Tim Walker | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

‘I was asked if I would wear Nicole Kidman’s breasts’

‘I was asked if I would wear Nicole Kidman’s breasts’

Geraldine James, recently notorious as the breast-feeding mother in Little Britain, talks to Tim Walker about her role in Howard Barker’s VictoryGeraldine James’s agent telephoned one day and asked if she would care to play an over-protective mother. And he added there was something that she ought to know: it involved breast-feeding and, ah yes, the recipient would be a man in his thirties. The distinguished stage and screen actress has always liked surprising people and that was why, after she had seen the script, she agreed to appear in the ‘Bitty’ sketches in Little Britain — although not, she hastens to add, with her own breasts. ‘Everybody assumes they were mine, but in fact they were prosthetic and made by the man who made the fat suit that Matt Lucas used when he played Bubbles,’ says Miss James matter-of-factly.

I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

Tim Walker talks to Greta Scacchi about her new role in The Deep Blue Sea, the gaucheness of Bill Murray — and being offered the lead in Basic InstinctGreta Scacchi is lying in bed beside Laurence Olivier. His head is resting against her shoulder. Suddenly it feels damp. She looks at the old man and sees that he is crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. He looks back at her imploringly. ‘Oh, Greta, I haven’t got any more work after this for six months. Nobody wants me any more...’.The bedroom scene in the television drama The Ebony Tower took a whole day to shoot and so there was plenty of time for confidences with the man she always addressed as ‘Sir’. Miss Scacchi was then 23, and Olivier 78, but he was looking older and frailer after a bout of pleurisy.

I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama

A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama

‘I am and always have been an activist,’ says Paul Boateng, the British High Commissioner to South Africa. ‘As a lawyer, a Methodist lay preacher and now as a diplomat, that is what I am. It is how I have been brought up and I can’t imagine ever being anything other than that.’ Boateng’s posting comes to an end next May and somehow one can’t quite see this Hackney-born, one-time firebrand of the Greater London Council allowing himself to be quietly packed off to the Lords. He will then be 57, still relatively youthful by Westminster standards and, as his late Ghanaian father, Kwaku, once told the Daily Mail, it is not inconceivable that his boy might one day, ‘with the help of God’, make it to the highest office his country has to offer.

Two old stagers find vigour in Brief Lives

Two old stagers find vigour in Brief Lives

In a soulless, drafty rehearsal hall just around the corner from Euston Station, Roy Dotrice is doing a reading as John Aubrey under the watchful eye of the director Patrick Garland. The bitchy 17th-century writer and antiquarian is a character that both men have come to know very well over years.The relationship began in 1967 when Brief Lives — Garland’s adaptation of The Memoirs, Miscellanies, Letters and Jottings of John Aubrey — was first staged at the Hampstead Theatre. On the West End, Broadway and around the world, Dotrice went on to play Aubrey for more than 1,700 performances which still warrants a mention in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-running one-man show. Now these two old stagers — Garland is 72 and Dotrice is, unbelievably, 84 — are about to reprise the play with a run that will open at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester on 7 February and end, they hope, in the West End.

‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

Peter Vaughan has been delivering fine performances for decades — Grouty in Porridge and Robert Lindsay’s prospective father-in-law in Citizen Smith, among many others — but it is only lately, since he became a pensioner, that a large swath of the population has finally put his name to his face.His performance as the Alzheimer’s sufferer Felix Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North and his wonderful turn as Anthony Hopkins’s father in The Remains of the Day were the parts that finally did it for him. ‘They were my favourites,’ says the 84-year-old actor. He adds, however, that he has another film now that is every bit as special to him — Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral, which opens this week. He plays Uncle Alfie, the elder statesman of a feuding family which gathers to bury a relative.

A child of the Troubles with a smile on his face

A child of the Troubles with a smile on his face

Patrick Kielty says that there are three ages in a comedian’s life. ‘He starts off as the young Turk who is angry about the state of the world and wants to put it right. Then comes the age of hypocrisy — when he is still quite angry and still quite young, but quietly goes home after the show is over and puts his feet up at his nice pad in Chelsea. Then there is the final age when he is well into middle-age and making jokes about the goo-goo noises his children make. That is when he should, if he has any sense at all, give it all up.’At 36, the man who hosted the BBC’s Fame Academy and ITV’s Celebrity Love Island admits that he is halfway there. He is talking to me in a fashionable club in Chelsea just around the corner from his home.

‘Being famous has become rather common’

‘Being famous has become rather common’

‘Being famous has become rather common’

Rupert Everett tells Tim Walker that there is nothing wrong with being a bimbo, that political correctness has been ‘a disaster for everyone’ and that gay adoption is wrongRupert Everett has just done Richard & Judy, or maybe, he concedes, Richard and Judy have just done him. ‘It is hard to work out who is using who on these occasions,’ he says. ‘I suppose ultimately we are all just hustlers.’ The actor is proud of his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and, now that it has come out in paperback, he is throwing himself at the promotional tour with professional gusto. He can’t, however, disguise the fact that the chat show circuit now seems to him a trifle infra dig.‘I think being famous has become rather common, actually.

‘Being famous has become rather common’

‘I enjoy being an ousider’

‘I enjoy being an ousider’

At the Prince of Wales’s 50th birthday party at Buckingham Palace, Sir Geoffrey Cass, who was then the chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company, presented Antony Sher to the Queen. ‘He is one of our leading actors, ma’am,’ Sir Geoffrey whispered into her ear. Her Majesty frowned, paused for a very long time and finally said, ‘Oh, are you?’A string of words, mercifully unuttered, formed in Sher’s head. ‘No, of course not, Your Majesty, you’ve seen through me. I’m just a little gay Yid from somewhere called Sea Point on the other side of the world. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know why I am. I am an impostor.’Only an angry, if not an incandescent, outsider, could have thought in such terms, but nine years on, after a knighthood, a civil partnership, much psychotherapy and, funnily enough, a convivial stay at Sandringham as a house guest of the Queen’s oldest son, Sher seems to have come to an accommodation with himself and with life.

Meeting Eileen Atkins

Meeting Eileen Atkins

Dame Eileen Atkins is adamant that she is a horrible person. ‘My mother looked at me as if she had hatched a snake, but then I could be vile to her and to my family,’ the actress says. ‘My parents were angry people, frustrated with their lot in life, and I inherited their anger. I’ve always put my career before everyone and I have been very selfish. I think it’s a good thing I never had any children as I would almost certainly have passed on my anger to them. I’d have been a terrible mother.’Everybody seems to love and revere Dame Eileen except, alas, Dame Eileen herself. I tell her the complimentary things that the distinguished playwright Ronald Harwood has told me about her and she just laughs. She has always been different from her fellow dames — Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren — but then she says that, coming from a council estate in north London, she had a background that was a lot more humble than any of theirs.

‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is her trademark. ‘I bowed and then I just got on with it.’The story is a perfect metaphor for the actress’s eventful life. Even after her worst falls — one thinks of the end of her youthful, passionate relationship with a married Richard Burton (‘my greatest love’), and the more recent, acrimonious divorce from the novelist Philip Roth — she has always managed not merely to get up again but to do so with aplomb.Miss Bloom, who celebrates her 76th birthday in February, has an intelligent, sensitive and still very beautiful face with dark, vulnerable eyes.

‘Reid should not stand in Brown’s way’

‘Reid should not stand in Brown’s way’

Neil Kinnock on the Home Secretary’s ambitions, and Cameron‘Call me Neil, for God’s sake,’ says Lord Kinnock of Bedwellty when he welcomes me to the chairman’s office at the British Council with its panoramic views over Whitehall and the South Bank. ‘That title makes me sound like the bloody Royal Albert Hall.’Kinnock has always been too self-deprecating for his own good. Tony Blair’s propagandists like to suggest that Year Zero in the Labour party’s history was 1994, when their Dear Leader took charge. Others have longer memories: Kinnock heroically taking on the Militant Tendency, struggling to give the party some semblance of professionalism and, in the process, planting the seed that was one day to grow into a red rose for Mr Blair.

Will Charles be the first multicultural monarch?

Will Charles be the first multicultural monarch?

The Queen turned 80 on 21 April this year, and while she may finally have been prevailed upon to scale back on her public duties, she remains — as anyone who saw her during her visit to the Baltic States last week knows — in robust good health. Alex Galloway, the Clerk of the Privy Council, has however deemed this a prudent juncture to dispatch a circular letter to all the 500 or so members of Her Majesty’s Privy Council to ensure that he has up-to-date land and mobile telephone numbers and email addresses for each of them should he ever need to relay urgent information. The phraseology that the career civil servant employs in his letter is studiously matter-of-fact, but his purpose is abundantly clear: he has in mind the arrangements that will need to be put in place when the sovereign dies.

In praise of the patriotic playwright

In praise of the patriotic playwright

Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of The Pianist and The Dresser, tells Tim Walker that he is delighted to be in demand — but never wants to be ‘fashionable’I first came face to face with Ronald Harwood three years ago as we were waiting for our coats after the party to mark the opening of the Saatchi Gallery in the old County Hall building in London. Two disgruntled lines of people had converged and he thought I was queue-barging and I thought he was. It could have gone either way. Either a big row or the start of a friendship. Happily, it was the latter. Harwood does charm but he also does fury. On that occasion I wasn’t quite sure which I was going to get. His plays and screenplays invariably have the same unpredictable quality, the same edginess and simmering tensions.

‘Never be terrible in a terrible movie’

‘Never be terrible in a terrible movie’

Listing page content hereThe waiters at Le Caprice in St James’s have never had to go out to see the world. The world has always come to them. Just after the war, Humphrey Bogart used to dine at the ineffably glamorous establishment with Lauren Bacall and, since then, just about every major headline-maker of the past century — and the start of this one — has had a regular table, including the late Diana, Princess of Wales.Over the past two decades I have broken bread there myself with a variety of political, social and show-business figures and, needless to say, the waiters never batted an eyelid. Until the other day, when I lunched with a man who almost brought the place to a standstill. Every eye was trained upon this regally tall, imposing figure as he made his entrance.

‘It seemed to me that Tony was suffering’

‘It seemed to me that Tony was suffering’

‘It seemed to me that Tony was suffering’

Sir Cliff Richard has sold his palatial home on the St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, Surrey, but the entertainer is not forsaking Britain for America, as you might have heard, but merely downsizing. Indeed, he has already put in an offer for a smaller place scarcely 20 minutes away.At 65, Sir Cliff is at an age when most men have completed the metamorphosis into a fully formed Victor Meldrew and are only too happy to talk about the sense of despair they feel for their country and its people. The traditional next stage is migration to Spain — or anywhere else in the world but Britain — where disgruntled expats are wont to gather and moan and talk about the way things were.What I find extraordinary about Sir Cliff is that he has become an old-age pensioner with not just his youthful good looks but also his youthful spirit intact.

‘It seemed to me that Tony was suffering’

Diary - 21 April 2006

Diary - 21 April 2006

Delhi It’s a sappingly humid Sunday evening, but I decide a suit and tie are in order for Sir Michael Arthur, the British High Commissioner. Bad move. He is in shirtsleeves as he takes me out on to the terrace of his Lutyens villa in Delhi. His bearer pours me a gin and tonic and I inquire after another man known for his aversion to mufti: the Prince of Wales. Sir Michael explains that he couldn’t spend as much time as he would have liked at his side when he visited India with the Duchess of Cornwall last month. Jack Straw had summoned him home for the launch of the White Paper ‘Active Diplomacy for a Changing World: The UK’s International Priorities’. It is hard to imagine any previous High Commissioner to India bailing out — even briefly — of a visit by the heir to the throne.