Tom Courtenay vs fame

‘You can’t talk about what might have been,’ says Tom Courtenay, reflecting on an acting career that blazed like a meteor the moment he left drama school and is now in its sixth decade. ‘The things you might have done, the films you might have made. I just didn’t feel comfortable with the world of international cinema. I saw a bit of it, the so-called hellraising and what have you, and realised it wasn’t for me’.

Not talking about the things he chose not to do doesn’t mean there is nothing to talk about. A trim 75, Courtenay has enjoyed a life blessed with good things, from the day he passed his 11-plus (one of only two boys in his class who did) to win a place at Kingston High School in Hull, where Alan Plater, the writer, was two years his senior. The working-class lad from the fish docks became head boy, before he went from the Humber to University College London, where his acting affected his English studies, and then Rada, where he found his true voice.

Upon graduation in 1960 it was straight into the Old Vic production of The Seagull, as the disaffected student Konstantin. Then came an extraordinary run of film roles: Billy Liar (which he also played on stage), Colin Smith in The Loneliness of the Long -Distance Runner, and Pasha Antipov in David Lean’s adaptation of Dr Zhivago, a worldwide smash. Here were three more disaffected young men, in Yorkshire and Russia, a world away in time and mood from Quartet, Courtenay’s latest film, which was released this month.

Directed by Dustin Hoffman (making his debut behind the camera at 75) from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, 78, with Courtenay, Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins and Billy Connolly playing opera singers in a retirement home, Quartet is a divertissement about mortality that takes its cue from the closing line of Larkin’s ‘The Old Fools’: ‘Well, we shall find out.’