'Darling boy, call me Larry'

In 1969 Denis Quilley joined the National Theatre. In this exclusive extract from his memoirs, he recalls seeing Laurence Olivier forget his lines, Anthony Hopkins drunk on stage - and John Gielgud fall through a trap-door

* Denis Quilley
* The Guardian,
* Saturday February 28 2004

My agent Bernard Hunter started his career at 17 singing with Henry Hall and the BBC Dance Orchestra. He couldn't play an instrument, so when he sat in with the band, he strummed a guitar with rubber strings, which made him look very dashing, and made no sounds loud enough for the BBC microphones to pick up. He went on to become an accomplished performer in the theatre before forming his agency.

I first met him in 1953, and in 1969 accepted his long-standing offer to join him.This was the year I told myself that I must start doing some Serious Theatre before it was too late. I had turned 40, my days as a romantic leading man in musicals were surely numbered, and I needed to summon up my courage and stand toe-to-toe with the big men: Shakespeare, Chekhov, O'Neill. I told Bernard I would really like to join one of the two major companies, the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, and preferably the National, which at this time was based at the Old Vic Theatre and led by Laurence Olivier, who had been my idol since I was a schoolboy.

Two days later, Bernard rang me. "You won't believe this, but Olivier wants to see you about joining the National for the next season." I was stunned. Later, I learned that Olivier had recently seen me perform in Nottingham, as Archie Rice in The Entertainer and as Macbeth. Thank God I didn't know he was watching!

The offices of the National Theatre of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were down the road from the Old Vic in a higgledy-piggledy assemblage of little wooden shacks. At the appointed time, I entered one of these shacks to be confronted by a formidable triumvirate - John Dexter, Michael Blakemore and the Boss, the Guv'nor, Laurence Olivier. He was unbuttoned, both literally (jacket over a chair, waistcoat undone, tie loosened and shirt open at the neck) and metaphorically - a big guffaw that would have been heard at the Festival Hall. I just hoped it wasn't about me.

"Ah, Mr Quilley," he said, still laughing. "Welcome. Sit down. We've asked you here because we'd like you to join our little company." Somehow I managed not to jump up and turn cartwheels all around the shack - there wasn't room, anyway.

My first role was Aufidius in Coriolanus, a production for which the critical reaction was, as we in the trade delicately say, mixed. I, though, came out of it unscathed and was selfishly delighted that my debut had been successful. Now, I thought, if only I can be in a play with the Guv'nor himself, I'll be able to die happy. When he asked me to play his son Jamie in the next production, Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night, I could hardly contain my joy.

For the first week or two of rehearsals I was barely able to concentrate on my own character, so consumed was I by the excitement of working with Olivier. At one point, the director Michael Blakemore suggested a change of move, and I replied: "But if I move there, I'm worried about getting in Sir Laurence's way."

"Oh, my darling boy," cried Olivier, grasping me by the shoulders, "you really must call me Larry." I paused, grinned sheepishly and said: "I'll try." I managed it, of course, and we became good friends.

Watching him work was like watching a terrier hunting a rat. He would spend hours nagging away at tiny pieces of business - lighting a cigar, lifting a drink - until they were second nature to the character. He grabbed O'Neill's script and never let go until he had beaten it into submission, and then he cherished it and loved it like a horse he had broken, which would now carry him wherever he wanted to go.

The production was a triumph, but the physical burden on Larry was enormous - he was in his office every day running the National Theatre, and coming to the theatre to play this huge, demanding role every night. On Saturdays, a one o'clock matinee ended at about 5.30pm, then the 6.30pm performance ended just before 11pm. He was 65 at the time, and had quite recently survived cancer and a thrombosis, and was carrying a workload that would have daunted a fit man half his age.

After the first scene, we took a two-minute pause to let in latecomers. On many evenings, Larry would sit in the wings and fall asleep for a minute and a half. On one night only did his fatigue get the better of him. In the last act, he had a long scene with Ron Pickup (who was playing my brother), in which he drunkenly bemoaned the fact that he could have been a great Shakespearean actor, and told a long story of how he and the great Booth had played Othello together. On this one tired night, he couldn't remember Booth's name, couldn't remember which play they acted in, and after ad-libbing for a minute or two, he got up saying: "I'm sorry lad, you'll have to excuse me, I'm not feeling too well," and staggered off the stage. Ron could do nothing except sit there and take another drink of cold tea masquerading as whisky. Meanwhile, in the wings, Larry grabbed the prompt script. "What's the bloody line? Ah, yes - Booth and Othello." Plunged back on stage - "Sorry about that, lad, where was I? Ah, yes - Booth and my Othello", and on went the scene. Nobody suspected a thing.

I loved him. Not everybody did; everybody admired him and respected him, of course, for all the obvious reasons, but I loved him - for reasons perhaps a little less obvious. He had a broad streak of vulgarity that lived quite comfortably alongside the sweetness, the toughness and the commanding authority of his nature. The other theatrical knights of his generation (Gielgud, Guinness, Richardson, Redgrave) were all, for want of a more elegant word, gents. Larry never quite was - he was always one of us.

This endearing quality showed itself, just now and then, in his clothes. He had some beautiful suits, and he also had some very jolly ones. My particular favourite was the one I privately christened the Brighton Bookie suit (he was living in Brighton at the time). It was a gloriously robust mustard colour, with a bold brown over-check. Then there was the Syd Field overcoat, an ankle-length camel-hair number with very broad shoulders that made him look absolutely square. And for a brief period he sported a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker. At this time, his preferred mode of transport was a London black taxi which he had bought and had resprayed in the imperial Olivier purple. One wondrous day, after a performance of Long Day's Journey, I came out of the stage door and was stopped in my tracks by a beatific vision. The purple taxi was throbbing at the kerbside, and at the wheel sat the Baron Olivier wearing all three of the above-mentioned items. Ride of the Valkyries was booming out of the hi-fi. Unable to stop myself, I burst out laughing. He leaned across to the nearside window, raised two fingers at me in a time-honoured salute, growled "Piss off, Quilley!" and roared off towards the Old Kent Road.

In 1972, I was treated to a display of another aspect of Larry's protean personality - his monumental anger. Anthony Hopkins was playing Macbeth, Diana Rigg was Lady Macbeth, and I was playing Banquo. Tony is a wonderful actor - but by his own admission he lacked the mental and emotional stamina needed every night in the theatre. On top of this was his freely admitted over-reliance on the booze to keep him going.

During early rehearsals his Macbeth seemed to be developing well, but at some point he lost it, and on the opening night he was not good. He knew he was not good, and most of the critics agreed with him. On the second night, he arrived in the wings, floating gaily on a bottle or so of vodka, and boomed loudly in that stirring Welsh baritone: "I wish I was a thousand bloody miles away from here, boyo!"

The stage manager's nightly report revealed that the performance lasted 25 minutes longer than usual. During that time, we were at the receiving end of a feast of quite incompatible ingredients: endless pauses; long passages of improvisation (some meaningful, some not); flashes of blazing brilliance and long stretches of the bored, colourless delivery of someone just going through the motions.

This went on for about a week. Then one Tuesday morning, Larry came up to the rehearsal room where we were working on The Cherry Orchard, and beckoned me across to him: "Darling boy, can you play Mackers on Friday?"

"No. Why - what's happened?"

"Tony's fucked off."

"Ah. I see. Well, I'm sure you've spoken to him, but would it help if I rang him and asked if he can hang on until I'm ready?"

He went purple. I thought he was going to have a stroke. Then the voice burst out with all the force of the entire brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra: "Don't go near the fucking phone! I never want to see the little bastard in this building EVER AGAIN!"

I had to sit him down and repeatedly reassure him that I could do it in the time - four days - before it returned to the repertoire. In the event all was well. I surprised everybody, even myself.

The last play to be staged at the Old Vic before we moved to Denys Lasdun's monumental concrete pile on the South Bank was Peter Hall's production of The Tempest. John Gielgud was playing Prospero for the third time in his career, and I was Caliban. John was by now over 70, but the years had not diminished his mastery of the art of verse speaking - if anything, it seemed more effortless than ever. Effortless, however, was not the word to describe our dress rehearsal. John Bury had designed an exotic set dominated by a great golden sun, two great black rocks that slid across the stage, and trap-doors for eye-catching entrances and exits. Somewhere round about midnight, John was launching into the great speech in the last act - in which he reveals his identity - when he disappeared from view. He had fallen through a trap-door. Peter Hall, never previously known for his athletic prowess, ran from the production desk at the back of the stalls down to the edge of the stage and, in a voice of preternatural calm, breathed: "John? Are you all right?" After an agonising pause, those uniquely velvety tones wafted elegantly up through the gaping hole in the stage, saying: "Yes, I think I'm all right." Fortunately for John, though less fortunately for the young man concerned, he had landed on top of the actor playing Ferdinand, who was waiting to come up through the trap for his chess game with Miranda. We carried on.

Half an hour later, one of the big black rocks trundled across the stage, hit John smack in the face and knocked him flat on the floor. He dusted himself down, said, "I think we should call this the Rocky Horror Show, don't you?" and soldiered on to the end. I should have known that in his own willowy fashion, he was just as tough as Larry.

The opening night went wonderfully well until the moment when I had to perform one of the most beautiful speeches in the play which Shakespeare, with exquisitely touching irony, puts into the mouth of the misshapen, half-human Caliban: "Be not afeared - the isle is full of noises." The Old Vic is situated just along the road from a busy ambulance station. Dead on cue came "doowah doowah doowah" as an ambulance sped up the Waterloo Road. The audience had hysterics of course, and I had to stop, turn my back, then fix them with a beady eye and start all over again. They loved it. Oddly enough, so did I.

© Denis Quilley. This is an edited extract from The Quilley Memorandum: Happiness Indeed - An Actor's Life, published by Oberon, price £19.99.