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Saturday 11 October 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

A difficult war had followed. He served in Normandy and Belgium as an officer, which he says was ‘terrifying’. Later, in the Far East, he was at the liberation of Changi jail. He saw things that he still cannot talk about. ‘It was a strange way, between the ages of 18 and 24, to form a character. I think I was in a daze when I came back to Britain. It took me a while to come to terms with it.’

A critic once said that Vaughan could convey menace reading a weather forecast. One wonders if his early life made him the kind of actor that he is. ‘Obviously one’s experiences inform one’s acting. I think the more experience you have of life, the better it is for an actor. In terms of the parts I played, I think my face had more to do with it. Clearly I wasn’t ever going to play romantic leads.’

He tackles every job with relish — ‘I have always approached every one I have done as if it will be my last and that it’s the one I will be judged by’ — and he has affection, too, even for his less than successful ventures, such as Fatherland, the film version of Robert Harris’s thriller. ‘I enjoyed that because of the part — I was playing a Nazi. Obviously some of the things I have done have been better than others, but I have always tried my best. That’s what counts. Arthur Lowe once said to me that it is our job not only to do the classics but also to disguise, where necessary, bad scripts.’

If he has a ‘career guru,’ it is, he says, Lilias, his wife of the past 40 years. ‘She was a much finer actor than me, but she gave it up to raise the family. I owe her everything.’ He has lately welcomed Gregor Fisher — better known as Rab C. Nesbitt — to the family as his son-in-law. He laughs at the mention of his name. Clearly nothing daunts this man.

He is in good nick for an octogenarian, which is just as well as he is seldom, if ever, not working these days. He has just completed filming a one-off drama called Christmas at the Riviera which will be broadcast by ITV1 over Christmas. The day after we met he was about to start work on a new film with Michael Caine about life in a nursing home. ‘This is no time to take it easy — I am in my prime,’ he says, quite seriously.

Tim Walker is the Sunday Telegraph’s Mandrake editor and theatre critic.

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