May
24th, 2020rosalyn51
Nickolas
Grace remembers playing Anthony Blanche in the glorious TV version of
Brideshead Revisited - The Oldie
On
Brideshead Revisited’s 75th anniversary, Nickolas Grace recalls the joy of
playing the camp, eyelid-fluttering Anthony Blanche
Had I
been born two years earlier, I would be as old as Brideshead Revisited,
published 75 years ago! Still, I’d rather be younger.
One
sunny morning in 1979, my agent asked me to read for a new series, Brideshead
Revisited. My heart leapt – I adored the book at school. I dared to ask the
question: which part?
‘Anthony
Blanche.’
‘Oh
God, isn’t that the queer guy with the stutter?’
‘The
very same,’ responded my agent.
I went
off to meet the director, the classically handsome, cigar-smoking Michael
Lindsay-Hogg; the producer, the charmingly effusive Derek Granger (who turns 99
on 23rd April); and the casting director, Doreen Jones. She didn’t want me for
the role! There was no reading at all; just an informal chat and an invitation
to a screen test in Manchester.
I
found Blanche’s stutter a genuine challenge. When the screen test happened, I
just went for it, and found my eyelids fluttering with each stutter.
They
said they’d be in touch the next day. I wandered back to the station, where I
bumped into Lindsay-Hogg.
On the
train, he declared, ‘You’ve got the part – so you can relax and we can chat all
the way back to London!’
The
next morning, I received from Derek Granger a huge package of letters and
articles about Waugh’s contemporaries, including Maurice Bowra, Peter Quennell,
Bryan Guinness and Harold Acton and Brian Howard – the two inspirations for
Blanche.
The
best information came from the puppet master himself, Mr Waugh. His first
description of Blanche includes ‘part Gallic, part Yankee, part perhaps Jew:
wholly exotic’. That gave me a huge canvas on which to paint.
Acton
and Howard had been rivals at both Eton and Oxford, both vying for the title of
‘aesthete par excellence’. Like Blanche, Acton had stood on his balcony at
Christ Church, declaiming Eliot’s The Waste Land through a megaphone to the
‘meaty boys’ walking below; as an undergraduate, Howard varnished his finger
and toenails. When he was an AC2 in the RAF, he dragged up at weekends and
worked as a waitress at the Ritz.
By the
time I played Blanche, Howard had been dead for 21 years, and Acton locked away
in his beautiful Villa La Pietra in Florence.
Marie-Jacqueline
Lancaster’s Brian Howard biography is packed with outrageous tales of his
extrovert behaviour. Predominantly, though, I relied on Waugh’s superb detail.
I used
his ‘Gallic’ clue to introduce the French ‘r’. I exaggerated his stutter, and
fluttered my ‘large, saucy eyes’ with each affected stutter, extending any
innocent, unsuspecting word. The challenge was to convince the audience that it
was the character who was over the top, and not the actor. Only you can judge.
At our
first rehearsal, at the Spread Eagle in Thame, Jeremy Irons said, ‘You’re not
really going to play it like that, are you?’ Anxiously, I looked to
Lindsay-Hogg, who gave me a definitive nod of approval. So I was off, and onto
the B-B-Brandy Alexanders…!
All
progressed swimmingly from April until, suddenly, filming ground to a halt,
because of a technicians’ strike. When we started again in November,
Lindsay-Hogg reluctantly had to resign, owing to film commitments in the USA.
Large chunks of John Mortimer’s script were rejected and, with Granger’s
guidance, we restored much of Waugh’s original.
Despite
the vicissitudes of the strike and the erratic schedule, it was one of the
happiest and longest shoots of my life, from April 1979 to August 1981. Et in
arcadia eram. When the series was finally broadcast, in October 1981, the
reaction was unexpected and overwhelming.
I did
eventually meet Harold Acton in 1984, when he invited me to his 80th-birthday
drinks party at Claridge’s. He was still full of ‘c-creamy English charm’ but
not as extrovert as I had hoped. On a postcard to me, he wrote, ‘Enjoy the
fruits of your youth whilst ye may!’
As for
Brian Howard, I received a letter from an elderly lady, Carley Dawson, Howard’s
cousin, who invited me to Washington DC. She said, ‘But you’re so much nicer
than Brian!’
I owe
Brideshead a huge debt, and much gratitude to Lindsay-Hogg and Granger for
casting me. It transformed my career, leading to an assortment of fascinating
roles and unexpected, decadent adventures, some of which I shall reveal in my
autobiography, when I am 80 – adhering to Sir John Gielgud’s instructions to me
when I was working on his King Lear in 1994, commissioned by the BBC for his
90th birthday.
Happy
birthday, Brideshead Revisited, and thank you very much!
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