An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises on her leg that she had got while tumbling about with her stage lover during the second act of Noël Coward’s Private Lives.

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