In 1971, I was 28, and two national treasures, Alastair Sim and Stanley Holloway, were starring in my first West End play. What could go wrong?
For one thing, they hated each other from the moment they met.
Alastair Sim (1900-76), star of the Christmas film Scrooge, was a comic genius – though, strangely, he refused to acknowledge it and claimed only to be ‘an actor’.
Stanley Holloway (1890-1982) came from the tradition of Victorian music hall and concert parties. He was a performer who played straight out to his public.
Every night, when the curtain went up, the audience gave Alastair a round of applause – which, like a proper actor, he ignored. Stanley, however, couldn’t resist acknowledging them with a grin and a wink – which set Alastair’s teeth almost audibly on edge.
Off-stage, they were equally different. Alastair rejected the trappings of stardom with an almost Calvinistic puritanism. He never gave interviews. If asked for an autograph, he would launch into a finger-wagging diatribe about the moral degeneracy of the practice. Stanley bathed in the attention that came with stardom, giving interviews and autographs with unfailing charm and generosity.
And then there was politics. Alastair was a left-wing firebrand. He regarded America with supreme contempt as the home of capitalism and the root of all evil.
Stanley loved America, and America loved him. After his all-singing and dancing triumph in My Fair Lady, he’d had his own TV series there, was a regular guest on The Dean Martin Show and co-starred with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas in the Hollywood blockbuster In Harm’s Way (1965).
Rehearsals for my play, Siege, were in the basement of St James’s Church, Piccadilly. Alastair, a fiercely committed atheist, arrived on the first morning with his coat collar turned up and a tweed hat jammed on his head, lips curled in distaste and eyes darting around behind tinted glasses, like an arsonist in search of the best spot to set a fire. He made me a gift of a terse little volume entitled The Misery of Christianity, itemising the church’s multitudinous abominations since its foundation.
Stanley had no strong feelings about religion, but was concerned about the growing power of the unions and the efforts of the far left to take over the country. Alastair sat hunched over his script in a corner muttering, ‘Bloody right-wing old fool.’
Another of Alastair’s hobby-horses was a near-obsessive worship of youth. The young were to him mankind’s only hope. ‘Nobody over 30,’ he proclaimed, ‘should have the vote.’
Stanley, whenever he was within hearing distance of one of these rants, would react with a sniff of disdain and return to his Daily Telegraph.
I suspect the only reason the two of them never got into a blazing row was that they never spoke a single word to each other, except on stage, throughout the whole rehearsal period and run of the play – which opened three days after the start of the miners’ strike in 1972. It was a disaster, and we closed almost at once.
A disappointment for me – but a relief, perhaps, for my two national treasures. David Ambrose |
