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| Alf Garnett bought my house |
Warren Mitchell reveals all about
Hancock, Burton and his TV alter ego
Warren Mitchell as the West Ham supporting Alf Garnett in
his most famous role |
WARREN Mitchell was not the first, second nor even the third
choice by television producer Dennis Main Wilson to play the cantankerous
Alf Garnett character in the long-running series, Til Death Us Do
Part. Mr Mitchell revealed to an audience at Burgh House in Hampstead
on Thursday that it was only after Peter Sellers, Leo McKern and
Lionel Jeffries had either turned it down or were not available,
that the part was offered to him.
He agreed to do it immediately, although he had reservations about
the script at first. “I had no idea, when I read it,”
he said. “I thought: this isn’t funny – it’s
just a family arguing. But it caught on.”
He went on to star in 125 episodes of the comedy and its successor,
In Sickness and In Health, and then developed a largely improvised
stage show, the Thoughts of Chairman Alf, which he still performs
occasionally now at the age of 79.
“Alf Garnett has been good to me, and he is still a part of
my life,” he continued. “I mean, he owns the house where
I live in Highgate; he certainly paid for it.”
Interviewed by Burgh House Trustees chairman Matthew Lewin, Mr Mitchell
said that he had been born in Stoke Newington in 1926, near the
fish and chips shop run by his grandmother who had come from Russia
in 1910.
He said: “She used to say to me: ‘Varren, ven bizniss
is good, people eat fish and chips, and ven bizness is bad, people
eat fish and chips. So open a fish and chip shop and you’ll
never go hungry.’ But I made the mistake of going into this
precarious acting business instead.”
When he was at university in Oxford he met and became friends with
Richard Burton, and they were then to serve together in the RAF
in Canada during the war. One afternoon he saw Burton leap impulsively
onto a platform at an air force open day and deliver a whole series
of declamatory Shakespearean speeches.
“I looked around at all these people watching him, with their
mouths hanging open in admiration, and I said to myself: I wouldn’t
mind doing that for a living!”
After the war the RAF paid for him to have voice production lessons
and helped him get into RADA – but acting work was initially
very difficult to find. He worked as a porter at Euston Station,
a labourer on the night shift in the Walls Ice Cream factory and
a worker at the Standard Bottle Company in Bounds Green.
He was just about to give up acting when he got his first real breakthrough
– an audition for the TV version of Hancock’s Half Hour.
“Sid James said to me, ‘Just go in and do your funny foreigner,
and you’ll get the job’. And he was right,” he recalled.
“It was all live in those days, which was incredibly nerve-wracking,
and we would all get very nervous, especially Tony Hancock. When
he came on for my first scene with him and Sid, he dried stone dead,
live on television. I went up to him and said: ‘Master Hancock,
a word in your ear. . .’ and I fed him the line. After the
show he looked at me and said: I’m never doing a show without
you – you’re in!’.”
But it was in 1979 that Mr Mitchell really showed what he could
do when he played Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a
Salesman at the National Theatre – a performance many people
believe was the best ever in that role.
He was playing tennis in Highgate with National Theatre director
Michael Rudman who revealed that he was doing Salesman and was thinking
of casting the lead as a Jewish man.
“I told him that I had just finished playing Willy Loman in
Australia, and Michael asked me to come in and read for him. Weeks
went by, and I’m pretty sure that he was fighting the establishment
at the National who were saying no, no, no to the idea of Warren
Mitchell playing the part. But eventually, there I was doing it.”
It was a huge success. He won the Evening Standard award, the Laurence
Olivier award, Plays and Players and others. And the greatest accolade
of all came from Arthur Miller himself, whocame over to see the
performance and who told him: “‘Warren, you’re my
favourite Willy.’ And I said to him, “I bet you say that
to all your Willys”. Further praise for his serious acting
on stage followed a few years ago when he played the 89-year-old
Gregory Solomon role in Miller’s The Price, initially at the
Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, and then later when the play transferred
to the West End. Mr Mitchell usually spends part of the year in
Australia where he has family and a large number of fans. He has
even obtained Australian citizenship. But although his health is
not as good as he would like it to be, he is determined to continue
working. Why? “Because it’s better than gardening, and
it helps me stay sane,” he said. |
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