The first lesbian kiss on British television was performed by Alison Steadman
in Girl, a 1974 BBC play that her mother couldn’t bring herself to watch.
“Don’t let anyone tell you it was on Brookside,” says the actress with a
proud little laugh. “My mum said, ‘Oh, Alison! Your father and I couldn’t
look. We’re so upset.’ ” Later the Liverpool housewife would concede
that it was a good play “aside from all that kissing business”. When
Steadman went on to play a prostitute, she rang her father to warn him. “He
went, ‘Oh God!’ Then he said, ‘Are they paying you well?’ I
said, ‘Quite well.’
He said, ‘Oh, well, do it then!’ ”
Since those days Britain’s favourite character actress hasn’t outraged
suburbia, merely punctured its vanities with her hilarious, and mercilessly
observed, women. Not that there is anything remotely sharp or satirical, or
even urban, about her; she is dotty about foxes, refuses to swat flies (she
opens the window for them, and possibly knits them bootees), bird-watches in
Trent Park, is a stalwart member of the London Wildlife Trust. When she
tells me about joining the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and going on a
“bee-walk”, however, I wonder momentarily if she had been researching a
reprise of her Candice-Marie role from Nuts in May, but no. “It’s just so
nice; you’re with people who don’t have an ego. They’re just interested in
nature. They can teach me something.”
On the eve of the opening of her new play, a revival of Alan Bennett’s Enjoy,
with a packed house and rave reviews, the director Christopher Luscombe
asked his leading lady what more she wanted from life? Steadman, now 62,
smiled, not thinking of Broadway transfers or Olivier awards. “More wildlife
holidays,” she announced firmly. “And she absolutely meant it,” laughs
Luscombe.
In person Steadman is quietly elegant in her long suede jacket, her modern
chunky turquoise necklace, with long highlighted hair; on stage she couldn’t
care less. “I’ve got over looking glamorous,” she says in her unspecifically
northern accent. “On stage, or anywhere else. I’m past child-bearing
age.” Ageing is not so much a crisis of confidence or career, but the
annoying reason she can’t jump down from stone walls on 10-mile country
treks. She looks the sort of smartly turned out, middle-aged empty-nester
you might see browsing the handbags in John Lewis in Brent Cross near her
north London home, where indeed she’d been the day before we met.
Or indeed in Chichester, where I see her in Alan Bennett’s story of a dying
back-to-back community where the only hope for preservation is to join the
heritage industry. She acts everyone else off the stage, carrying every
scene as poor old Connie, known as “Mam”, the Leeds housewife with a
wandering mind and an errant family. As she turned her back on the audience
after the final curtain call, she started to cough and her co-star David
Troughton placed a protective arm around her shoulder; a young member of the
cast came over to stroke her back. The familial warmth she exudes on stage
is not just acted but actual. The director laughs about having an easy ride
— his star is so polite, unassuming and punctual that the young actors
follow her maternal lead.
In life Steadman was always destined for doting motherhood; as a child she
nurtured a doll with plastic moulded hair. “It was called Johnny. I used to
bathe it in the sink and put talc on its bottom.” Her two sons with the
film-maker Mike Leigh, from whom she separated in 1995, are the pride and
pleasure of her life: Toby, 29, an illustrator who makes her good-luck cards
for her opening nights, and Leo, 27, a film-maker who will never labour in
his father’s shadow. “Oh, no, he’s his own person,” she insists. “When Toby
told me he was going to study illustration I said, ‘Fantastic.’ Then I
thought, ‘Oh my God, he’ll never make a living.’ But it wouldn’t have suited
them to have been doctors or businessmen.”
When Leo was doing his drama GCSE at state school in north London, he tried to
stop his illustrious parents coming to watch his assessed performance. “He
said, ‘If you come, these are the rules: you don’t talk to anybody, you
don’t make any comments.’ People must have thought we were real snobs.” He
also objected to his mother’s rape in the first episode of Kavanagh QC in
1995. “He said, ‘Can’t you do Pride and Prejudice kind of things all the
time?’ ” She chuckles. “The only time they were interested in my work was
when I did the 1986 Christmas special of In Sickness and in Health. I had
this scene with Warren Mitchell and they thought it was brilliant. That was
the only thing they’ve ever talked about. One episode in a whole career.”
In general her work has not involved much cringe-making sex and nudity. In her
first job, in repertory at Lincoln in 1969, she played the precocious Sandy
in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and eschewed the body stocking for a brief
flash of bottom. For all her commitment to raw-edged realism, Steadman was
raised to be ladylike, private, even rather proper, never acquiring a taste
for her contemporary Helen Mirren’s bohemian abandon. Or even much ambition.
She promises that the very best years of her life were the ones away from
acting “and all that stuff”, at home with her sons when they were babies.
“I’ve thought, ‘Oh, I’d love those times back. But you can’t have them back.
They are gone and that’s that.”
Straight-talking and quick to laugh, she is almost too down-to-earth for her
own good; so easy-going she can seem almost ordinary, which, of course, she
isn’t in the least, given the accolades of the past 40 years. With her
modesty (never false, just unfailing) and her description of free time spent
pottering in charity shops and weathering the menopause (without the HRT
that gave her “depression and painful boobs”), she turns an interview into a
chat, a disarming and very different experience from the exercise in power
and ego many performers require it to be.
“I’m a bit old for digs,” she confesses when we talk about touring in this
play. “Or hotels, really. I prefer a flat, but then you’ve got to do
your own Weetabix and fruit.” Dogged normality is her armour, how she
negotiates the most self-regarding and vainglorious of professional worlds;
by being the star who refuses to shine excessively in case she gets blinded
to life’s realities. There is nothing of the grandeur or self-conscious
graciousness of the theatrical dames whose ranks she should have joined long
ago.
You can’t imagine a Dench, or a Rigg, or even a Mirren rating their triumphs
by how hellish the lines were to learn. Steadman shudders to recall
mastering Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1992), for
which she won an Olivier award playing the drunken, pushy mother Mari Hoff.
“It was hell to learn, but no pain, no guts, no glory.” She lost the film
role to her friend Brenda Blethyn; but not minding such slights is her first
rule of survival. “You should never covet any roles,” she says. “They chose
Brenda because she had a higher profile in the cinema. End of story. Forget
about it. Bitterness eats you up.” The week after she got the bad news she
bumped into Blethyn and the film’s director at an awards ceremony. “I said
to him, ‘Look, we’ve worked together and I like you. It’s not even your
choice.’ ” She stops and grins. “And if I find the bastard that didn’t give
me the job, I’ll poke his eye out.”
Today she lives in leafy north London with her actor boyfriend, Michael Elwyn.
They fell in love 12 years ago while making the BBC drama No Bananas and
seemed perfectly suited. They are not hobnobbers, but happiest on long
bracing walks with their sandwiches stashed in their rucksacks. “There’s a
bench opposite my flat,” she says. “I can take a coffee and sit surrounded
by my favourite trees when I’m doing my lines. I’m closer to Candice-Marie
than I am to Beverly in Abigail’s Party. And thank God for that.”
Steadman worked with Alan Bennett in 1986 in Kafka’s Dick at the Royal Court
in London with her friend Jim Broadbent, another member of a group of actors
regularly employed by Mike Leigh: Blethyn, Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville,
Liz Smith, Phil Davis — serious actors who are neither movie stars nor
sonorous thespians, but admired for their fine-tuned depiction of class and
locality. Indeed, it is Steadman’s resolute Englishness that most resonates
in all she does on and off screen. If think-tanks puzzle over what it is to
be British, they only have to consider the qualities embodied in Steadman’s
alter egos: humour, eccentricity, self-effacement, class-awareness,
absurdity in the quest for advancement, a touching acceptance of what must
be, passionate love of home. “I love my home,” Steadman says. “I don’t
really like being away from it.”
America doesn’t appeal. When she won her National Society of Film Critics
award for Life Is Sweet in 1992, she was “too long in the tooth” to be
offered a movie; she wouldn’t mind a stint on Broadway but had never
considered an LA-based film career. “My British agent made me go and see an
American agent.” She shakes her head at the memory. “I just thought, let me
get home. I know where I am at home. I know my work, I know my characters. I
don’t want to be here. Other people can go. What do you do when you go to
America? You play Americans. I don’t want to play Americans. I am known for
playing quirky English people. I know English people. I’m not interested in
whether you’re from California or upstate New York. I’m interested in
whether you’re from Leeds or Crawley.”
Steadman’s speciality is the comedy of social aspiration, her famed latter-day
Mrs Malaprops, whether Bev in Abigail’s Party or Mrs Bennet in the BBC’s
Pride and Prejudice, teetering on the edge of caricature, but never falling.
They are saved by the emotional depth the actress locates in even the
blackest comedy. “The doors I could have opened if it wasn’t for you,” says
Mam, echoing a host of Steadman’s creations, saddled with the gaffes and
humiliations of women tumbling over their eagerness for a posher life. They
are closely interlinked, a raucous conga of archetypes whose similarities
are partly imposed by the scripts, but also by her own tried-and-tested
style. The “little sandwich” offered by the grotesque Beverly is also on the
menu chez lovable Wendy in Life Is Sweet, who shares a throaty cackle with
salt-of-the-earth Pam in Gavin & Stacey. Bev is also a distant cousin of
brittle Veronica in Leigh’s Hard Labour, with her posh Sunday teas and
elevation of coleslaw into a status symbol.
The youngest daughter of a production controller at a Liverpool electronics
firm and a housewife, Steadman’s family sounds average until she mentions
the anarchic grandmother who wore men’s clothes “for a joke”, and the aunt
who threaded washing-line through a ring drilled into her tortoise’s shell
so it couldn’t escape. She was eight when the family acquired its first
television; she sat glued to Beryl Reid and Hattie Jacques, captivated by
Flora Robson’s hysterical Betsey Trotwood.
She imitated and entertained, the pretty darling of her family dressed up and
paraded around by her two big sisters; when she was nine she artfully
applied trickles of gum-enhancing red toothpaste to her eyes and mouth — “to
make it look as if I’d been hit” — and burst into the sitting room. “My
mother screamed. Dad jumped up and got hold of me, and I smiled and said,
‘It’s brilliant, this stuff, isn’t it?’ They went berserk.
I had no idea what I’d done wrong.” She left school at 16, took a secretarial
course (“My dad said it was a good fallback”), worked as a clerical
assistant in the probation service, having known since she was nine that she
wanted to act. “Though a bit of me wondered, ‘Is that allowed?’” All Mr
Steadman told his precious 17-year-old as she headed off to London — the
epicentre of vice and hedonism — was that if it didn’t work out, she
shouldn’t worry about coming home. “He said, ‘At least you will have tried,
and if it doesn’t work it will still enrich your life for the future.’ ”
In Liverpool she had attended the Youth Theatre and — though the only drama
school she had heard of was Rada — was advised by a contact at the Liverpool
Playhouse that East 15, whose principal had worked with Joan Littlewood,
might be a better bet for a girl so keen on improvisation. “I thought, yeah,
this is my world, not Rada.” It is a self-definition which, for better or
worse, would hold fast: not for reasons of anti-Establishment politics, or
inverted snobbery, but because it suited her natural irreverence and dislike
of elites. At her audition she was asked not to evoke Ophelia but to
impersonate Cassius Clay. “I just did it. It got me my place.”
It was at East 15 that she met Mike Leigh, who was directing a student play;
she was struck by the young Jewish northerner’s intensity, and the way his
improvisations delved deep into character, the importance he placed on
“externals”. She still insists on cheap shoes if they’re right
for the character, even if they cripple her.
“She has no vanity,” says Christopher Luscombe. “Some actresses would have
been hesitant to wear Mam’s unflattering wig; she relished it.” More than
that, Steadman personally oversaw its design and, smoothing her homely
overall, she looks as redundant as 60-year-old women used to. “When Mam puts
on her hat and best coat,” she says, “I see my mum looking back at me.”
(When her ex-husband and son
saw the play they were “spooked” by the resemblance.) A framed photo of the
much more sophisticated Marjorie Steadman adorns all her daughter’s theatre
dressing tables, still trusted confidante of her secret fears about
performing.
Part of Enjoy’s appeal was its northern setting. “I’ve played a
lot of Essex women,” Steadman muses, maybe meaning too many. As I walk
through the restaurant to get some water for my guest, who is enduring a hot
flush with great composure (“I’m not embarrassed. It’s a damn nuisance, but
so what? It’s part of life”) I hear a customer whisper to his friend,
“Look, it’s that woman from Gavin & Stacey. You know — the old Essex girl.”
Overhearing such conversations is her professional tool. Comments heard on the
bus, mannerisms, accents are stored away in her notebook, a magpie’s nest of
treasures. “I listen and I watch because that’s my job. How else could I
play all these parts?” For Mam she found an old Leeds woman talking about
her life on the internet. “That’s the real Leeds accent. Not your voice
coach’s… When I was on tour in Bath with Rula Lenska I was in a cafe and
there were two girls on the next table. One of them says to her friend [she
slips into Vicky Pollard gabble], ‘Guess what I dreamt last night? I dreamt,
right, that my boyfriend was having an affair with Rula Lenska.’ This friend
says, ‘No! You didn’t!’ She said, ‘I did!!!’ And she paused and said, ‘Well,
it was someone with big ’air anyway.’ You couldn’t write it. It’s perfect.”
Yet for all her fame and popularity (and her 1999 OBE), Steadman has been
overlooked for more highbrow or heavyweight roles. Mike Leigh thinks it
“preposterous” that she has done so little at the RSC or the National
Theatre. “These people are neglectful,” he rumbles. “They’ve got the idea
that she is limited to overblown, blousy women, which is nonsense. It’s
terrible what’s happened.” So why didn’t he redress the iniquity by choosing
her to play the poor bedraggled Cynthia in the family drama Secrets & Lies
that went to Blethyn (her again...), or even as the abortionist Vera Drake?
“That is impossible to answer,” he replies tactfully. “Which is not to say
she couldn’t have done it.”
But Steadman is quite resigned to her fate as a mainstream national treasure.
“It’s the luck of the draw,” she shrugs. “You can’t have everything and I’ve
had a lot.” She doesn’t yearn for Ibsen or Stoppard or Pinter; she is just
as happy playing everywoman in Horlicks telly like Fat Friends or doing the
voice-over on Bob the Builder. Christopher Luscombe describes her as placid.
“She’s not temperamental or fiery.
A lot of actors are frustrated people because life hasn’t dealt them the hand
they wanted, but not Alison.” She is indeed remarkably hard to ruffle. A
cacophonous bell goes off in the middle of our conversation. I frown and
tut-tut at the interruption; she laughs: “Oops! Pies are ready.”
Perhaps she has missed out because she is not one of those actors who
genuflects at the mention of the sainted Harold, or grows teary over the
magnanimity of the Bard. Don’t they make her cringe? She smiles. “Everyone
has their own thing, and if they were all like me, thrilled to bits when
they saw a fox, it would be a pretty boring life, wouldn’t it?”
She worked at the RSC briefly in 1983, taking over from another actor in
Tartuffe, and staying on for a second minor role; at the National she had a
supporting part in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and did Little Voice after it was
bought in. “I’ve never had ambitions in that sense,” she says.
“I’ve never known what I wanted to do until it came up. I’m just lucky I’ve
always earned my living acting. To have left drama school at 22 and arrived
at 62, having kept my head above water, is pretty good. I’m not patting
myself on the back. A bit of luck, a bit of talent, being in the right place
at the right time: that’s how it really works.”
The best of the breaks was the Hampstead Theatre’s 1977 production of Mike
Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, which later became a legendary Play for Today, with
Steadman cast as the monstrous hostess of a suburban drinks party. Having
handed round the nibbles (“Take another one, Sue, save me coming back”), she
sloshes out the Bacardi in the flame-orange tiered dress that concealed the
actress’s pregnancy with the director’s first son. Swaying seductively to
Demis Roussos’s Forever and Ever, creating a character so iconic that 30
years on nobody can eat a vol-au-vent without thinking of the ignorant,
lustful, pitiful Bev. She won an Evening Standard Theatre Award for the role
which has pursued her ever since. “When you play a part like Beverly, that’s
all anyone wants to talk about,” she says. “And all anyone wants you to
play. You get sent a script and they say, ‘It’s not Bev,’ but it is. You go
for a voice-over and they say they want you to do that voice… I was once
offered a lot of money to advertise something as Beverly. Thank God I wasn’t
tempted for a second. It would have cheapened it.”
Mike Leigh calls the part her “albatross”, a burden that has led people to
believe she is only a comedienne. “They forget,” he says, “that she was
celebrated long before Beverly for a heroic performance in Trevor Griffiths’
Through the Night [a ground-breaking 1975 TV play about a woman with breast
cancer] and that she gave a classic Uncle Vanya at the Hampstead Theatre.”
Steadman and Leigh were married for 28 years, and it is tempting to believe
she appeared in most of his work (actually it was only seven productions), a
muse as well as wife. She instantly dismisses the idea. “I was never a muse,
just an actress. I’ve been in a tiny proportion of his films. I didn’t
want to be in all of them. I had my own career as well, I wasn’t just
sitting waiting for him. We didn’t work together for a long time because of
our boys. I didn’t want them to grow up thinking, ‘What we remember about
our mother is her walking out the house.’ ”
She sees no reason why she and her ex could not work together again. She
admires his working methods, the closed-set rehearsals and painstaking
layering of character detail, as much as ever. “It’s about building a
character like you would build a house. You can’t just pluck it out of
thin air. You begin with the foundations.” As his wife, had she helped
originate his projects? “No, the actors don’t get involved. That is purely
Mike. We never discussed the play outside the rehearsal room. It’s
unnecessary, a distraction that would get in the way.” Her voice sounds
slightly tight when she talks about Leigh — maybe just bracing herself to
repel an intrusion — but she is fiercely loyal to him. One imagines she put
up with more than her fair share of temperamental genius over the years.
Leigh, who admires her deeply, hints as much when he talks about his friend
Jim Broadbent meeting Mia Farrow on the set of the film Widows’ Peak.
“He told her he was about to work with Woody Allen. She told him, ‘He’s a
great director, but don’t try marrying him.’ ”
In the future she might like to direct — if she can master her fear of the
lens — a story about two 12-year-old boys who find a body in a house in a
run-down British seaside town. But after Enjoy ends its West End run at the
Gielgud Theatre, the pottering bumblebee fancier is looking forward to a break.
“Something will come up. And if it doesn’t, I shall get a dog.”
At times she seems surprised to still be going strong. Recently she did a film
for no fee to help its young producers; the “old woman” in the script turned
out to be 94-year-old Anna Wing, whose grand theatrical voice Steadman
switches on like a light. “Hellooo dear,” she imitates, “ isn’t this
exciiiiting!” She says that Wing had been waiting on the pavement at six in
the morning for the taxi to take her to unpaid work just for fun. “How
amazing is that?” I venture that she’ll be the same, but she doubts it
somehow. She tires more easily these days; when she talks about the cast of
Abigail’s Party, all once her good fiends, there is a jolt of nostalgia
which reminds you that, despite the glossy hair and the peachy skin, she is
a venerable survivor. Harriet Reynolds, who played Sue, died young of
ovarian cancer, Janine Duvitski still works, of course, John Salthouse is
producing now, Tim Stern’s wife died, “which was a huge blow to him”. All
the people she knows of her age who are not in show business have retired. A
chap she grew up with in Liverpool came to see Enjoy in Cardiff recently,
explaining that he and his wife rented a house in Florida every year, where
he crewed his friend’s boat. “I was sitting there so tired. I’d
done two shows that day and I was thinking, ‘Am I wrong here?’ I used to
think I could never live without acting. I’d rather die. But some days I
think, would I? Could I? Maybe.”
Alison Steadman stars in Enjoy at London’s Gielgud Theatre from January 27,
2009. Tel: 0844 482 5130
