As the President of the Associates of Rada and an ex-Rada student, I was asked to make a speech about my days at the academy for the third-year students and some of my friends.Speech-giving is tough, speech-writing even tougher and I envy Mr Obama and his silky way with words. Does he write them himself, I wonder, or does he have a team of experts crafting his elegant soliloquies? Certainly his recent speech in Kenya was masterful and he verbalised what many people thought for years and dared not speak for fear of offending the Gods of Political Correctness: namely, that Africa is to blame for its recent troubles.
My Rada speech was only a teensy bit politically incorrect but nevertheless it seemed to go down quite well. I was struck by the enormous difference in the way the students looked between today and the 1950s. They were all much older than our group. I was 16 when I started at Rada as were David McCallum, Diane Cilento, Susan Stephen and many others. We were fresh out of school, innocent, naive and quite frankly wet behind the ears. We wandered through the streets of Soho in our short and revealing outfits (the girls that is) with never a thought of being mugged or having our space invaded. Great care was taken with hair, make up and grooming: we even had make-up classes at Rada. We were all instructed to speak the preferred Received English of the time — in other words we were taught to speak in a sort of adenoidal glottal-stop squawk, and regional accents were out. Celia Johnson personified this ‘proper’ voice in Brief Encounter. ‘Aim heppy, eow so heppy,’ she squeaked. Good actress, but, oh, that voice. Needless to say Rada’s classes of 2009 all have Glaswegian, Mancunian, Irish or Welsh brogues and are encouraged always to use their natural accents in their work.
After I gave a speech it was Q and A time and the usual questions. The final one was, ‘Why do you think that your generation could attend Rada right after leaving school without qualifications and now we have to have degrees and have been through higher education?’ ‘Higher education,’ I scoffed. ‘All you need to be an actor is know your lines and hit your marks!’
Prince Azim, the second-born son of the Sultan of Brunei, threw a lavish birthday party for his sisters and himself at a magnificent hotel deep in the heart of Leicestershire. No ordinary group of guests this. As Percy and I, with my daughter Tara and Paul, her fiancé, drove up slightly late, standing in the doorway, deep in conversation, were Faye Dunaway, Ursula Andress and Jerry Hall, a trio of vintage beauties still well in season. ‘Wait till you see who else is here,’ whispered Jerry, as Sophia Loren, in all her red-frocked splendour, swept into the anteroom to greet the royal family. Then Mariah Carey sailed into the room, with just a simple entourage of three or four in tow. Jaws dropped at her skin-tight gown, seemingly sprayed on à la Marilyn Monroe. After greeting the prince’s sisters and mother, I remarked fatuously to her, ‘Ooh, is that real?’ about the playing-card-sized rock adorning her neck. Silly me!
We adjourned for dinner and all of ‘the girls’ surrounded the young prince, who seemed especially entranced by Mariah Carey. I had read and heard much about this so-called difficult and impossibly demanding diva whom everyone hated. To my surprise she turned out to be utterly charming, delightful and amusing, with absolutely no hint of divadom at all. I spoke to her at length and not only was she intelligent and captivating but she possessed a good sense of humour. How sad that the media have chosen her as one of their ‘Aunt Sallies’ to throw barbs at and constantly malign. I know of several actresses who receive nothing but plaudits from the press, yet are actually closet bitches. It seems once you’ve been put in a slot that’s either good girl or bad girl, that’s where you’ll always stay.
My blood runs cold when someone I don’t recognise sticks their face into mine and yelps, ‘Do you remember me?’ This happens a lot in the party season in St Tropez. Since I have a bad memory for faces (and some of their faces have been so plasticised that they’re almost unrecognisable), I’m often in a state of embarrassment, particularly when one of the faces belongs to a woman whose party I attended a year ago. So now I have taken a leaf from Jack Nicholson’s book, certainly a face one couldn’t forget. At parties he stretches out his hand and grins, ‘Hi, I’m Jack,’ which usually forces the other person to reveal their name. It also prevents that ghastly huggy, kissy performance which I’m also averse to. At Selfridges’ 100th anniversary last month a girl I didn’t know dashed forward to greet me in hug ’n’ kiss mode. I took a step back and yelped, ‘Sorry, I don’t kiss people I don’t know.’ The lady in question, one Lily Allen, whom I had never met, later went on Twitter to report this exchange. By the next morning friends in America were emailing me excitedly about this (to me) non-event. It used to be the power of the press. Now it’s the fatuous power of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo or MySpace! I guess people don’t read much anymore. Too busy ‘twittering’ away. What a waste of time.
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