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Zoë Wanamaker interview: 'Emma Rice was perfect for the Globe'
Actress Zoë Wanamaker tells Ben Lawrence about her latest TV role – and reflects on the crisis at the theatre her father founded
Zoë Wanamaker springs from the basement kitchen of her north London home like Puck, ready to cause havoc in an enchanted wood not far from the gates of Athens. She’s a small, wispy figure, and that’s at odds with her voice, which is rasping and theatrical; she swoops on her vowels like a bird of prey.
As we sit down for a coffee, she reaches inside a wooden box of smoking impedimenta and constructs a cigarette from liquorice rolling paper. Joan Littlewood was a smoker, too, and Wanamaker is playing her in a new BBC biopic, Babs, about the life of Barbara Windsor.
Recreational habits aside, however, the impish Wanamaker seems to have little in common with the mother of modern theatre. Littlewood, most famous for developing the groundbreaking musical Oh, What a Lovely War! through her Theatre Workshop at Stratford, east London, was known to be intransigent at best and on occasion downright rude. When Peter Hall tried to woo her to the National Theatre in the late Seventies, she replied: “Bulldoze your building!” Her love life was enigmatic, and she ended her days, improbably, as a sometime companion to Baron Philippe de Rothschild.
“She was a phenomenal creature,” says Wanamaker. “She had energy, a strength of passion and a social commitment which, I don’t think, exists much in theatre any more. “She often cast working-class actors, which had never been done before. She gave people like Barbara Windsor a voice, and of course that changed film and television for ever.”
Tony Jordan’s drama begins in 1993, with Windsor at a low point in her career, reduced to cabaret appearances in seaside towns. Windsor reflects on aspects of her life; the starstruck child of an unhappy and violent marriage, a grammar-school girl, wife of a gangster and, most surprisingly perhaps, an actress whose potential was spotted by Littlewood and whose career was damaged by the need to work on such dross as the Carry On films, thanks to her hubby’s sporadic detainments at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Windsor is played by four actresses, including Jaime Winstone and Samantha Spiro (plus there’s a cameo from the woman herself). A piece of Littlewood’s tough love has made it into the film: “If you’re not careful, you’ll end up playing the sexy little blonde for the rest of your life.”
Wanamaker, 67, met Littlewood once, at her father Sam’s funeral in 1993. “My father created a people’s palace [he founded the Globe], and that was exactly what Joan was doing at Stratford. He was always raving about her and when he came over to England, it was her kind of work that he wanted to be doing.”
Sam Wanamaker had a successful career as an actor in the US before he found himself blacklisted by Joseph McCarthy in the early Fifties. He had previously been a member of the Communist Party. At the time, he was filming in England and decided, in the light of the witch hunts, to remain here. A successful career as an actor and director followed, although he is now remembered, almost exclusively, as the man behind the Globe.
“Before the blacklisting,” says Wanamaker, almost swallowing that phrase, “My parents sent my elder sister to an all-black school in New York. Can you imagine?” Wanamaker herself, who was only three when the family emigrated, went to a progressive boarding school in Oxfordshire; it was a liberal upbringing and she thinks she never rebelled because she didn’t have anything to rebel against. But she did feel American rather than English. “It was all to do with the sense of humour,” she says. “Our family’s humour was ironic and British humour, particularly at that time, wasn’t. I was brought up on shows like I Love Lucy and Sgt Bilko.”
Now, she says, she feels very English in New York and very American when she returns to London. Her parents, she says, tried to persuade her not to become an actress – “they told me it would be difficult and humiliating” – so she studied at Hornsey Art College.
But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that it was not her vocation. She later attended drama school (Central) and took secretarial classes where, as an undiagnosed dyslexic, she struggled. Eventually, she got her equity card by hauling herself through the then-buoyant British repertory system, appearing in works with such unedifying titles as Ah Well, It Won’t Be Long. “A terrible play,” she proclaims, laughing.
All this time, she was ignoring her father’s struggle to achieve his dream of a replica of Shakespeare’s theatre on the South Bank. “I think I was a bit snotty about it, and my friends certainly were,” she recalls, her eyes alternating between dancing mischief and a retreat into the middle distance, as if she’s trying to fathom the unknowable. “I remember Jonathan Miller saying to me, ‘Why does your father want to build the Globe? We’ve got Shakespeare at Stratford.’ Everyone thought it was going to be baggy tights and bad acting.”
Of course, the Globe is now a British institution in the best sense of the word, and Wanamaker gives a distant smile as she remembers how her father died knowing its completion – and its success – would be assured. “When he was dying, he said to me, ‘I will get the Lottery money because I’m dying and I will get the sympathy vote’. And look, the Globe has become everything Dad said it would be.”
I ask Wanamaker what a trailblazer such as her father would make of the board’s treatment of the Globe’s artistic director Emma Rice, who is leaving after a year in the role following their concerns over her creative choices. “I can’t say. I can’t say. It upset me too much,” says Wanamaker, simultaneously rubbing her upper lip and taking a drag of her roll-up with studied introspection.
She exhales an arabesque. “OK, I can say this. An artistic director, once they are chosen, should be given everything they need. You have elected them and so you should give them their support. I was saddened because I think she [Rice] is perfect for the Globe. But it’s about compromise really and I’m not sure if anyone was prepared to compromise.”
Would she ever perform there herself? “Mark Rylance asked me a couple of times but it was too much of a strain for me. I find it difficult even going there because I know what it cost, its emotional cost, I mean – the rows and the rejections and the passions my father had.”
Wanamaker turns 68 next weekend and has reached a level of fame with which she is now comfortable, although it wasn’t always the case. “It is a shock when someone has a car accident in front of you because they have seen you and done a double take.”
Naturally, it was television that raised her profile. An early success was as the Greenham Common protester Charlie Titmuss in John Mortimer’s Paradise Postponed (1986). She was the brittle and eccentric Audrey Maclintick in the 1997 adaptation of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and combined sweetness and gravitas for the romantic comedy drama Love Hurts, an unlikely hit in the early Nineties.
However, it’s the sitcom My Family for which most recognise her. Its unashamed middle-classness and middle-of-the-roadness alienated some critics, and Wanamaker recalls, with glee, a review which stated that it “looked like two good actors running away from a bad script”. More than five years since it ended, Wanamaker maintains that she is proud of the show and that the scripts weren’t bad at all – at least not initially.
She still works constantly (as does her actor husband, Gawn Grainger) and she is currently learning lines for a new ITV drama, while a “dangerous and challenging” theatre piece is on the horizon. “If you are frightened of something, you should do it, because it makes you sharper,” she says. “I hate the fear that I get whenever I take on something new, but if I’m scared, well, I think it means I’m on to something.”
Would she be scared of Littlewood? “Terrified!” she squawks. And as if to calm her nerves at the very prospect, Zoë Wanamaker takes another drag of her liquorice roll-up.
Babs is on BBC One tonight at 8pm