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Thursday 4 December 2008

‘This is no time to take it easy’

‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

At 84, the actor Peter Vaughan says he is entering his prime

‘I don’t do that,’ he says, his flinty, pale blue eyes suddenly narrowing. ‘I remember when I was making Straw Dogs the director, Sam Peckinpah, said he never wanted to see actors laughing at each other because when they are conscious that they are funny they cease to be funny. I can’t bear it when I pay good money to go to the theatre with my wife and we see actors on stage giggling with each other when they shouldn’t be. It is unprofessional.’

Some actors can cry on cue but Vaughan, the consummate pro, can do one better than that. One thinks of the droplet that fell from his nose into a bowl of soup as he served Lord Darlington’s guests in The Remains of the Day. How many takes did he need for that? ‘One, fortuitously. I did not have a cold at the time. The make-up girls gave me a solution to put up my nostril. I am not sure what it was, but it caused a reaction of some kind in my nose, and the required droplet fell at precisely the right moment.’

It is not hard to see why the director James Ivory cast him as Mr Stevens Snr. That old retainer’s professionalism — his desire to see that ‘everything is in hand’ — is every bit as much of an obsession of Vaughan. Typically, before he started work on Our Friends in the North he spent many hours at a home that cared for Alzheimer’s sufferers. ‘One wants to be real, above all things,’ he says.

He has come up the traditional way — years in rep and then the West End stage and small parts in films and on television — and, as he says, no part has ever fallen into his lap. Even as Mr Stevens Snr — a part it now seems inconceivable that anyone else could have played — he says he was up against strong opposition. ‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around.’

His first big break was playing Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at Wyndham’s Theatre in 1964. ‘Joe was a one-off. He would always wear army boots, a Chairman Mao jacket and an old War Department gas mask over his shoulder in which he had his meat pie for lunch and his copy of the script. If I asked him about a line, he’d tell me it means whatever I want it to mean. Pinter would say the same thing and, years later, when I was making the film The Crucible, so, too, did Arthur Miller.’

Vaughan was married for more than a decade to the actress Billie Whitelaw. He affects to remember little, if anything, of the union, but some years ago he told a journalist he wondered if he had been much good at communicating his emotions in those days. His parents — father was a bank clerk and mother a nurse — were unhappily married. He was a loner during his childhood and early adolescence.

More articles from: Tim Walker | this section

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