This Much Is True

In the year of Dickens’s bicentenary, 2012, I was determined to revive the show — almost twenty-four years after its Edinburgh Festival debut. In the middle of 2011, Richard Jordan, who had seen the show when he was sixteen, took over with remarkable speed and I embarked on a ten-month tour. Starting in Australia and New Zealand, I returned for the Edinburgh Festival, then after the British run I went to Canada and America.

I had some narrow escapes on tour: I got furious with delays in the airport in Florida, and when being herded about interminably, I shouted angrily at the security officer: ‘How big’s your dick?’ My group shrank with horror: he looked up, smiled slightly and said, ‘Well, I prefer mine percolated.’ I just let it go. Another drama was losing the antique stool I used for Miss Mowcher, when returning from our presentation at the Lincoln Center. I’d brought the stool with me from London — it was my grandmother’s, and very precious. The Lincoln Center took great care of it; it was stored in a safe overnight and two security officers carried it to and from the stage. Afterwards, I was rushing back to catch the plane to London for a Harry Potter film shoot and left the stool in the taxi. I was in hysterics: Richard Jordan remembers my phoning him seventeen times and when he asked me to describe the New York cab, I said, ‘It was yellow.’ Amazingly, I got it back, thanks to the lovely taxi driver.

The world tour took in forty cities in England, America, Canada, Australasia. Andrew McKinnon, the distinguished Australian impresario, took over the Antipodean leg of the tour, and with a wonderful pianist, John Martin, who is a precious friend, we had seasons in Sydney and Melbourne and went all over Australia. Andrew introduced me to Bob Hawke. He and his wife, Blanche, who is also a real corker, invited Heather and me to a dinner party at their Northbridge home. It was the occasion of Bob’s rapprochement with Paul Keating, with whom he’d been on bad terms for some years. A nice-looking man was sitting opposite me. When I asked him what he did, he said, ‘I’m the premier of South Australia.’ It was Mike Rann. I felt I was at the centre of Government.

After dinner, Bob and Paul Keating went downstairs to talk. When you were in Bob’s presence, it felt as though the air fizzed around him. He made me think of David Copperfield: ‘We must meet reverses boldly and not suffer them to frighten us. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down.’ Dickens would have loved him. If only there were politicians now to match his greatness — they’re such puny men these days.

We took our play all over the world, people admired it; my love of Dickens has made me much more famous as an actress, we even published the book. But then Sonia got sick and died, tragically before her time, in 2013. And while I remain passionately proud of Dickens’ Women, I haven’t the heart to do it again, without her.

Taking America by Storm

When I went to Los Angeles in 1988, it was on a whim. Just like Charles Dickens’s trip to America in 1842, I was taking a chance: ‘If not now, when?’ I’d received a Los Angeles Critics’ Circle Award for Little Dorrit. This was the prod I needed. I was in my late forties and I thought to myself, ‘They’re prepared to give me, a completely unknown English woman, an award and they’ve never heard of me? There will never be a better moment. I’m off!’

I had never thought of working in America; it was the glittering centre of the entertainment industry, way out of my reach. Many actors go ‘on spec’ — few succeed. But if you can piggy-back on an award, you have a better chance of standing out from the crowd of hopefuls.

I made a systematic plan. I wrote to Menahem Golan, the Israeli film producer and director whose company, the Cannon Group, had distributed Little Dorrit in the States. I made him a proposition: if Menahem Golan would pay for me to have three nights in a top-rate hotel in New York, I would pay all other expenses. ‘I won’t ask for any travel money,’ I wrote, ‘and I will find a publicist.’ Naturally he agreed. I went straight to my beloved friend, Hodge. She knows her clothes.

She took me to a shop called Wardrobe in Marylebone, where the smart proprietor, Susie, grasped the challenge and kitted me out in an array of stylish garments for the fuller figure. I remember she said, ‘Black stockings, always wear black stockings.’ I bought a trouser suit, a smart overcoat and several tops. Hodge found me a make-up artist and hairdresser, and I had myself ‘zhuzhed’ up. That was the first part of the plan sorted.