UK Edition
Kenneth Cranham: 'I got £2k a show for Harvey Moon. Now it's £400 a week in theatre'
Kenneth Cranham, 71, made his movie debut in the 1968 classic Oliver! but is best known for his title role in the early Eighties ITV sitcom Shine On Harvey Moon. His more recent work includes Valkyrie with Tom Cruise and Maleficent with Angelina Jolie. He is currently starring in the West End production of The Father and lives in London with his wife Fiona Victory and their 21-year-old daughter Kathleen.
How did your childhood experience influence your attitude to money?
I was born during the war. My mother was Scottish, Margaret McKay Ferguson of Lochgelly, Fife, so I lived up there with Mum. I didn’t meet my father until I was 18-months-old as the country had tried to avoid the mass unemployment that happened at the end of the First World War and he was sent off to Africa to uphold the remnants of the empire. When I was approaching school age we moved to a tiny place in Camberwell, south London, where I shared a bedroom with my parents from the ages of four to 10. But it didn’t seem weird then, as I didn’t know anything else.
Both my parents worked and my mother put me into a school in Pimlico near where she worked but my upbringing didn’t feel sparse. Our house was end of terrace and had been rebuilt after being bombed during the war; consequently it was the only one in the street with an outside toilet. We didn’t feel too badly off and it actually felt like we were ahead of the game. And because both my parents were working we were the first house in the street to have a television.
One of your earliest roles was in the Oliver! movie as Noah Claypole. How much you were paid?
I did five days for £50 a day which seemed like a fortune and even better was the fact that in the evenings I was in Joe Orton’s Loot and I was getting £30 a week for that so that felt like a very flush time. Joe Orton was so impressed that I was earning £50 a day on Oliver! that he wrote about it in his diary. He thought it was really something.
Was that the first time you got paid for anything?
No. I was lucky enough to be paid for acting while I was still at school. In the school production of The Long And the Short and the Tall I played Bamforth, which was the part that Peter O’Toole played in the Royal Court production. Playwright Ray Jenkins wrote a two-hander for the radio when I was finishing school so I did that job with an actor called William Squire and got paid a few quid for it. I was amazed, as I would have done it for nothing. To get paid for doing something that I found so exciting was incredible.
Acting can be a volatile profession. Are you a spender or a saver?
What happens with acting is that occasionally you’re rich, but a lot of the time you’re poor. Your earnings fluctuate. You can have a lucrative period of your life but if you don’t earn something similar to that amount the following year you can pay an awful lot of tax.
I don’t know what the answer to that one is. It’s a pity that you can’t spread your earnings over a period. I did once buy this painting which I had for a bit and then Gordon Brown when he was chancellor rearranged the tax system so you got taxed ahead of the year and I had to sell the painting. It was a wonderful painting and I used to look at it, but I didn’t have it for long. It’s gone now.
You’ve appeared with Tom Cruise in Valkyrie, Angelina Jolie in Maleficent and Daniel Craig in Layer Cake. Which movie paid the best?
Maleficent was a spectacular Disney film and because I went over the period I was employed to work for I was well compensated for that. I can’t remember exactly how much, but I did earn an extra £10,000 for going past the date, which sounds a lot, but around that time Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt bought a château in France for £65m so my 10-grand didn’t seem so much then.
How does it feel to be getting your more modest fee on movies when the megastars are being paid tens of millions?
Having worked with Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie and people like that, you are with people who are living parallel lives really. You don’t exist in the same world at all. It’s a strange one. In Berlin with Valkyrie, Tom Cruise had organised these caterers called Four Stars and on some days they would do ice sculptures of Berlin landmarks full of seafood hanging off them. I’d never seen anything like it. It was another world.
What’s been your single biggest payday?
You sort of tot things up at the end of the year and you have some good years and some bad years. I did the title role in an opera for the Royal Opera House. It wasn’t a singing role but it was a text by W H Auden so it wasn’t easy as it had long pages of music and I don’t read music so I had to rely on the conductor pointing at me. But I got £1,000 a show for that and as I was the title role I got opera money.
How does opera money compare to theatre money?
When I did my current play, The Father, at the Ustinov Studio theatre in Bath, I got £400 a week then when we came to the Tricycle in London I got £450 a week.
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Shine On Harvey Moon was your TV breakthrough role, watched by 18 million people. Were you rewarded accordingly?
Peter Kay talks about hurrying home to see Shine On Harvey Moon in one of his books, and it did become one of those shows that people connected with and really got to know. I got very well paid for that. It was a time when TV paid really well so I think I got £2,000 a show for the first series and that rate went up a bit with each series.
Does money make you happy?
Let me put it this way. Two actors who I worked with a long time ago – John Nettles and Paul Eddington – were just theatre actors at the Old Vic in Bristol where I did a season on The Long Day’s Journey Tonight with them. When I met them years later and they’d had a long time of success on the television, John in Bergerac and Paul in Yes Minister, they were much, much happier people. Life is certainly much easier if you’ve got some money
What are the biggest financial lessons you’ve learnt?
My advice to somebody starting out is try not to get yourself too many bills to pay early on so you can perhaps get a bedrock of good work at the start of your career. I had the good fortune to be a principal player at the Royal Court Theatre and I did eight productions for my main mentor, director Bill Gaskill.
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What’s your best financial decision?
The most important thing is that we’ve got somewhere to live. Not that we ever bought where we live in London to make money on it, but my daughter is living underneath me and she’s a student so she’s got a certain amount of independence but we can look after her. I don’t have a property portfolio. It’s just our house.
Do you have any financial indulgences?
I’ve never learnt to drive. I’ve never learnt to play golf. I don’t do lots of things that are very costly, but I do love travelling. That’s my extravagance. We both went to Vienna by train in the last year. That was a beautiful trip on the Eurostar and we’ve just been to Miami for some winter sun. I spend a lot of money on memberships too. To the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum. I belong to them all and use them as much as I can.
Do you ever gamble?
No not for me. I’ve done it a few times but I just thought, 'No, this is the fastest way to get rid of money'.
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Do you bank online?
No, no no. I don’t do anything online. It’s a real pressure on those I share my life with but I only go as far as a fax machine. That was the last bit of technology I understood.
What are you financial plans for the future?
I don’t have any really. My immediate future is with The Father. I’ve done 171 performances of it so far and I’m doing another 90. I’m going on a seven-city tour with it. I’m 71. It’s quite something to do something like that.
What do you like least about dealing with money?
I find all the complications seem to be arising with the world of plastic and technology; I found that sometimes rather confusing. I wish things were less automated. I’d prefer them to be more personal.
• Kenneth Cranham stars in The Father at the Duke Of York Theatre in London’s Covent Garden until March 26