Murder Unprompted

‘Yes. I can’t think why you’re havering. It’s obvious. A very good offer.’

‘Yes, but it is understudying a part I’ve already played — and played well.’

‘So?’

‘So. . it becomes a matter of pride.’

‘Pride? You, Charles? Oh, really.’ And Maurice Skellern let out a gasping laugh, as if the joke had really cheered up his weekend.

It was inevitable that, when rerehearsals started on the Monday, the centre of attention should be Michael Banks. His theatrical successes exceeded those of all the rest of the cast added together (and the money Paul Lexington had agreed with his agent quite possibly exceeded their total too).

His face was so familiar that he seemed to have been with the production for weeks. Few of the cast would have seen him in the revues of the late thirties where his career started, but they would all have caught up with the films he had made in the immediate post-war years. He had had a distinguished war, being wounded once and decorated twice, and had spent the next five years recreating it in a series of patriotic British movies. Michael Banks it always was who gazed grimly at the enemy submarine from the bridge, Michael Banks who went back for the wounded private in the jungle, Michael Banks who ignored the smoke pouring from his Spitfire’s engine as he trained his sights on the alien Messerschmidt.

He had then gone to Hollywood in the early fifties and stayed there long enough to show that he could cope with the system and be moderately successful, but not so long as to alienate his chauvinistic British following.

The West End then beckoned, and he appeared as a solid juvenile in a sequence of light comedies. He was good box office and managements fell over themselves to get his name on their marquees.

That continued until the early sixties, when, for the first time, his career seemed to be under threat. Fashions had changed; the new youth-oriented culture had nothing but contempt for the gritty, laconic heroism of the war, of which Michael Banks remained the symbol. The trendies of Camaby Street flounced around in military uniforms, sporting flowers of peace where medals once had hung. Acting styles changed too, as did the plays in which they were exhibited. The mannered delivery of West End comedies sounded ridiculous at the kitchen sink, and became the butt of the booming satire industry.

‘The wind of change’, that phrase coined by Harold Macmillan in 1960, grew to have a more general application than just to Africa, or just to politics. It represented a change of style, and this new wind threatened to blow away all that was dated and traditional.

Amongst other things, it threatened to blow away the career of Michael Banks.

And it might well have done. He had reached that most difficult of ages for a successful actor, his forties. The audience who had loved him as a stage juvenile were themselves growing old, and could not fail to notice the signs of ageing in their idol. The rising generation was not interested. To them Michael Banks represented that anathema — something their parents liked. If they saw him in a play, they saw a middle-aged man pretending to be young, in an outdated vehicle that bore as much relation to their reality as crinolines and penny-farthings.

He did two more West End comedies, neither of which lasted three months, and theatre managements were suddenly less anxious to pick up the phone and plead with his agent. The British film industry, such as it was, was committed to making zany films about Swinging London and, if there were any parts for the over-forties, they went to outrageous character actors.

One or two offers of touring productions or guest star status in provincial reps came in, a sure sign that their managements were trying to cash in on the name of Michael Banks before it was completely forgotten.

It was the nadir of his career. He was all right financially — he had always been shrewd and he had made his money in days when the Inland Revenue had allowed people to keep some of it — but his prospects of regaining his former place in the public’s esteem seemed negligible.

The way he had fought back from that position showed that the grit demonstrated in all those celluloid heroics was not just acting. He had survived by sheer determination.

His first decision had been to take on only older parts. He refused every sort of juvenile role that was offered, resisting lucrative inducements to recreate his West End successes in the diminished settings of the provinces or seasons in South Africa and Australia.

The result of this policy change was a very quiet three years. He played one Blimpish cameo in a short-lived play in Birmingham and a couple of small parts in television plays.

It wasn’t an enjoyable period of his life, but he stuck it out, certain that he was on the right track. He deliberately courted very old parts, particularly on television. He realised the medium’s power, and realised that, through it, he could reach a different public and establish a new image with them. The West End and even cinema audiences were tiny compared to the huge passive mass of armchair viewers. He reasoned that, if he could establish a new, older identity with them, he would be able to shake off the persona of faded juvenile.

Age was not the only criterion in his choice of parts. He avoided the trendy and the experimental, aiming ideally for costume drama, aware that his strengths were those of permanence and reliability, and would be dissipated by following the twists of fashion. And he had a gut-feeling that the values of that huge but silent force, the British middle class, were the same as his own. The television-viewing public was made up of the older stay- at-homes, not the swinging exotics whose exploits filled the front pages of the newspapers. They might not dare to admit it, but they didn’t like the changes they saw around them; they enjoyed television’s recreations of more confident times, when they had had a country to be proud of, when people had reached maturity at forty and had not pandered to youth. They liked seeing the old values reasserted.

And, gradually, through the parts he chose, Michael Banks came to symbolise those values.

His three years in the wilderness climaxed with a solid part in a BBC costume drama series. It was not the lead, but the character was in every episode, and had the advantage of ageing from week to week.

The public took the character to their hearts. Once again, they took Michael Banks to their hearts. Having watched him grow old before their eyes in their own sitting-rooms, they would thereafter accept him in parts of any age.

Since that time, his career had had no more problems. He had become increasingly selective in what he did, avoiding, on the whole, long runs in the West End, and concentrating on starring television parts or extremely lucrative cameos in international films. He became an institution of British acting, respected and loved. In the business, you never heard a word against Michael Banks.

And, when the cast of The Hooded Owl met him, they could understand why. He was an immensely likeable man. He was in his sixties, but had aged gracefully. The familiar acute face had thickened out, and the hair, remembered as darker than it actually was because of all those black-and-white films, had greyed becomingly. It was cut in a trendier style, worn longer than it would have been, but its shape still reminded one of all those gruff but infinitely reliable heroes. He dressed casually in a red golfing sweater, pale blue trousers, and deceptively ordinary-looking hand-made shoes.

The surprise about him was his size. As actors, they were all used to people looking different off screen, but none of them had expected him to be so tall. He must have been six foot four, with a frame to match. A most impressive figure. The reasoning behind casting him as the father in The Hooded Owl became clearer by the minute.

Clearer to Charles, anyway. He was at the rehearsal, needless to say, having, possibly for the first time in his life, followed his agent’s advice. Through the haze of Bell’s which had been the weekend, it had become clear that he had little alternative. He was being offered a job, being offered good money, and he’d be based in London. His dreams would have to wait, be returned intact to some cupboard deep in the recesses of his mind, whence they would arise, undaunted, at the next glimmer of hope in his career.

To his surprise, the strongest argument in favour of taking the job had been that it would keep him near to Frances. Her talk of moving, and the indefinable detachment he had felt in her when they had met, worried him. He felt he needed to rebuild the relationship — not, of course, to revive it as a total marriage, but to get back to the level of intermittent companionship which seemed to have gone.

Similar arguments must have weighed with Alex Household, because he was there too. His face looked strained and petulant, but he had clearly decided to put his mortgage and proximity to Lesley-Jane above pride.

If the cast had needed a demonstration of Michael Banks’s genuine warmth, they could not have asked for a better one than the way he dealt with Alex Household.

The first thing he did on arriving at the rehearsal room was to ask Paul Lexington which one was Alex and,