Читать книгу Martin Shaw - The Biography - Stafford Hildred - Страница 8

‘Somehow the school discovered a sensitivity beneath my roughshod, drinking, big-headed character and they brought this out. It altered my personality completely’

Martin Shaw on his student days at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art

Martin Shaw might not have realised it but he could hardly have headed for drama college in London at a more exciting time for a young man. Not for nothing had the Americans dubbed the capital Swinging London: youth held sway amid a colourful explosion of creativity in music, art, fashion, photography, movies and the theatre. They were exciting times, and it was ‘Cool Britannia’. David Bailey was the photographer of the day, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy ruled the world of modelling, Mary Quant had launched the mini-skirt, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp were the two young London actors the film world was talking about, the Rolling Stones were pop gods and clubs like the Scotch of St. James, the Speakeasy and the Cromwellian were packed every night with peacock males dressed garishly by Carnaby Street, who were dancing the night away with dolly-bird girlfriends who felt liberated by the advent of the Pill. The feel-good factor was tangible: England had won the World Cup at Wembley, all over the world the Beatles were top of the charts and at the box office with Yellow Submarine, and Paul Scofield was on his way to winning an Oscar for his role as Sir Thomas More in the movie A Man For All Seasons.

Martin arrived in 1963, not so much in style but astride his closest companion – his aged but lovingly restored motorbike, an A7 Combo that had cost him all of £15 back home. ‘It took me a whole year to get the bike into mint condition,’ he said nostalgically, years later. ‘I must have visited every breaker’s yard in Brum.’ Of course, in those days Birmingham was the motorcycle capital of the world so that must have meant a lot of breaker’s yards. ‘It was a beautiful bike – bloody beautiful,’ he recalled.

At the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he was able to mingle with other like-minded students drawn from all areas of the country. The days when rounded vowels were de rigueur for entry to top London drama schools had long gone, and a Birmingham accent would be no drawback. He could also pride himself on being a student at one of the very best drama colleges in the world. LAMDA had a proud history that dated back to 1861, making the Academy the oldest of its kind in Britain. Apart from moving to Hampton Court for a brief period during World War II when its studios were bombed, the Academy had always been based in west London and when Martin was a student its home was in Earl’s Court. Among its notable Alumni are the late Richard Harris, David Suchet, Maureen Lipman, Brian Cox (a contemporary of Martin’s) and Patricia Hodge, who was much later to play a somewhat upmarket girlfriend of Martin’s character Ray Doyle in The Professionals.

Martin proved to be an exceptional pupil who frequently stood out from the others and the LAMDA course also became a passage of personal discovery. The Academy prided itself, as it does today, in neither seeking to teach skills superficially, nor to deconstruct the individual in order to rebuild a LAMDA product. Rather, the aim was to encourage and develop talents already innate in each student, all of which suited him perfectly. ‘Somehow the school discovered a sensitivity beneath my roughshod, drinking, big-headed character and they brought this out,’ he was able to say on looking back. ‘It altered my personality completely.’

He will always be grateful to LAMDA, where he learned so much of his craft. ‘It changed me from an adolescent into a man,’ said Martin. ‘The timing was perfect,’ he later observed. ‘The extremes of Method acting were starting to go away, the “scratch your arse, kick pebbles and mumble” techniques were on the way out. I just happened to hit a wonderful couple of years – I was very lucky.’

Martin’s trusty motorbike faced a pretty comprehensive change as well. Years later, in a hilarious interview with a motorbike magazine, he recalled: ‘I went out to Hampton Court one day with a girlfriend and it was incredibly hot weather. I was showing off and really thrashing it (the bike!). One of the nuts came loose on the carb through vibration. It dripped petrol on to the exhaust, which was already overheating and, whoosh! The bike went up like a torch. We only just got off in time!’

This happened in Fulham on the way home, just a short distance from Martin’s flat. ‘A bus stopped and the conductor rushed over with a fire extinguisher to put it out. I pushed it back to my flat and then went out and got drunk. I came back in the early hours of the morning and saw my poor bike outside the flat and, because I was tight, I thought I would kick it over and see if it would start.

‘I switched on the ignition and it all came on, so I thought “Great!” I turned on the petrol and kicked it over, but the fire had burnt all the insulation off the HT leads. Whoomph… the whole lot went up in flames again! I ran into the house and did the worst possible thing – I got a bucket of water and threw that over it – a petrol fire! It spread worse than ever! Luckily, a nightwatchman came out with a fire extinguisher, a very big one and he turned it into a wedding cake!’

The bike was slowly rusting outside when a passer-by stopped and bought it. ‘In the end,’ Martin said, ‘he gave me 13 quid for it and I waved it off down the road. I’d had all that pleasure for just 2 quid.’

He emerged from LAMDA in 1965 full of hopes for the future and soon afterwards headed for his first job with Hornchurch repertory company in Essex where he was taken on as an assistant stage manager. As an ASM, he was essentially the theatre company’s general dogsbody and he was paid the princely sum of £7 a week. To save money, he lived for a while in a shed at the bottom of someone’s garden where he had an electric ring to cook on and just about nothing else. While some thought his unusual choice of digs was bizarre, others admiringly considered it “Far out, man”.

Martin found he could rent the shed for 30 shillings (£1.50) a week, which left him with just over a fiver for food and cigarettes and to buy fellow members of the company a round or two. ‘I was 22 before I could afford to buy cigarettes in packets of twenty,’ he once recalled.

His hard-drinking lifestyle often brought him close to conflict and he can recall lots of narrow scrapes with violence as a young man in London. However, the worst beating he ever suffered happened in his early twenties – and he can’t remember a thing about it. He was attacked by a gang of thugs in a London street, just after he had been to his drama school graduation. He had been drinking with a pal when they were set upon in an unprovoked assault and finished up in hospital.

Martin has a blackout about the whole affair but he assumes he must have fought back because when he came round the next day he found teethmarks on his knees and hands where he must have hit someone. ‘All I do know for definite,’ he said wryly, ‘is that my skull was fractured, my cheekbone was smashed, several teeth were knocked out and I ended up having to have a piece of plastic inserted in my right cheekbone.’

He believes his friend had much more sense – he just fell down and lay there. ‘I don’t know if we were picked on because I was supposed to be a tough guy,’ he said, ‘but if that was the case, they soon found out how wrong they were because I lost miserably.’ He might look like a bit of a hard man who can handle himself but Martin insists he’s really a confirmed pacifist. ‘But if it happened again I don’t know what I would do. You can be a good pacifist, but you can still fight back!’

If Martin thought Hornchurch Rep was ready to recognise his great potential as an actor and hand him the role of Hamlet straight away, the management had other ideas for their new recruit. The first task he was given was to make an inventory of the company’s props. Hornchurch was no different from every other repertory company in that money was always tight and making use of existing props was one way of avoiding unnecessary costs.

‘I literally did shovel shit for my first job,’ he told one of the authors cheerfully. ‘There was a whole new stage management team that had taken over there. I was the assistant stage manager and this new stage manager said, “We have an old prop store at the White Hart and according to my book it has not been opened for 30 years. So let’s go and see what’s in there and make an inventory.” And when we opened it up it was ankle-deep in rat shit. There were rat carcasses all over the place and it was pretty revolting. We had to shovel everything out and I just had to stop and laugh at one point. I realised to my horror that I had done three years at one of the best drama schools in the world and one of my first professional jobs was shovelling shit. Surely after this the only way was up?’

But Martin has never been afraid of hard work and he got busy. Later it was discovered that another props room was flooded with a foot of water and he had to sort out the problem. It wasn’t the start he would have chosen to his career as an actor, but he mucked in anyway and cheerfully put such menial tasks down to good experience.

Soon he was to become more involved with the theatre’s productions, but still without actually treading the boards and uttering a line. He swept the stage, hung scenery, made the tea and proved himself adept at helping to make props. A request to make a sedan chair in just a matter of hours might have been beyond less enthusiastic ASMs, but taking a lead from his grandfather’s skill with tools, Martin managed to knock up a very presentable sedan by the required deadline. It was several months before he progressed to walk-on parts and minor roles. Martin Shaw, professional actor, was on his way.

Further appearances in rep followed and, at one point, he shared digs with another up-and-coming actor by the name of Anthony Hopkins. The two young men became friends and spent many a night staying up into the small hours, discussing the theory and craft of acting over copious drinks.

Martin was learning all the time, and in 1967 he made his first appearance on television playing an Irish revolutionary in a play called Love On The Dole. It was the first of several small but varied TV roles in quick succession, at a time when he was also starting to make his mark on the stage. Notably, in October 1968, he played Cliff Lewis in a revival of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court theatre in London opposite Jane Asher, for which he received kind notices.

In 1970 he also appeared at the Lyric theatre in The Battle Of Shrivings with Sir John Gielgud who, legend has it, first greeted Martin with the words: ‘You’re frightfully handsome – I suppose you’re married.’ And indeed by now he was.

On New Year’s Eve, 1968, Martin had married Jill Allen, a beautiful, slim blonde actress he had fallen in love with. They had been living together for some while and marriage was the next logical step. When they decided to tie the knot, Martin was in the middle of a run of Look Back In Anger that had by now transferred to London’s Criterion theatre. True to tradition, the show had to go on and soon after the couple had exchanged their vows the groom dashed back to the theatre to appear on stage. Martin’s friends all agreed that Jill made a beautiful bride and there were a few million TV viewers who would not disagree. Just two days before she became Mrs Shaw, Jill had been seen on TV in The Best Pair Of Legs In The Business.

At first money was tight for the young newly-weds, but as Martin’s star began to rise they were able to buy a home of their own, and by 1974 they were living in a tall, sunny late Victorian house in Southgate with Harry, an old English sheepdog and a Volkswagen estate car suited to their expanding family. By then, Martin and Jill had three children: sons Luke and Joe and daughter Sophie.

In 1969, a year after getting married, Martin had gained an important TV break when he joined the cast of Doctor In The House, a hugely popular comedy series based on Richard Gordon’s books and made by London Weekend Television.

The series arrived on TV screens 15 years after Gordon’s novels had first spawned a string of medical joke-and-jape movies beginning with the original Doctor In The House in 1954, The films starred a clutch of solid British actors including Dirk Bogarde as young medical student Simon Sparrow, as well as Donald Sinden, Kenneth More, Donald Houston and James Robertson-Justice.

No less than 6 sequels followed: Doctor At Sea, which introduced a young French actress called Brigitte Bardot, who would go on to become one of the great screen sex sirens, and then Doctor In Love, Doctor At Large, Doctor In Distress, Doctor In Clover and Doctor In Trouble. Essentially, these movies were a slightly more sophisticated variation on the Carry On… films. They were subtler on innuendo but became increasingly more predictable in settings and situations. As the series of movies progressed, the light comedy became ever more contrived.

Nevertheless, the films proved very popular at the box office, so when Frank Muir became head of comedy at London Weekend (the capital’s newly franchised ITV station) in 1968, he was keen to get Richard Gordon’s novels successfully adapted for the small screen for the first time. To that end, he employed some fresh young writing talent including Graham Chapman and Graeme Garden, two qualified medical doctors who went on to find fame in Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Goodies respectively.

For television, the series was updated to reflect the Swinging Sixties. But, as with the original stories written by Richard Gordon, the Doctor In The House TV series was set in a fictional medical school of a London hospital, St Swithins, and the high jinks of the medicos mainly involved the chasing of pretty nurses with plenty of bedpan banter and lashings of innuendo about bedside manner.

The show paraded an excellent cast led by Barry Evans, Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies, and Martin joined them as Huw Evans, a Welsh doctor rather fond of his drink. He featured in 3 episodes in a series that went down well with viewers and featured the likes of David Jason and Susan George.

That same year he was also able to demonstrate his versatility by playing Horatio in a TV version of Hamlet with Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud, and over the next few years he was able to play a variety of TV roles including a jaded soccer star in a play called Achilles Heel. To get fit for the role Martin ran 3 miles a day and had the thrill of running out on to the pitch with professional Fulham players for a five-a-side game.

In parallel with his TV roles, he continued to progress as a stage actor and it was a real feather in his cap when in 1973 he joined the National Theatre, then run by Sir Laurence Olivier. It’s not hard to envisage the excitement he must have felt when he was auditioned by the great man himself and given the role of Dionysius in The Bacchae. Martin was to appear as the young god Dionysius, son of Zeus, king of the gods, wearing little more than a handkerchief-sized piece of chamois leather and Olivier was extremely concerned that he should look as handsomely god-like as possible. ‘Are you working out?’ he enquired. ‘Well, you ought to – you’re not going to be wearing any clothes, you know!’ Olivier immediately offered to introduce Martin to the gymnasium where he himself regularly worked out to keep fit. Martin readily signed up and began to put himself through a punishing regime of lifting weights in order to look the part. He was spurred on by the sight of Olivier himself, then regarded as the world’s greatest actor, sweating away while going through his exercises. From that point he resolved to keep on exercising throughout his life.

Olivier was then in the sunset of his career, but Martin could not fail to be impressed by the way he retained his enthusiasm and drive, and still continued to challenge himself rather than resting on his laurels. ‘He was fantastic, a proper actor/manager in that he cast and auditioned everybody in his company. He knew everyone and everyone knew him, although it was very clear that he was the boss. He used to come and talk to us in the dressing room at night; it was a magical time.’ Though Martin’s stint at the National was brief, he also got to appear in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Saturday, Sunday, Monday – another worthy addition to his fast-growing acting CV.