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Piers Plowright with Alison Steadman in Burgh House |
Taking to the stage to tame the wild horse
Alison Steadman, star of Pride and Prejudice and ex-wife and collaborator of director Mike Leigh, talked about her life and career last week at Burgh House. Matthew Lewin was there
IF there is an anarchic side to the life of Alison Steadman, and a desire to do something different, it probably came from her eccentric grandmother, the actress revealed to an audience at Burgh House last week.
“She was somewhat eccentric and would frequently do very strange things, like come over to our house in Liverpool dressed in my grandfather’s clothes. She was an extraordinary woman,” she said.
Ms Steadman, most famous for roles such as Beverley in Abigail’s Party, Candice Marie in Nuts in May, Mrs Bennett in Pride and Prejudice and also for causing a major BBC uproar over a sex scene in her role in The Singing Detective was being interviewed by retired BBC radio producer Piers Plowright as part of Burgh House’s Lifelines series.
She said that her own parents had been wonderfully supportive through he whole career. “One of my biggest regrets is that they weren’t around when I got the OBE for services to drama in 2000,” said Ms Steadman, who lives in Wood Lane, Highgate.
“I always loved doing voices, even from a very early age. I would listen to the Scottish woman next door and then I would chat away to my dolls using her accent. I also remembered opening the window one day and making a speech into the empty garden because I had just seen a film with Dame Flora Robson playing the Queen and making a speech. And when the woman next door came out and asked me who I was speaking to, I really wanted to say: ‘To my people’! But I didn’t.”
She found it very easy to entertain her parents, and then at grammar school she found she could sideline a chequered academic career by performing for the class, doing voices, telling jokes and impersonating teachers – and she loved the applause.
Aged 16 she joined the newly formed Liverpool Youth Theatre and that convinced her that she wanted to be an actress. But her dad persuaded her to do a secretarial course first so she would always have something to fall back on.
“I worked for the probation office for two years, and that was great – you get a real look at life and learn an awful lot about people in a probation office.”
But then she applied to go to drama school and was accepted to train at the East Fifteen School, which is now part of the University of Essex.
It was here that she met director Mike Leigh (who she would later marry) when he came to direct a production at the school. She recalls: “I didn’t work with him then, but we chatted and I remember that we were very like-minded about a lot of things.”
Four years later he saw her in a play at the Liverpool Everyman and invited her to be in his first television drama, Hard Labour, and it was then that they got together.
Ms Steadman gave a fascinating account of the way Mike Leigh works on a play, starting with a concept or idea that he wants to investigate and building characters and dialogue in association with the actors.
She described how they built up the famous character of Beverley in the Abigail’s Party, using aspects of a woman from Romford who she knew at drama school, bits of other women, and also ideas that came from watching a very confident make-up demonstrator working at Selfridges.
“You don’t try to copy these people or actually try to play them,”she said. “We used one character as a springboard and then you add your own things through improvisation.
“But at some stage everything becomes fixed and nothing can be altered, so that all performances of the play are 100 per cent the same every single night, like any play would be.
“What’s different is the method of getting there.”
Ms Steadman also revealed that although she had appeared in several feature films she was not proud of them: “I look back at some of the films and I’m not happy with them at all, perhaps with the exception of Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet.
“Filming can be very tedious because you have to repeat things again and again and there is no audience to give you feedback.
“The theatre is why I became an actor. There is no better feeling than when you are in a good play that you are on top of. It’s like riding a wild horse and taming it, and you can hear the audience and use the audience because they can tell you a lot about a play and where the real laughs are.”
Most recently she appeared in the stage revival of Alan Bennett’s play Enjoy.
But she is also proud of the television work she has done, including Nuts in May and especially in Dennis Potter’s television series, The Singing Detective.
“I played the mother of the little boy who eventually becomes the Michael Gambon character, and he climbs a tree in the woods and sees me having sex with a man in the woods.
“You don’t actually see very much, but we got into terrible trouble with Mary Whitehouse and Norman Tebbitt about it.
“On the day that episode was due to go out I went to buy a paper and there was this picture of me with the headline: BBC braces itself for biggest sex shock ever. I ran home and phoned the director, and then rang to warn my parents. My mother watched it and later told me: ‘You just tell that Mary Whitehouse to shut up!’
“It was a truly wonderful, terrific piece of work by Dennis Potter. Every now and then I remember that moving scene when my character leaves her husband, takes the boy on a train to London and she starts crying in the carriage while some soldiers sing ‘Paper Doll’. It still makes me want to cry.
“In the end, as an actor, you can only do your best and do what you believe, and what you think is right.”
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