Honestly Hawthorne

Love nourishes the living, judgments may serve better to nourish the dead. Nigel Hawthorne, the much loved character actor of Yes, Minister and The Madness of George III, is placed in an awkward position, for he wrote Straight Face, his autobiography in 2001, completing it two weeks before he died, aged 72, from cancer of the pancreas. Sadly he is not around to sign copies, and his book betrays a hurried need to record as much as he could, sometimes at the cost of too much detail.

Not surprisingly then, given the suffering of Hawthorne's last days, illness stalks the book. It begins with "We Are Not Safe", the discovery of his own tumour, perhaps too much in the manner of a confessional article in a middle-class newspaper.

The next chapters evoke with nostalgia his early days in South Africa. Hawthorne senior, visited at the end of his life in a gruesome deathbed scene, taught Nigel honesty ("Dad was a man of honour"). In Cape Town, to which the Hawthorne family had emigrated in the Thirties, schoolboy Nigel absorbed lifelong guilt from the Irish Christian Brothers, who ingrained it with a mixture of the strap and mechanically repeated Hail Marys.

By the age of 22, shy, in conflict over his emerging sexuality, and with experiences of being jumped on by a Brother known as The Gorilla, but ignored by the handsome boy whom he hero-worshipped, Nigel was desperate to get away. He had been born in Coventry. England beckoned: "The theatre was supposed to be rife with homosexuals, yet the ones I'd met so far had not appealed to me, being too camp and obvious, not the sort with whom one could be seen without people staring and tongues wagging. Some day I would find someone discreet, gentle and warmhearted who would share my likes and dislikes, someone with the same sense of humour who would put up with my foibles."

Hawthorne, in a wistful more than passionate or dramatic way, in between recalling the vicissitudes of his career, charts this search. He tackles the thorny subject of his complicated nature with humour and dispassionate honesty. Perhaps the "perils" of homosexuality, which he claims were with him all his life, did not really go that deep - not enough, anyway, to provide gripping narrative.

First he is involved - " tangled up" is a better description - with Bruce, a scene painter, for more than 25 years. Bruce was possessive and publicly demonstrative in the way Hawthorne did not care for, but he could not detach himself. Bruce had liaisons with others in town, "but let me so much as look at anybody else and all hell would break loose". Hawthorne does go on a bit about "falling sensibly in love", but his years of deprivation and professional hardship did not make him bitter. Bruce dies from Aids during the time, with appropriate irony, Hawthorne appears as the dying CS Lewis in Shadowlands. But in these later years (and when still tangled up with Bruce?) - and after other unsatisfactory liaisons - Hawthorne lights upon his ideal partner, Trevor Bentham, a stage-company manager, the gentle tortoise to his hare, whom he describes with tenderness and gratitude. Bentham's summary of his older partner and mentor tells us rather more in an epilogue of four pages about Hawthorne's unguarded self than the author himself. He concludes that living with Nigel was "certainly not dull" (alas, too much of the book rambles on); Hawthorne used to ask him: "Am I eccentric?" (Some, but not enough of this eccentricity comes across, but Hawthorne does not ultimately reinvent himself in a literary persona, never an easy task).

Bentham concludes: "Nobody I ever met had such maverick energy. His head was constantly filled with ideas - sometimes wonderful, sometimes outlandish, frequently contradictory. In many ways his whole life was a paradox: he was a conservative socialist, an agnostic Christian, a heterosexual homosexual, a man with prodigious skills on stage ..."

We should leave it at that. Listed in the index, alas without the dates or the names of parts, are some hundred or more plays in which Hawthorne appeared. Here, surely, on stage is where the real life happened - his sketch of the Royal Court enfant terrible Victor Henry appearing with him in Total Eclipse, Ralph Richardson in West of Suez, or his shabby treatment at the hands of the RSC management have much more character and literary bite. Yet the desire to leave behind him an honest account in homage to his dead father and in gratitude to his perceptive and supportive partner has to be warmly respected, if not wholeheartedly admired.

? Garry O'Connor's Paul Scofield: The Biography is published by Sidgwick and Jackson.