1938 October 22
Leytonstone, Essex

My parents first took me to theatre when I was 7.

I played Hamlet when I was 17.

[Richard Burton] said: Your voice is very mellifluous like mine; and he said: I used to go on top of a mountain in Wales and shout, and roughen my voice up.

I waited and waited. I never felt old enough; and I was eventually 74 when I did [Lear], because the director Michael Grandage said: You know unless you do it now you just won't have the physical stamina to do 8 King Lears a week, because it's huge, absolutely huge, physically and vocally and mentally. It's enormous, so I said OK. I still have got all my faculties and I'm fairly limber. It's one of the things that actors have to have actually, health and stamina, apart from a modicum of talent. [Lear] appeals to all my instinctive actor's duties. It is one of those like Hamlet but even more so than Hamlet I think, where you are asked to play every instrument in the orchestra. Not to be a wonderful cellist or a wonderful violinist, you have got to be the entire orchestra; and the demands that it makes on an actor, if you can climb that Himalayan mountain .. the diminutia .. it is so many-layered, it is so textual. And you can use every, every note in your repertoire: a note in your voice, a note in your body. He asks you to use what you are, what you have, your whole being.

Associated Plays: