It was pitiable to behold. On this particular night of the long, humiliating cock-up of the US presidential election, the grapevine had Bush sworn in, and any New Yorker with the remotest pretensions towards cultural or cerebral activity was exhibiting the symptoms of severe reactive depression. Those with tickets for Yasmina Reza's sell-out play, The Unexpected Man, zombied along Broadway, took their extremely expensive theatre seats and sat there in stunned silence until it was time to go home. God alone knows what they were thinking. On stage, two of Europe's most sophisticated exponents of the English language turned words to symphonies, while the best they can do is elect a president who can't put a cogent sentence together. Oh shame! What will become of us? There was not a ripple, not a chuckle, not a solitary comprehending inhalation, just this terrible, unremitting silence from beginning to end. Then the sound of seals slapping their fins together. What actors call a dead house.
It was him she felt sorry for. Poor Alan Bates. He has to carry the piece for its first 15 minutes, which isn't easy at the best of times, even when you're as brilliant as he is. Eileen Atkins heard the awful silence enveloping the pair of them and knew his cadences were spot on, his irony just so, his undertow of loneliness precisely as he would wish it to be. These things just happen. There are times when stage fright makes you vomit, times when you hear yourself mis-time a phrase or bungle an inflection and you have to hold your nerve and force yourself to stay in the moment. When worse comes to the worst, as it just did, you have to remember that if you can't take rejection you shouldn't be an actor. They comforted each other afterwards, repaired to the nearest hostelry and drank more than was strictly necessary.
The morning after, Miss Atkins indulged herself in an extra hour in bed with the phone switched off, ate a wholesome breakfast, took her vitamins and went on for the matinee. By which time the count was on again, the pall lifted and the audience enjoyed the play with something approaching audible responsiveness. That night there was actual enthusiasm; Alan's monologue got the snickers, giggles and guffaws it deserved, the house was alive with concentrated appreciation and, when it was over, rose to its feet with nicely modulated bravos. New York, the day, the actors are back on track, the dreadful may never happen.
Thoroughly gratified, Miss Atkins joined a few chums for a post-performance supper, during which she was heard to remark that she felt as though she had just been fucked. She meant it, of course, in the nicest possible way. In fact, she is looking quite beautiful in a post-coital way; beautiful, as Philip Larkin once said of Kingsley Amis's first wife, without being remotely pretty. The critics here had raved about the turn of her ankle, the curve of her cheek. One of them called her sexy, which is particularly pleasing to a woman of 60-something about to be shown on British television as a mean old bat with a mouth like a trap. Not that such a persona is unusual for her. When she's not doing something pure and classical, she's most likely to emerge on film or television as somebody unappetisingly post-menopausal who's just done something particularly unlovely with a kirby grip.
What appealed to her about Reza's two- hander was its sexiness: a middle-aged romance defined by the experiences of the hearts and minds of the protagonists, unhindered by the mendacious imperatives of their hormones. Tonight she is in excellent form. Someone asks her about a theatrical anecdote recounted by her hairdresser, apparently, featuring Atkins and luminaries of the British stage. She listens politely, widens her eyes and says, "Christ, talk about Chinese whispers."
Her first-hand version tells you all you need to know about the personalities of the actors involved and hinges upon the night, five or so years ago, when the snow-making machine for the stage production of John Gabriel Borkman went on the blink. The stage manager had the task of going into three dressing rooms to inform the three stars of the disaster. There would be no snow in the snow scene. Eileen's response was to lose her rag. "What's the matter with those bloody fools," she raved, "can't they even do the simplest thing." Vanessa Redgrave took it sweetly. "Oh dear," she murmured, "perhaps we could all tear paper up into little bits and we could throw them up in the air." Paul Scofield continued to regard his face in the mirror. Then (and she does a perfect imitation of his growl) "No snow. No Sco."
"No show!" the table rocks. " No Sco!"
For the duration of The Unexpected Man, Miss Atkins is residing in a small apartment in a hotel described by an Irish poet friend of hers as like living inside your Auntie Hilda's knickers. You can see what he meant. Her quarters are quaintly film-starry, all pink and chintzy-frilly, not at all like her. All available flat surfaces are covered with books about or by Virginia Woolf, first-night gifts from friends and well-wishers. She doesn't know what made them think she hadn't already read them all, but it was nice of them, wasn't it?
Against the incongruous, rented background, her straight-up-and-down, black- and-white figure reminds you that there are aesthetic rules for correct bodily proportion to which we must all aspire, and that these are probably what you're looking at. Being herself, without a fictive motivation inside her bones, she moves fluidly, like a dancer. Like all pathologically impatient people, she can't be bothered to prevaricate. Her back is precisely as broad as her front, and you get to see them both at the same time. She's not always easy, her husband, producer Bill Shepherd, told me while imparting her whereabouts: "One of the things I love about Eileen is she hasn't the faintest idea how good she is." And she hasn't. She just gets on with it. Does what she has to.
A cursory glance at the record of her long career tells the story of her driving force in no uncertain terms - she has never allowed herself to be involved in anything vaguely resembling mediocrity. It's as though she suddenly popped up from obscurity as Jaquenetta in Love's Labour's Lost at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, and then spent the rest of her life swanning around the orchard of all that is great and good, picking one plum role after another like a scrumper with an in-built shit detector.
Her co-stars seem invariably to have been lions such as Laurence Olivier or Alec Guinness, and she doesn't seem to have ever bothered to open a script unless it emanated from Shakespeare or Shaw or, at a pinch, Eliot, Tennessee Williams, DH Lawrence, Edward Albee, Robert Bolt or John Osborne.
In the parallel universe of her writing career, she has rarely stooped beneath the rarefied aura of Virginia Woolf and her chums. Why bother? She routinely collected posh awards for whatever she involved herself in, here and in America over the past 35 years, culminating, in 1998, when she was rather pleased to get the Olivier award for The Unexpected Man, swiftly followed by the Evening Standard gong for best screenwriter with her screenplay for Mrs Dalloway. When she gets a minute, she'll complete the film script of her play Vita And Virginia - well, just tart it up a bit, it's more or less done - and think about what to do next.
On this muggy morning in Manhattan, she feels she must address herself to more personal biographic matters, which she hasn't ever really got down to in a serious way before. She's not sure she's telling the truth, though, because she's not sure what the truth really is. Memory is a movable feast, we rewrite the past as we go along and, besides, whatever she says about her origins will be hotly disputed by Ron, her surviving sibling. However, as the child of elderly parents - always assuming her desire to be exposed as a changeling continues to be thwarted - she feels entitled to trace her direct blood line back to the 19th century and the photographic image of her maternal grandfather, "the only gorgeous member of the family". Dark, dark brown eyes, black hair, excitingly foreign, she'd pore over the portrait and ask her mother, was he Italian? Spanish? And her mother would hush her up, no, no, no, don't be so silly, as though the mere thought of being anything other than entirely English, with perhaps a bit of Scottish on dad's side, was somehow shameful, something not quite right in the woodshed.
Her mum was intent on bettering herself, not dwelling on dubieties of ancestry. She was knocking 40 when she met Eileen's dad, and, according to family lore, obliged him to marry her in exchange for taking care of his three-year-old daughter while he serviced the automobile of the Portuguese ambassador. He was called an under-chauffeur, which meant that, though he couldn't actually drive a car - he didn't know how - he got to vacuum them and polish their bonnets. When his first wife died, he took up lodging in Eileen's mum's mother's house in Stoke Newington, where they all lived together in quiet desperation and increasingly cramped conditions as the children of the union arrived at a rate of one a year. When she was pregnant for the third time, she opted for an abortion in the interests of health, space and respectability. Then, when her two-year-old died of diphtheria, she realised God had punished her for her wickedness. Life went on in the little house; dad read gas meters, mum sewed for a factory all day and went out at night to be a barmaid in the Elephant & Castle. And that was it until, at the age of 47, she discovered she was pregnant again.
"It's funny," Eileen says, "but I always felt I've come out of a massive row." She sounds enigmatic, but it's probably literally true. Her father, it seems, had undergone testicular surgery, a painful and emotionally unmanning experience that prompted a somewhat taunting comment from his good lady. "I'll show you . . ." he is supposed to have retaliated and, wallop, Eileen was conceived. She was born in the Salvation Army Home in Clapton, north London, a geographic fact furiously denied by her mother, who insisted until the day she died that it was a hospital, not a home.
They were allotted a council house in Tottenham as a prize for the birth of Eileen June. They'd never had it so good. The six of them piled into the two-down, three-up; gran, mum, dad, half-sister, brother and the tiny blonde princess, God's forgiving gift.
"My very first memory of being alive," she says 66 years after the event and bright as yesterday, "is being tossed in the air by my father and laughing and knowing, really knowing, that his was absolute joy." She knew that, and she knew that she was unequivocally adored. There was never, ever any doubt about it. She could tell her siblings were miffed, and she knew, even then, she couldn't blame them for that. She was a born dotee and, in the Jesuitical sense, she reciprocated the dote till the age of seven, when she ceased to be pretty and realised she could read and didn't need her dad to tell her his wonderful stories any more.
Not to mince words, her dad was a bit on the backward side. He left school, of necessity, at the age of 12 and was known by the children of his acquaintance as "Uncle Funny Man" for his amiable, childlike qualities. To Eileen, as she began to look about herself with the critical eye of a seven-year-old, he was just stupid. Irritatingly so. For instance, when they built the first motorway, the M1, he would always pronounce it the M Eye. It made her wince. So she said to him, listen dad, it's not the M Eye. It's the M One. Next time they build a motorway, it'll be the M Two, then the M Three. "That's right, luv," he said cheerfully, "M Eye."
She remembers the day she read her first words as one of the greatest moments of her life. She knows exactly where she was in the high street, holding her father's hand, looking at an advertising hoarding with a poster of a man with yellow hair riding a bicycle on top of a jar of Bovril. And the words, "Bovril is good for you." She read them out loud. Oh Bliss. "Bovril is good for you." She didn't feel her father's deflation until they got home and she heard him say to her mother, "She can read", in the same tone he'd have used if he'd said, "I lost her", or, "Her leg came off". From then on books were her ecstasy. Even now, when that unaccountable flooding of euphoria, bliss, happiness, whatever you call it, wafts across her consciousness - you know how it does sometimes, for no particular reason - she gets a flash of the steps leading up to the library in Tottenham, just round the corner from the council house.
Her father didn't tune himself easily to the separation caused by his daughter's literacy. Whatever sadness he felt he channelled into a threatening irascibility over the possibility of a ha'penny fine being imposed on her overdue library books. He'd pick them up, sigh, then glare at the date stamps. Stupid, stupid man. Only when she was nearing middle age did she appreciate she was just like him. Thick. She has the same kind of intransigent thickness as the one she despised as a child. She prepares for her roles slowly. S-L-O-W-L-Y and with difficulty. She finds herself at parties with erudite friends, suddenly unable to understand a word anyone's saying, as though something tripped in her brain and she's fallen down a black hole. Once she had a lover who asked her to nip out and move his car. When she told him she couldn't drive, he turned on her. You idiot. He bawled. You incompetent. "That's right," she said. "I act and I fuck and that's it."
Her mum was the pushy one. Sometimes now, when she looks down at her own hands, she sees her mother's. She's like her, too. When Eileen was three, a Gypsy came to the door selling lucky heather and clothes pegs. Not getting much change out of Eileen's mum, she gazed at the little girl clinging to her skirts and announced she was to be a world famous dancer. Never one to pass an opportunity, Eileen's mum went straight out and enrolled her in the nearest dance class.
She tended to make the best of things, did Eileen's mum. From the age of three, Eileen has been insomniac. Her mum dragged her around doctors' surgeries, distraught for two years, until an old Indian physician explained the problem. "She has," he said, "too much imagination." He prescribed, for reasons best known to himself, breakfast in bed and lots of books. Mother and daughter were well satisfied with the arrangement. Eileen's mum would say, airily, "Oh no, she never sleeps. She has too much imagination." As though vaunting another facet of her own and her daughter's innate superiority.
Eileen didn't like dancing class. At the same time, she discovered in herself an aptitude for inventing, telling and maintaining monstrous lies. That and snivelling. While her mother persevered with the famous dancer fantasy, enrolling her in school after school, Eileen invented her own exit lines. "They're awful to me," she'd come home blubbing. "That Doreen, she put my head down the toilet and pulled the chain." She doesn't know to this day where she got it from, or how she held on to her story while the innocent Doreen was pilloried and exiled to outer darkness. "I was just . . ." she says, "a liar."
In 1939, and for some time after, the exigencies of the war threw up a moral climate among Londoners in which it was considered the height of adult responsibility for parents to evacuate their children to rural locations, where strangers were prevailed upon to take them into their homes, while they remained in the prime bombing area to contribute to the war effort. In deference to this masterstroke of social engineering, Eileen, aged five, was given a bar of chocolate and put on a bus with her 12-year-old brother and innumerable other brats, and transported to a village called Little Baddow in Essex, or, if her brother's recollection is more accurate, Great Baddow.
There, in company with some Civil Defence dignitary, the children were trailed from house to house, imploring the residents to take them in. "Aw, please take us, lady, we're ever so clean," she heard her brother beseech a woman at her garden gate, which was bad enough. Then a huge, unpleasant-looking woman arrived, demanded the pretty one with the ringlets and whisked Eileen home to her daughter, who kicked her, pinched her and scoffed her chocolate. Endlessly weeping was again the answer to her problem. She sobbed, she cried, she damned near died, for many months. Then her mother came and took her back to London, omitting to register her as a resident and therefore a schoolchild. She stayed at home with mum, who, to distract her traumatised daughter from the air raids and bomb devastation, redoubled her efforts to give the Gypsy's prediction a helping hand. Tirelessly she sewed the little nymphet costumes. Ruthlessly she hawked the child, now known as "Baby Eileen", around the working men's club circuit, where she tappy-toed and sang faintly iffy songs for 15 shillings a pop.
Of course, she knew there was something deeply wrong with being Baby Eileen (see picture, page 41). The whole frilly-knickered-bum-chuck, finger-to-dimple awfulness of it all. She once heard a big bosomed chanteuse complain to the management, "Hey, Buster, how am I meant to compete with that ?" cocking a thumb in her direction. But 15 bob was a lot of money in those days, and besides, it's not everyone who can boast they were on the same bill as Anna Neagle, at age seven, singing I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy and toe-tapping on a drum at the stage door canteen.
In the golden autumn of her elegantly fulfilled life, Miss Atkins has no particular complaint about the bizarre nature of her childhood. "Bad things happen," she says imperiously. "Cope!" What really pisses her off is the current vogue for "counselling". The slightest thing happens, you witness an accident, you get burgled, some fool sends you a victim support round robin and the offer of "counselling". She sounds, she concedes, like some fat old blimp. "I was thrashed with the buckle end of a belt and it never did me any harm." Yes, that's her. A disgustingly reactionary old woman. "Wheels come off? Get on with it. Cope. Survive."
She isn't joking. Pragmatic people don't jest about themselves; rather, they sometimes choose to elaborate on one half of a contradiction for reasons of economy or modesty. The fact that life hurts is a banality, and we're all free to choose to be anaesthetised or sensitised or, as Eileen puts it so succinctly, "You might as well stay indoors for ever, because if you go out the bus conductor might not like you."
By the time she went to high school, she was bright enough not to give a stuff about being stupid. At the end of a lesson, teachers would say to the class, "Do you understand?" then, "And does Eileen understand?" and everybody would laugh. She didn't take offence and therefore no offence was intended. School offered "Drama", and a drama teacher who allowed her more enthusiastic pupils to improvise and perform their own playlets. Eileen found her niche and stuck to it.
In the fourth form she took the title role in the school production of Alice In Wonderland, a triumph that put her occasional scholastic weakness into perspective and gave her an identity she could grow up with. More significantly, perhaps, she found a mentor in the shape of the divinity master, an energetic and singular fellow with a penchant for moulding receptive schoolgirls, who sailed fairly close to the wind by eventually marrying one of them. But his influence on Eileen was purely cerebral, and, in imparting to her the benefits of his mindset, broke down the remaining barriers of her upbringing. They travelled to and from school on the same bus, he took her to the theatre, he explained to her with meticulous care the societal improprieties of capitalism and the moral superiority of socialism. He made her a free thinker. This had the effect of making her perfectly foul to her mum and dad. My, how she knocked and mocked the poor darlings, their narrow-mindedness, the petty parameters of their ambitions for themselves and herself.
When she was 14, going on 15, she took it upon herself to address a Mr Robert Atkins, a Royal Shakespeare Company director with an encouragingly familiar name and an on-going production she felt she had something to say about. "Dear Mr Atkins," she wrote. "The boy who plays the prince in your King John isn't good enough. I could do it better." Or words to that effect. He must have been temporarily amused, because he wrote back and suggested she drop in some time. He was less amused when she turned up, having dressed and cosmeticised herself to resemble her idea of a going concern. In fact, he was rather nasty. Good God, he said rudely, we don't want any shop girls here. Flattered, she replied that she wasn't a shop girl, she was a schoolgirl, and threw herself into her little prince speech with no trepidation. After that, he told her to come back when she was a grown-up and she went back to school thinking it had all been rather a good day's work.
Eileen didn't get into Rada. Guildhall wasn't keen, either, but signed her up for its teaching course and nobody noticed when she slipped herself in with the drama students and took up their curriculum as well. She wanted to be an actress. She was an actress.
At 18, going on 19, she was slogging up and down Charing Cross Road, knocking on doors, looking for jobs. That was how it worked in those days. You put yourself on as many agents' books as there were agents, then you went home and hoped. One Christmas she nearly got a job as a pantomime dog. An agent rang her up and said, quick, tell the truth, how tall are you? Five foot seven, she said. Damn, he said, the costume's for five foot two. Oh, she said, did I say five foot seven, I must have been thinking of my sister, she's the five foot seven one, honest - I'm five foot two. An hour later, she was backstage at some fleapit in Walthamstow with three other contenders. There was no audition, just the skin. So there she was, sweating and straining and yanking at the zip of this ratty costume, her entire life depending on cramming her five foot seven frame into a five foot two dog skin, and failing. No job. No money. No life.
Next day brought another great opportunity. A Christmas show in Norwich. "You'll be met at the station, dearie," said the agent. "It's a three pounds a week, all in. Digs and everything." Nothing to lose, everything to gain, she packed her suitcase and boarded a train for Norwich, where she was met at the station by a sad creature with a baby in her arms and a toddler round her ankles who dolefully led her to a bus stop. The bus stopped outside a theatre showing Mother Goose with Cyril Fletcher, and what luck, a young man called Peter Johnson, who she'd been at drama school with. Only it wasn't her stop.
The bus sailed on into the countryside and set her and her dismal companions down by a fairground. She was then led through the deepening darkness to a caravan in which a large man, another child and three huge dogs were already ensconced. These, apparently, were her digs.
"Look, lovey," said the large man, relieving her of her suitcase and stowing it beyond her reach. "I know all you girls think you're serious actresses" - which Eileen thought was perspicacious of him - "but get a load of this . . ." and he produced a cardboard box of Turkish harem costumes and flourished it at her in the manner of one offering the answer to a maiden's prayer. "Go on," he said, "you can choose!" Her role, it seemed, was to adorn herself in the exotic scanties of her choice, then prance about outside a tent in the cold, exhorting people to buy tickets to watch her host throwing knives at his wife, after which she was welcome to bed down with them in the caravan, babies, dogs, the whole ensemble.
And no, there was no telephone and no again, her suitcase was staying put. When in doubt, Eileen reckons, act it out. Certainly, bursting into tears was not going to work this time. So she fingered the horrible costumes in the vile box and said, ooh, yummy, how lovely, she could hardly wait - then, muttering something about finding other digs, ran panic-stricken into the night, leapt aboard a Norwich-bound bus and found herself at the stage door of Mother Goose. "Mr Johnson," she demanded, pulling herself together. "Mr Peter Johnson." Someone bawled along a corridor and Mr Johnson was roused from his kip between matinee and evening shows to emerge in green tights, horns, full Demon King fig, still holding his trident. Even his face was green. He threw his duffle coat over his kit, hailed a cab, bundled Eileen into it, took her back to the fair, thumped on the caravan door and addressed himself to the knife-thrower. "Evening," he barked. "Sorry. Not suitable. All right? Sorry. Give us the case. Jolly good. Sorry. Thank you. Goodnight." Then he drove Eileen to the station and put her on a train back to London. She got home at five in the morning. Her brother Ron let her in. "Right," said Ron, taking one look at her, "that's it. She's had it. The end."
But it wasn't. She continued to live at home in Tottenham with her parents and Ron while they gamely supported her in whatever she did as best they could. Her mum and dad sat bored and bewildered through interminable Shakespeares and Ibsens and Chekhovs and, good grief, Strindbergs, while their beloved daughter spread her wings far, far beyond their wildest dreams of her betterment. They'd hoped for a successful chorus girl. They didn't complain. They were, she says, valiant. One day, she thinks she was doing a Strindberg play at the time, she was with her father when they passed a theatre somewhere in Croydon where the late Cicely Courtneidge was starring in an extravaganza called Steppin' High or Steppin' Out or some fine thing. "Now that's the sort of thing I'd like to see you in," her dad said to her. She could have killed him at the time, but now, well, bless. And she wonders if she ever thanked Peter Johnson properly.
Six years ago, Eileen was in New York doing a play with Kathleen Turner. The two women didn't get on. Not to put too fine a point on it, they seemed to share a deep and visceral mutual aversion. And then Eileen got cancer. She took her little lump to the doctor and knew immediately what it was because he avoided her eye. She won't hear a word against oncologists. "Not only do they work impossible hours," she says, "but they're supposed to behave impeccably and be psychiatrists as well." Her best friend went with her for the big biopsy report and the best friend burst into tears and everybody looked the other way and, yes, she had cancer and they took her in and cut it out and that was it. Next morning some poor, benighted counsellor came into her room and confided to her that she must be very angry. Angry? asked Eileen. Oh yes, she'd kicked up a fuss because of the noise of the television set next door. Sorry, she said, but how are you supposed to get any sleep with that row going on? No, no, said the counsellor. You must be angry about the cancer. You know, he prompted, you must be thinking, why me?
"Look mate," she told him. "I've been angry all my life. I'm not about to start blaming it on cancer at the age of 61. And I've never thought, 'Why me?' I don't understand 'Why me?' My attitude is: 'Why not me?'"
She took some time off actually to have the cancer, of course. She didn't need to, but she did. They gave her the chemo and the radiation and she lay a bit low, because, to be honest, she didn't want people's eyes sliding off her all over the place. She did some writing, read a bit, ate well and felt perfectly wonderful all the way through. Her hair failed to fall out. She never felt sick. She doesn't know what all the fuss is about. She enjoyed it. She met such marvellous women having chemo. Marvellous. It's nothing to do with being brave, it's about getting on with it. You really have no choice.
"I'll tell you what pisses me off," she says, not for the first and I trust not for the last time, "it's that soppy cow on the Archers, weeping and wailing about her bloody cancer." Then she thinks for a minute. Still, she concedes, she is a bit young and she'd better watch what she says about the Archers in case she ends up on it. Come to think of it again, she reckons, she'd rather like that