Time for Penelope to soar

10 April 2012

Penelope Wilton tells me she lacks "the equipment" for real stardom. For the life of me, I don't see what she means. She is up there among our very best stage actresses, a favourite of Pinter, Hare and Jonathan Miller and at the Barbican she is presently enjoying great critical success as Madam Arkadina in Adrian Noble's superb production of The Seagull. On television, 18 months ago she was elected to that select academy of actors entrusted by Alan Bennett to perform a Talking Headsmonologue.

In it Wilton played Mrs Horrocks, an amateur gardener who belatedly found love with a murderess. On set, Bennett had to force a handkerchief into his mouth to prevent his laughter ruining the take, although tears cannot have been far away either. One of her lines, about plants that are supposedly best left in the shade, certainly got to this viewer. "They do perfectly well in the shade," her Mrs Horrocks agreed, "but give them a bit of sun and they come into their own."

So what equipment does she lack, I ask. "Oh, I don't know. Pizzazz, I suppose," she says. "I changed agents recently and he said, 'We'll have to find a Mrs Brown for you.'" I suppose he is right. It is curious that she has yet to get a Judi Dench-size film role. And, apart from the Bennett and her cameo in last year's Wives and Daughters, television has also neglected her since she dived under the floor boards for the last time in The Borrowers seven years ago. It is, she reminds me, 16 years since she first played Mrs Richard Briers in Ever Decreasing Circles.

But I doubt if it's really pizzazz she lacks. She is still only 52, and a rather sexy 52 at that. When we meet she is wearing a brown pinstripe trouser suit on to which her brown hair falls girlishly. She looks like Emma Peel. Although she talks diffidently over coffee in a curious establishment in Mayfair called the University Women's Club, I gather she's a hoot socially. "She'll pick you up at a party," one family member told me - worryingly, since I'd understood she was happily married to Ian Holm. It turned out he meant she'd physically lift me up by the waist. "It's her party trick. She does it to everyone."

So Wilton is stronger than she looks. When you hear her private history, you understand she would need to be. She is willing to speak about it now because the person she risked hurting, her first husband, the actor Daniel Massey, died two years ago. They met in a short-lived play called Bloomsbury in 1974 and married a year later. Their daughter, Alice, was born in 1977. But in 1984 they divorced and Massey subsequently fell into a long-term relationship with her younger sister, Linda.

Through therapy Massey came to blame the marriage's breakdown unequivocally on his own "psychological problems" caused by his relationship with his mother, the actress Adrianne Allen. He called her a "social psychopath" but said he had found joy with the Wiltons. "When I met them 20 years ago it was like coming home," he said in 1995. It sounds as if Penelope was being asked to make good a very large deficit.

"Well, he was about 14 years older than me, Dan, and I think he had difficulties coping with himself. It was not really to do with anyone else. I think he was depressed. He had at times been extremely depressed and dealing with that was quite hard. I wasn't really sophisticated enough, I don't think, to deal with it at that age. I was 26 and he was 40. It was tricky. He'd had a lot more life than me. It's quite a big gap at that age - as you get older it is not such a big gap - so it was a learning process. But we had Alice, who's very much like him in personality. He was very bright, Dan, extremely clever and had passions for things. He loved music and would tell you about that. He had a very good analytical brain and a wonderful laugh. He threw back his head and laughed and Alice has that laugh too. And she's bright."

Wilton, clearly still awed by Massey's brain, owns up to an inferiority complex about her education. A schoolfriend who boarded with her at the now defunct Oak Hall in Haslemere, Surrey, says the school trained young women to be ladies rather than be educated. She squarely blames Wilton's lack of self-confidence on it. But when Penelope tells me for the second time that she regrets not going to university, I feel bound to point out that the classics she has played will have given her a far deeper knowledge of literature than any BA course. And does she really feel inferior to everyone else in the club this morning? Nothing, however, is going to diminish her pride in her daughter's forthcoming graduation.

Before Alice, a boy had been still born. "He was early, 31 weeks, but Alice was only 32 weeks when I had her. She weighed two pounds." She must have thought Alice wasn't going to make it either? "I did think that actually. I thought perhaps I was blighted. I had been in hospital for 14 weeks when I had her. She was tiny but she came out fighting and she's never looked back. And now she's in her final year at Manchester, reading French and Spanish."

Alice enjoyed an excellent relationship with her father, she says. After all, he never left the family. But his not leaving the family was also the odd part. Massey moved in with Linda after she had returned from an unhappy marriage in Thailand. She had had two daughters of her own and the sisters shared not so much an extended family as a Venn diagram with a large common part shaded "Massey".

"It would seem odd to people outside one's circle, I know. But there were all these girls and it seemed natural that he should be with Alice and the cousins who were all the same age. It was odd to begin with but I got used to it."

Did it interfere with her relationship with her sister? "No. No it didn't. I mean, it wasn't all easy. You'd be a complete idiot if you thought that. It was quite tricky sometimes."

And tricky for Alice? "Actually no, at least not according to her. She had always gone to my sister's to see the children and now her dad was there too. More tricky for me, I think, at one point. Usually when you divorce your husband, they move further away ..." She trails off. "Having said that, in the end it was perfectly fine when everyone got used to the idea."

Massey's last years were devastated by recurrences of Hodgkin's disease and in the months before his death in March 1998, Penelope once more became very close to him. He died while she was at home collecting pillows to take to him in hospital. He was, she says, "a terrific fighter".

Understandably - particularly since her parents also died of cancer - Wilton asks if we might move on to cheerier subjects. I suggest, as a topic, the actor Ian Holm, whom she married in 1991, after having fallen for him in 1984 during the making of the film Laughterhouse. Holm had been married twice and had another 14-year relationship behind him. He was a father times five.

Another older man? "Yes, he is a bit older, about 16 years I think. It must be something about my father that I like these older men! Well, they are not that much older. Goodness me! Who gives a toss? I don't notice that sort of thing."

Is he an easy man to live with? "No," she laughs. "I don't think actors are easy. I really don't. I think it's a very tricky life."

The trickiness, I suppose, arises out of the combination of the confidence you need to give a performance and the insecurity and competitiveness of the profession itself. Holm is a case in point, having suffered a mid-play nervous collapse that practically kept him off the stage for 18 years until he played in Moonlight opposite Wilton herself in 1992. Holm has given her much of the credit for pushing him back into live theatre and, ultimately, towards his triumph as King Lear at the National in 1997. His renaissance on stage has not, however, reduced his movie commitments and when I meet Penelope, he has been away from their homes in Kensington and Wiltshire filming for nine weeks.

"Having two careers in one home is sort of batty," she says. "It's tricky." She frequently uses "tricky" to describe her life. It is an interesting choice, for while the word doesn't trivialise what she has faced, it doesn't dramatise it either. The effect is to make it all sound commonplace, which seems to be how she still regards her career. The explanation may be that she was born, in Scarborough in 1947, into a vast family of actors. Not only did her mother, Alice Travers, act, but two of her siblings. Uncle Bill married Virginia McKenna. A cousin married Ben Kingsley. So when Penelope fulfilled her childhood ambition and became an actress? "They were very phlegmatic, really."

After training at the Drama Centre in London she spent some time out of work before mainly being offered comedies. Jonathan Miller cast her in The Seagull at Chichester in 1968 but not as the beautiful young actress, Nina, but in the smaller role of Masha, the steward's daughter. "I never played the Ninas. I always played the one with the chatelaine and a lot of keys round her waist. I wasn't pretty-pretty. I was dark. People were looking for nice fresh-faced blondes."

I quote what the Telegraph's critic has said of her 30 years on in the context of the current Seagull: "Penelope Wilton, a great and undervalued actress". But, she protests, if she were really undervalued she would not, at her age, be working at all. Nevertheless, a part of her clearly admires the ageing, egocentric actress Arkadina, who will not be upstaged.

"I know I have to like her because if you don't find something you understand or sympathise with then you just comment on the character, which is no good. But I think people are hard on her. She is as mean as hell, but then a lot of actors are because they never know what's going to happen next. They are vain, but she is also fantastically insecure. These demons of hers come to haunt you when you get a bit older. You're trying to keep up and stay there, not be a has-been, not get sent on the second tour rather than the first."

So even Wilton feels like that? "No, I don't feel like that at all," she insists. Perhaps, however, others are beginning to feel that for her. Her agent is encouraging her to give more interviews and not to be such "a shrinking violet". "I think you've got to get out into the market place a bit. That's what I am told and I think it's true, don't you? It helps people, nudges people. One has got to be a bit braver if one wants to continue to work and perhaps not always in theatre. Not that I mind that work, but I'd really like to do some films or television."

So if ITV offered her five years as a detective? "If it was intermittently over five years I would certainly do it." Meanwhile, she waits to hear if she has been cast as Bridget Jones's mother in the forthcoming movie.

Wilton is brilliant at finding the common denominators that link her characters to herself and, through her, to us. Perhaps it is not surprising that when talking about her own life, she smoothes her highs and lows out towards the mundane. "These tragedies happen to anyone," she assures me. "It's not rare. It's not out of the ordinary. You read obituaries of people, don't you? Some ex-colonel somewhere and it says 'married twice, marriages dissolved, four children, two deceased'. Whatever. And those are all facts. But someone had to live through that."

She makes that point afresh with every part. No one plays the comedy and poignancy of ordinariness better. But that does not make Wilton an ordinary actress, which is why I agree that it's time she came out of the shade. Never mind Mrs Jones, let someone cast her as Cleopatra. Place her in the sun and see how she comes into her own.

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