he formed a mountaineering club at St Benedict’s, and soon they had progressed from hill walking to trekking and eventually to proper climbing. By then, his love for the activity was so entrenched that it helped him decide where he would further his education. Lancaster University in the North of England was on the doorstep of the Lake District, home to the highest peaks in England.

Lancaster University also boasted a highly esteemed visual-arts course. Andy was a budding artist even when young, deeply obsessed with painting and drawing. It was ‘one thing that really took a grip on me’, and, even when his mother had tried to convince him that he needed to get a proper job, he felt certain that art was the path for him. But he wasn’t sure how one became a professional artist. By the age of 16, he was aware that edging into the world of design and graphics might help maximise his chances, and so he applied for a visual-arts course at Lancaster.

Serkis’s independent spirit had formed. As time progressed, he seemed less and less likely to follow a safe, if secure, career. He was driven by instinct and desire. Years later, he would summarise this as, ‘I’m only really good at things I want to do and I’m hopeless at putting any effort into things I don’t want to do.’ His understandably cautious mother and father hoped he might knuckle down for something reliable as a career. Lylie figured he might join the army or become a surveyor. Clement may have hoped – so Andy thought – that he might have opted for anything ‘apart from becoming an actor, really…he worried that it was precarious, that the art world was a precarious living.’

Andy Serkis arrived at Lancaster University in the autumn of 1982. He was intent on concentrating solely on visual arts – that course encompassed sculpture, painting and graphic design – but he was also obliged to plump for a second option. Reluctant to do so at first, he eventually chose theatre studies, as he became aware that that department was a strong one there: the university campus had its own theatre, the Nuffield Studio Theatre. ‘You could get involved in productions, and you could design them, or go more in a direction of stage management. All sorts of areas around theatre, not just acting. They had production meetings and you’d do the whole thing properly, and you’d have a budget.’

Any spare time left over for Serkis was spent either hill walking alone in the wilderness of the Lakes, or participating in broadcasts for the student radio station, Radio Bailrigg. The service was one of the earliest student radio stations in Britain, having been launched in 1969, and over the years its airwaves have also featured regular contributions from future broadcasting giants such as James May (now of television’s Top Gear) and Richard Allinson, DJ for Capital Radio in London and, latterly, BBC Radio 2.

There was plenty of nightlife on the Lancaster campus. The University Union Great Hall would welcome many high-profile rock acts in the next couple of years, among them Echo & the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, U2, the Smiths, Julian Cope and even Tina Turner. A newly opened venue, the Sugar House, staged cabaret from many exponents of the ‘alternative comedy’ boom from the London circuit: Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, and the National Theatre of Brent (Patrick Barlow and Jim Broadbent). Nearby, on Moor Lane, there was also the Dukes Playhouse, which would showcase productions ranging from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to (in January 1984) the world premiere of a play called The Life of Einstein.

It was theatre that became Serkis’s obsession. Combining visual arts with theatre studies meant that he was set-designing for productions at the Nuffield Studio Theatre. He became involved at an opportune moment. Prior to the 1982–3 academic year, the theatre had been predominantly staging musical events. Only now was a greater emphasis being placed on drama and revue. The Theatre Studies department staged a wide range of productions from classical theatre to contemporary works, and they were often bold and left-field in their choices.

Before long, Andy Serkis became a lighting designer as well as a set designer at the Nuffield Studio, but incidental performing roles came up too from time to time: minor appearances in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I in early 1983 and a new play by Tony Marchant called The Lucky Ones. He was fascinated by the theatre, and not just by those who performed, either. Years later, he recalled how, while still an undergraduate, he had been enthralled to visit a London production of the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Every aspect of the production interested him, down to wondering how the brickwork on the sets for the ‘little shop’ had been painted. Theatre was an inviting new world, an exciting destination to escape to, just like the Baghdads and Damascuses he had visited as a child.

Actually working in theatre was a different proposition from watching it, though, obviously. The demystification started in his first term at Lancaster, and it was a slightly disappointing discovery to find that, for instance, no one painted the reverse sides of the sets. ‘I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid. “What’s on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.” It’s a bit of a shame, really.’

A life-changing moment for Andy Serkis came in his third term at Lancaster, in the summer of 1983, when he was cast in the lead role of a confrontational play. Gotcha was penned by the playwright Barrie Keeffe in the mid-1970s, and told the story of a disaffected pupil at school (known as ‘The Kid’) who, on the final day of term, holds his chemistry teacher hostage. ‘He has this packet of 20 cigarettes and he’s holding them over the petrol tank of a motorbike and basically launches a tirade at this teacher. I thought it was so powerful,’ remembered Serkis. But he was already familiar with the play, anyway, from a TV showing six years earlier. He had seen it on television just days before his 13th birthday in April 1977, when a production of it – starring Phil Davis as The Kid – had been shown as part of the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand.

Gotcha had also been performed in Lancaster a few months earlier when a visiting theatre company staged it at the city’s Dukes Playhouse. It is not known if Serkis saw it there, but there’s no doubt that, when he was cast as The Kid, he felt totally liberated to immerse himself in the persona of someone else. He instinctively recognised a lost soul in The Kid, ‘factory fodder…who was going to be undervalued for the rest of his life. I could tell people about it.’ When he communicated the role at the university theatre in Lancaster, he knew that he couldn’t sit behind a drawing board for the rest of his life. ‘When I played that role, that was it. I knew this is what I wanted to do at the age of 19,’ he said. He felt so comfortable in connecting with such a powerful character that he thought, ‘I’ll have some more of that.’ Of course, he wanted to prance about onstage, but it was also ‘a real calling’.

So it was, in the balmy summer of 1983 – the close of his first academic year at Lancaster University – that Andy Serkis decided to drop visual arts and change course. Fortunately, Lancaster had a module system whereby a student could build a degree (called an Independent Studies Degree) from lots of seemingly disparate subjects. ‘I drew elements from the arts. I still did little bit of set designing. I concentrated on areas like Stanislavski and Brecht and theatre history, and then some practical stuff like mime and dance.’ His artistic background would serve him well in acting, too, when it came to spatial awareness: being able to relate to different environments, and understanding what one’s relationship is within that space.

Serkis was full of trepidation, though, as to how to convince his parents that he was doing the right thing. They, who would have preferred their firstborn son to embrace a career as a lawyer – ‘something solid and professional’ – had been uneasy enough that he had planned to be a painter. For him now to reject art in favour of acting would, for a short time, horrify them. ‘There was this resounding silence down the telephone,’ he told The Times’s Hugo Rifkind in 2010.

But both Clement and Lylie had carved out successful careers – in medicine and education – in contexts that can be unpredictable and that require flexibility and sensitivity. Both of their professions have required them to react to occurrences that are unfamiliar at times. That familiarity with the unfamiliar had been mirrored in Serkis’s travels back and forth from the Middle East during his earlier years, which would lay the foundations for the unpredictability of acting. ‘It was having a childhood filled with journeys and new experiences that prepared me for it. It was putting yourself onto a path and not quite knowing where you were going to end up, that was at the root of my life.’