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The
first dramatic role I ever played was the Virgin Mary at my local Sunday
school, I think I was about seven. I must have got a taste for performance
because not so long afterwards I wrote and performed my first play at
primary school. As I remember it was called BARTHOLOMEW. Bartholomew was a
naughty little boy – I played that part – who stole a cigarette from his
parents and smoked it, on-stage, amidst great giggling from the audience of
my classmates.
I have
written elsewhere on this site about getting a New Zealand Government
Scholarship to study acting in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,
and how I hated it, but how winning the Bancroft Gold Medal meant I was
offered lots of work. But it was only when I saw Paul Scofield playing King
Lear that I truly understood what acting could be: how it could move and
change people. After that I cared much, much more about working to be as
good an actress as I could. Later I worked with Paul Scofield in the film
of Michael Morpurgo’s
Why the Whales Came. We walked along the beach
on the Scilly Isles where we were filming and I was able to tell him how he
had inadvertently changed my life. But it took me a much longer time
to understand, though I am sure all young actors do today, how much one must
be pro-active in getting work, create your own work. Sitting round and
waiting for your agent to phone went out the window many years ago.
 Although
I have done very much stage work, (Chehov and Ibsen and Tennessee Williams
were my favourite playwrights when I was young), and have been in a lot of
television (in particular for Granada Television), I have this nightmare of
being remembered most for my performance as Zena the barmaid in one of the
films I have been in, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave
about which
people still write letters to me today, forty years later. I was
somewhat snooty about it at the time, and I remember distinctly that the big
Hammer Horror bosses were snooty also: I was rather thin and wispy, not big
and brassy which is what they wanted. But the director Freddie Francis, and
the producer Aida Young just laughed: they taught me how to stuff a bra with
cotton wool and found a big red wig and Zena the barmaid appeared – I do not
know to this day whether the bosses thought I had been replaced, or
realised it was still me.
 Then
Granada Television ‘discovered’ me. I was in the H.E. Bates Country Matters
series; that play
The Little Farm was nominated for an Emmy award in
America. I then
went into Sam, a serial about a northern mining village; then into
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens. Six weeks in the Lake District working
with Ken Russell on his two television films about Coleridge
and Wordsworth taught me to enjoy walking immensely: I was made-up every day
but not
used often, and if I was dismissed I would stride all around the lake in the
sunshine with funny hair. All the gritty Northern dramas led to John
Stevenson and Julian Roach writing a send-up of such programmes: this was
Brass. I didn’t realise how that old stuffed bra trick would come in so
handy: once I’d mooted the idea the writers couldn’t wait to write weekly
jokes about ‘the bosom of the family.’ Recently
Brass was celebrated
on ITV in Comedy Classics, and so we decided to have a Brass reunion:
in an Italian restaurant all the actors confessed that it had been their
favourite job of all time.
 But I
kept going back to the stage. I have played Jean Brodie, and Viola in
Twelfth Night,
and Lady Macbeth, and Solveig in
Peer Gynt,
and
Blanche duBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and Mother Courage
(twice.) I have attended acting classes and yoga classes and speech classes
off and on all my life. I’ve worked with wonderful actors and terrible
actors and boring actors and drunk actors. I have been in plays by,
among many others, Alan Ayckbourn and John Osborne and Jean Anouilh and Noel Coward and David
Williamson and Dostoyevsky and Sam Shephard and Richard Brinsley Sheridan
and George Bernard Shaw.
 I wrote a one-woman play
Alexandra Kollontai
about the extraordinary first woman in Lenin’s cabinet, and toured it to
Edinburgh Festival, and the Sydney Festival, and the Soviet Union just
before the fall of Gorbachev. In Kiev, where I acted alongside an
amplified, simultaneous, male translator, a woman stood up and shouted at me
in heavily accented English: “Why didn’t you do a play about Queen Victoria?
We are not interested in the WHORE of the Revolution!”
And
just occasionally I have felt it: that magical energy between actors, or
between actors and audience, a kind of electricity that sets the stage on
fire. It is thrilling when it happens, and worth everything. But as most
actresses of my age have found: older male actors go on, are in their prime,
but older actresses are simply old, and fall by the wayside. I still act,
and hope to keep on acting, but I know how lucky I am to have two
professions, and as I do many readings from my novels I suppose you could
say they sometimes merge into each other.
However: it’s taking a long time to get my own novels turned into television
or film. By the time it happens I will probably have to play the very old
ladies.
Luckily, in my last three novels, there are several magnificent old
ladies….
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