This Much Is True

I love an audience. If I hadn’t been a professional actress, I would have been a terrible show-off. Many would say I am! To have a live audience of hundreds and hundreds of people, all looking at you — that to me is heaven. I love contact. I love action and reaction. It’s how I know I’m alive. I cherish my audiences and I’m grateful for them.

My father was baffled by it. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you do that. It would frighten me to death. Who would do such a thing?’ The thing is, standing on the stage doesn’t frighten me to death, it frightens me to life!

But Mummy understood. She had studied singing and dancing and had wanted to be an actress. She almost had been — she was one of twelve finalists in the Golden Voice Competition of 1936, which then was the equivalent of Britain’s Got Talent. But a ‘nice Jewish girl’ didn’t go on the stage — certainly not in the twenties and thirties — so her passion became a hobby. She used to entertain around Oxford for charity, and for me in our front room. When I decided on a career in acting, she was delighted that I had chosen the path she longed to take and that she could perform vicariously through me.

What makes a good actor? I think it’s a talent, or should I say a personality disposition, that you’re born with. However, I think you can improve and refine your gift through attention to detail, careful observation, a love of people and a desire to communicate. How much of it is training, how much of it is innate? A mixture of both. I have no formal training: I didn’t go to drama school, mainly because I was already twenty-two when I left Cambridge and I didn’t want to remain a student for another three years. I read quite a bit about theatrical technique but mainly I have learnt on the job and through observing others.

That’s why I admire Eileen Atkins so much, because her flawless technique doesn’t get in the way of truth. She performs economically according to that old dictum ‘Less is more’, which infuriates me because although I know it is right, I always want to do more. I am an over-actress. And technique must be the spark that ignites the performance; truth is inside, but technique is the match that you strike to allow that truth to glow. I avoid analysing my own technique because I’m frightened that it’s a small, weak thing and that if it hits the light and the sun shines on it, it might completely fragment and disappear, so I tend to let my instinct guide me and hope for the best.

When I read a text, I use the bricks of my own personality to fashion a character. It’s the text that gives you the mortar, the other elements of what you’re creating and what you have at the back of your mind’s eye. When I get a play script, I want to see if the character has changed at all during the course of the piece. Is there an arc to the character? Or, if not, does she move in any way from beginning to end? If there is no movement, I have to try to put it there, because it’s boring to know everything about a character from the minute they step onto the stage. The actor or actress must surprise the audience in order to engage them and to entertain them. That’s what I look for in the writing. But the surprise must be organic, from within. Imposing it won’t work.

The great actress Edith Evans used to say, ‘Before I go on stage, I say to myself, «I am beautiful. And I have a secret.» ’ That was her method, but that’s not for me. First of all, I certainly don’t think I’m beautiful. As for ‘I have a secret’… well, I don’t have any secrets — that’s my strength. But it certainly seemed to work for Dame Edith.

I try rather to discover what it is that opens the door to a character for me, and it’s always different things — maybe a single line of my script, or something that another character in the play says. I see every rehearsal as an opportunity both to offer and to glean something new from my fellow actors — as long as you are receptive to that dialogue and you open yourself to the moment, the process of finding your way into a character becomes a continual foreplay. Every inch of your skin has got to be sensitive to the moment, and if you’re lucky, the moment comes — but it can go again just as quickly. It is a flash, and you can’t control it and you can’t compel it — you just have to be available. That’s the most important thing: you make yourself available for the moment. When it happens, it happens and it is exciting when, suddenly, you can forget yourself. That’s what occurs in the best moments when you’re on stage — you’re not you any more: you’re the person you’re playing.