This Much Is True

My favourite voice of all was the mother dog, Fly, in Babe, the film of Dick King-Smith’s 1983 novel The Sheep-Pig. (The film in a sense changed my life, but more on that later.) Babe came out in 1995, but I was working on it for several years. When the producer, George Miller, rang up and asked if I could come out and record in Australia and that he would fly me out first class, I thought he was joking. His call came as I was in studio, narrating an extremely sad documentary about the Holocaust. He said, ‘I want you to meet the dog. You’ll enjoy it.’ I thought, ‘You’re not kidding.’ I wasn’t going to tell him that I didn’t need to meet the dog; I could easily have done the recording just as well in a studio in London.

So they flew me out to Australia; I was introduced to the dog and we got on quite well. The film set was in a little rural village called Robertson, about eighty miles south of Sydney, in the lush green Southern Highlands of New South Wales. It’s more like Dorset there than Dorset. Then I was driven back to the studio in North Sydney.

Chris Noonan, the director of Babe, was meticulous and demanding, making me do take after take. But his attention to detail created Babe, and he helped me to create Fly.

Chris co-wrote the film with George Miller, and yet George never really acknowledged Chris Noonan’s part in creating Babe; whenever prizes were won — and Babe received 7 Oscar nominations^[14] — it was George who would go and collect the prize, not Chris, and I felt that was unfair. I’d also like to pay tribute to Christine Cavanaugh, the voice of Babe, who died in 2014. I never met her, but I think her work is sublime.

Australians, for the most part, are not tremendously demonstrative, but Chris was extremely quiet, gently mannered and reserved, and so for a long time I didn’t know if I was giving him what he wanted. Then gradually he opened up a bit, then I knew that I was delivering. We spent eight or ten hours each day in the studio, just the two of us together, and I had to go over it and over it ad infinitum, until Chris was satisfied.

On my first recording of Fly’s role, I did it in a Scottish accent — because Fly was a Scottish border collie and I like to be literal — and it was perfect. But then the big cheeses at Universal, the film company, said they didn’t understand a word Fly was saying. Americans just can’t deal with accents. I had just given Fly’s voice a tinge of Scotland, but the suits said, ‘No, we want it mid-Atlantic.’

So, they flew me back again, all-expenses paid and first class, naturally — and I obliged with the Fly you hear now. It’s good, but Scottish Fly was truer.

The narration by the African American actor Roscoe Lee Browne starts, ‘This is the tale of an unprejudiced heart…’ When you hear those words in that inimitable rich, commanding and dignified voice, you think, ‘Ah, this is a serious film.’ Babe is a film about prejudice and about inclusiveness. I loved it, and I still love it.

Banged Up in Bow Street

It was a Thursday, the day of the State Opening of Parliament. I wanted to deliver a voice-over tape to my agent. I parked the car on a busy Shaftesbury Avenue and ran upstairs to deliver the tape; I took, honestly, no more than a minute. When I returned to the car, there was a motorcycle policeman in jackboots, writing a parking ticket.

‘How dare you do that? I was only up there a minute!’ He slapped the parking ticket under my windscreen wiper. ‘Well, you’ve parked on a double yellow line,’ he replied. I lost my temper. I snatched the ticket off the windscreen, tore it into little pieces and threw them in the air. ‘You’ve got a dick that small!’ I shouted, indicating a very small member with my index finger and thumb. The policeman’s mood darkened. ‘Right. Now I’m doing you for parking on a double yellow line — and for littering.’ He was writing more in his notebook. I was enraged. ‘Go on, then! Arrest me! I don’t care what you do,’ I bellowed. ‘Miss, I’m going to have to take you to a police station,’ he said. ‘I demand to be taken to a police station!’ I retorted.

The policeman radioed for back-up. Because of the State Opening of Parliament, there was a fleet of police cars in the area. Seconds later, three panda cars flashing blue lights screamed up behind me. Six more policemen climbed out and joined us. They shoved their arms under my armpits and half-lifted, half-frog-marched me across the road, my little legs wriggling in the air.

By this time, quite a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered. I shouted out, ‘You see what happens in England?’ And I was pushed into the backseat of a police car.