Actors don’t retire, they just stop getting cast. But while acting may seem an unusually insecure and unpredictable profession, if health and luck hold out then it can extend well beyond your 60s. The opportunities are tantalising, whether it’s Glenda Jackson playing King Lear at the Old Vic last year, Caryl Churchill continuing to write testing plays with older characters, or the upcoming production Lost Without Words, an improvised show for actors in their 70s and 80s created by the National Theatre and Improbable. I met up with three actors who are all still embracing challenging work in their 80s and asked them what kind of career they thought they might have at the start, and how they have survived it.
Siân Phillips, unusually, burst into stardom and is a star still. Timothy West needed age to catch up with his natural air of authority, while Janet Henfrey has from the beginning been a character actor. Each speaks most lovingly of the theatre, though television gave them additional lustre. Phillips, rebuilding her career in the wake of divorce, found acclaim as the poisonous Livia in I, Claudius. West earned respect as historical figures such as Edward VII and Winston Churchill. Henfrey embodied Dennis Potter’s fears as the humiliating schoolteacher in The Singing Detective.
Phillips describes her precocious entry into performing. “My mother taught me to recite,” she says, “and I started performing when I was about four. I worked all through my childhood at the BBC.” Even so, she says, “nobody wanted me to go into the profession. They thought I was completed unsuited temperamentally. What did they know about it, up a mountain in Wales? But everyone thought I was not tough enough to take the reversals.” The playwright Saunders Lewis, who wrote especially for her, urged her to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada). “He wrote to me, ‘you have to learn to live on the knife edge of insecurity.’ But everything turned out to be very easy. There were no reversals. I didn’t have to learn to deal with unemployment.”
Henfrey and West (whose father, Lockwood West, was also a notable actor) both defied parental disapproval to act. Henfrey was tutored by Iris Murdoch at Oxford and initially hoped to work for the UN. On an exchange year in America, she shook hands with the young JFK. But when she joined Rada, she felt: “I’d come home.” There, she learned to bypass her academic instincts – her tutor Nell Carter, a star of the Edwardian stage, implored her: “Janet, don’t be so logical!”
Like most actors of their generation, Henfrey and West began in regional repertory theatre. Henfrey “wrote letters to every rep in the country”, and ended up “playing old ladies” in Pitlochry. This lost world provided an invaluable training for West, who didn’t go to drama school. Fortnightly rep – two weeks to rehearse, two to perform – offered over 20 productions each year, requiring “a variety of style, text, manners, accents”. He even survived weekly rep: “We didn’t do it very well, but we did it.” At Salisbury in 1957, a bold director introduced two weeks of rehearsals: “Some of the older actors muttered, ‘what are we going to do with the second week?’”
Henfrey’s first job was as an assistant stage manager for a play starring Phillips. She quietly forged her own path, securing work and negotiating wages – “I didn’t have an agent for my first 10 years in the business. I felt very pleased with myself when I got [producer] Michael Codron up by five pounds.” What shape did they imagine their careers might take? “In those days you didn’t see much further than the end of your nose,” West says. “If you were in rep in Lincoln, you might look to get to Liverpool. If you were in Liverpool you’d look to Bristol – because producers came to Bristol, so you might slip into the hallowed West End. Nobody gives a toss about the West End now, but in those days you were lucky if you made the leap. No shame if you didn’t – there were people doing rep all their lives, sometimes in the same place.”
From the beginning, both Henfrey and West played characters far older than themselves. “The first part I played of my own age was the stage manager in [the original production of] The Dresser,” Henfrey says, while West feels his casting was “a cheap option” for penny-pinching reps. “I don’t know what it is – Michael Billington always says I’ve got ‘bottom’, which I think he means as a compliment. It’s a solidity and weight but means I’ve never played parts like Hamlet or Romeo.” Nor did his hero, Ralph Richardson, who “excelled in playing really dull people. There was no concession to their dullness, but, gosh, it was riveting to watch. I’ve never wanted to do ‘great acting’, I leave that to others. I try to play truthful acting.”
Phillips, meanwhile, sailed straight into leading roles: St Joan, for example. Her cheekbones are still a marvel, but “my looks were never my fortune”, she says. “I was an unfashionable looking girl, tall and dark and my hair was all wrong. Pretty girls of my period had fair hair and curls and were shorter than me. Then I had a bad car accident which smashed my face in, but I can’t remember worrying about it for one second – I just thought I’d do different parts.”
What derailed her, she says simply, was that “I got married”. Her husband, Peter O’Toole, was himself a bright star, but reluctant to share the limelight. “It was in many ways a disaster, professionally, because everything that I’d built up was destroyed very quickly. I lost all my contacts, I had to break contracts. I felt very isolated. Having had everything at my feet, I had to do quiet, low-key things which didn’t attract attention to myself – which is harder than you think! Once or twice something became a big success, which was disastrous.”
That period, she admits, “did clip my wings. I was in my early 30s, which are the big years for an actress, but realised that I wasn’t going to be able to do the things I should be doing. But I thought the worst thing would be to get bitter and miserable, so I thought: I won’t do that, I just won’t.” Even so, she says calmly, “for years and years I led a very solitary life. I didn’t let it sour me, but in the end I realised it had to stop. That was hard.” She left O’Toole (they divorced in 1979), and flung herself back into work. “I had to make a lot of money quickly, because I was penniless. I had to buy a house, furniture, clothes, and I had to do it fast.”
West would later have his own hair-raising encounter with O’Toole when, as director of the Old Vic, he cast the loose-cannon star as a calamitous Macbeth. A more frequent and less lurid frustration was typecasting. “Sometimes I felt: come on, they ought to be giving me something more interesting. There was one director who would only cast me as a middle-aged gay man – lovely parts, but he wouldn’t touch me for anything else. I like challenges.” He admits to short periods of “despair about ever getting another part. I think I inherited that from my father, who constantly said, ‘There’s been a conspiracy to keep me out of work. I’ve been boycotted.’”
Except for a fortunate few, acting doesn’t make your fortune. As a single parent, Henfrey says “it was very hard until I had a home of my own. I didn’t have a base, so when I didn’t have a job there was a whole identity crisis.” Before that, she was renting a basement room in west London – affordable only because it was supposedly uninhabitable. Without a home, she says gravely, “I don’t know how you don’t go insane.” Of the three actors, she is the only one to admit to thinking hard about leaving the profession, as long as she could find “something real and useful”. She is politically active, explored speech therapy and enjoyed teaching voice – she was on the brink of accepting a leading management role when cast in a TV adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Even after the success of The Singing Detective, she tells me, she didn’t work for a year – and was repeatedly cast as teachers. So how do you stay sane in the face of uncertainty? “I always advise young actors to have a second string that they’re not committed to,” she replies. “If you’re not obsessed with this profession, you’ll never survive.”
If acting offers a hazardous career, it values experience. All three interviewees have recently enjoyed some of their most challenging roles. Henfrey navigated the fiendish text of Caryl Churchill’s Blue Heart (“challenging, stimulating and perplexing”), while West, remarkably, played his fourth King Lear, during the EU referendum: apt for a tragedy, he says, about “tearing up the map, old people making a disastrous decision and letting the younger people sort it out”.
If Phillips felt that she missed a swath of her career, she has made up for it in recent years with, she calculates, 11 theatre productions in succession, embracing physical theatre with Frantic Assembly, an unusual geriatric take on Romeo and Juliet (in Bristol) and, most recently, the four-hour epic Les Blancs at the National Theatre, directed by South African Yaël Farber. “I thought I’d met every kind of director known to man,” she muses, “but I hadn’t met anyone like Yaël. She’s so demanding and difficult. To this day I can’t work out what she does, but she’s a brilliant director.”
Both Phillips and West have since been followed by their children into a profession that depends on waiting for the call. I ask all three actors if there has ever been a point when they have felt captains of their destiny – and all three brush the question aside before I finish speaking. “No, never,” West says. “I don’t think any actor would ever say that – you’re always looking for the next thing, nothing is permanent.” He reflects for a moment, then adds, “I think we prefer it not to be permanent.”
In this nerve-shredding trajectory, what is the satisfaction of acting? “I can’t imagine ever being bored with a part,” Phillips maintains. “When you think of the impossibility of becoming another person for every second that you’re on stage, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to do it – but it’s fun to try.”
View all comments >