Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

hell.

Liverpool had been three-weekly cycles – that is, we had a new play every three weeks. But St Annes was weekly. Weekly! God, it was hard. Trying to juggle the show you’re doing with the one you’re rehearsing at the same time every seven days was a nightmare. Somehow we got through it and every night I would go skipping home to see if I had a letter waiting from Brian. He was working at the Malvern Festival and we wrote to each other every day. Occasionally, on a Sunday when there were no shows, we’d bomb down to visit each other.

Looking back, going to St Annes was the moment I left home. It didn’t feel like it, though. There were no big goodbyes, no sense that I was growing up. There was no plan, no great target that I had to achieve by a certain age. I was just following the next job. That’s what actors do, isn’t it?

I shared lodgings with Sheila Irwin, who had been in the year above at Miss Clarke’s, so it was nice to see her. Our ASM came from Liverpool as well, so it was happy families for a while, especially when my mother came up for a few days after she’d been ill.

I learned an awful lot. The stage was so thin, like a piece of Sellotape. You had to move along sideways; there was no depth to it at all. That took a bit of thinking about. I also discovered some plays didn’t give their characters much to do. The more experienced actors seemed to deal with this by grabbing a prop. So whenever I didn’t know what to do with my part, I’d find a banana and stand there playing with that for a while. Probably a bit phallic, thinking about it, but it’s an extremely effective tool when you’re bored on stage – and you can always eat it. I used the same trick in Doctor Who as well. In fact, they used the same theatre for Who, which was odd.

Two different plays a fortnight was a treadmill, but the end was in sight. When Duncan said to me one day, ‘Lis, how would you like the lead in the last play of the season?’, I was so happy I didn’t wonder what the catch was. Because with Duncan, there’s always a catch …

I soon found out.

Mary Mary wasn’t a weekly – it had a four-day turnaround. Four days! And it was a two-hander, which meant that I would have half of all the lines and the stage time.

My co-star, Paul Webster, who went on to work with the RSC and with whom I still keep in touch today, was a lot of fun but the play was impossible. I remember walking on stage for the third and final act, putting my key in the door, opening it to come on stage, and thinking, I don’t know a damn word. By then it was too late – I was in front of the audience. Paul was the perfect pro, however. He carried me until the curtain, working with the odd crumb I could recall.

Your memory goes when you’re tired, but that wasn’t the only problem. I was so hungry as well. It wasn’t until I moved to Lytham St Annes and had to pay for my own lodgings that I realised how hard it is to get by on theatrical wages – by then up to about eight pounds a week. I couldn’t afford much food and the weight fell off me. When you’re busy you don’t always notice your tummy rumbling and there are only so many bananas you can weave into a show. Afterwards I’d stagger home, famished, to empty cupboards.

Shelagh Elliott-Clarke’s had taught me so much about acting but they hadn’t prepared me for the truth – that you don’t earn enough to have three meals a day, even when you’re the lead.

It will be all right when I finish here and I’m with Brian, I thought.

How wrong could I be?

*   *   *

Brian and I have never been ones for planning – I don’t think you can be when you’re an actor. We sort of go with the flow and see what happens. So when he finished at Malvern, with no other options, he took a room in our friend Terry Lodge’s house in Clapham, south London. (Terry, like Brian, was another actor from the Midlands.) A few weeks later, I joined him. It was just like when I’d left home – no fuss, no big romantic gestures, just Brian and me living together as a couple for the first time.

The room was big, but bare, and there was no running water in the house. If you needed the loo or a wash, the tap and toilet were outside. But it was cheap – and cheap was what we needed. With neither of us working, just getting by was hard. I lost even more weight because I used to skip meals so Brian could grab something, not that he ever knew. I’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t fancy this roll – you have it.’

Looking back, you wonder why neither of us got a proper job – although I don’t know what on earth we’d have been qualified for. But just when I thought we’d made a mistake moving to London, our fairy godmother, Tony Colegate, stepped in. He’d been appointed director at the Manchester Library Theatre and wanted Brian to go up and join the company. At the same time Jenny Smith, our stage manager at Liverpool, offered me an ASM job in Farnham. I didn’t think twice even though I might not get on stage. It was the opposite end of the country to Brian but it was work. That’s all I thought about, that’s all that mattered.

And at least I’d be able to eat.

I wasn’t at Farnham long before Tony called again, this time inviting me up to join them in Manchester. I wasn’t fooled – he mainly wanted me to be his ASM.

‘But there’ll be parts as well, I promise.’

He didn’t have to ask twice. The chance of being back in the Northwest with Brian was irresistible, even if I was back on the book again.

The first play at Manchester was a panto, The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew, in December 1966. Brian had one of the leads, Obadiah Bobblenob, Terry Lodge, our landlord, was the storyteller and I was listed as one of the ‘Poor and Needy’. I had to go on stage in rags, a hood over my head, and pretend to tie something. It was a funny little piece.

I remember David Jackson coming down one day to talk about doing Antony and Cleopatra. David had been at Liverpool with Brian. He was a big, big bloke and obviously very heavy. I was talking about him afterwards with Linda Polan and she said, ‘Oh, I knew Jacks when he fell through his first flat.’ (Linda later appeared with me in K-9 and Company and a couple of other things. It’s funny how these things go round.)

I remember I was in my peasant’s outfit when Jackson wandered by with Tony. He took one look at me and said, ‘They don’t pay the staff very much these days, do they?’

Actually Brian and I were both on the Library’s top pay of eighteen pounds a week, which for doing what we loved was a fortune. After the horrors of St Annes I even managed to save about ten pounds a week. Working such long hours, all day long and into the night, didn’t leave much time to spend anything anyway. If it hadn’t been for a