AFTER PETER: Interview - Sian Phillips

07-29-2001 Independent on Sunday

By E JANE DICKSON

Sian Phillips can make herself disappear. It is a good trick, outranking anything David Copperfield has to offer. One minute she is there, a taut composition of eyebrow, cheekbone and chiselled jaw; the next, she has melted into soft focus, an elegantbut anonymous wraith. A tilt of the chin, a power-surge to the sorceress-green eyes and - ta-da! - the grande dame is back, acknowledging my single grin as if I were a theatre packed to the rafters.

"O'Toole taught me how to do that," says Phillips. "He taught me how to walk down the road and not be seen. You just think it. You think, `Nobody sees me', and they don't. Then, you think, `I'm going to be me now.' And everybody goes, `Oh! Isn't that -you know - that actress who used to be married to Peter O'Toole?'"

It is 22 years since Phillips walked out on her life with O'Toole. In that time she has worked constantly, on stage and screen. Her recent one- woman-show Marlene, in which she damn near out-Dietriched Dietrich, confirmed her status as a fully paid-updiva. And Phillips is defined, for many, by her long-defunct marriage to a burnt-out superstar. This must be a little annoying?

"Oh, I don't resent it at all," says Phillips. "I think that until I'm in my grave people will say, "But, oh, you were married to Peter O'Toole." It doesn't bother me at all. Not at all. It really, really doesn't." The Nefertiti neck swings gracefullyunder the weight of denial. "It just happens to some people. There are names that go together and never come unstuck and there's nothing you can do about it. It really doesn't bother me. I mean, he's a wonderful person to have to be shackled to. He's animmensely interesting man. I don't see him now, ever. But he can't have stopped being a very, very interesting man."

All the same, some things are not to be borne, even from the world' s most interesting ex-husband. When Phillips heard that O'Toole was bringing out a three-volume autobiography, she was alarmed. "It seemed that the third volume would bring his life up tome and our marriage, " she explains. "I didn't for a moment think O'Toole would be ungenerous or cruel, but I didn't think he would be truthful either. I didn't think he would remember well enough. I thought, `Well, I don't really want my life to behijacked.' I thought, `I'll just write my own book and leave it in the drawer. My daughters can find it when I'm dead and gone, and they'll know my story.' And then, I don't know how it happened, but a friend mentioned it to a friend, and suddenly therewas this lovely editor, and I had a deal for a two-volume autobiography."

The first volume, telling of Phillips' Welsh childhood and her teenage triumph through Rada, was published in 1999 to rather more critical acclaim than is usual with showbiz memoirs. The second volume, largely given over to "the O'Toole years" comes outthis week. The title, Public Places, is ironic as the book details how it felt to be living out an intensely private folie a deux in the full glare of publicity. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, no glossy magazine was complete without a glimpse of O'Tooleand Phillips's home in Hampstead, with Phillips being domestic in Dior, while Daddy flashed his famous rumpled grin at his daughters, Kate and Pat.

"There would be a designated part of the house where people would come and photograph, and it was absolutely rubbish, because it was all lies," says Phillips. Behind bolted, green baize doors in the undesignated reaches of Guyon House on Heath Street,life was lived at a pitch only sustainable on industrial quantities of alcohol. There were whole floors of the house, forbidden to the children, where the biggest names in British acting could misbehave in impregnable privacy. Burton and Taylor werefamily friends. Peter Sellers came to nurse a broken heart after Sophia Loren spurned him. Nureyev vomited over the toile de Jouy and was bumped, unconscious, down seven flights of stairs while his entourage begged an incensed O'Toole to "for God' s sakemind his feet!"

"It wasn't an easy household," says Phillips smoothly. "Sometimes it was irregular in a way I can't write about in books because it would be libellous." Pre-publication, Public Places attracted the attention of so many libel lawyers, alert to possibleslights on their famous clients, that Phillips nearly pulled the plug on it. "It makes you wonder about the whole business of truth. Because the minute you start leaving things out, you're editing. And the minute you're editing, it's no longer exactlywhat happened. So I've had the most terrible time writing this book. It's been so lonely, like doing therapy without the therapist." To cap it all, it turned out that the third and final volume of O'Toole's autobiography is to stop just short of hismarriage to Phillips.

For all her thrilling staginess, Phillips is a peculiarly sincere person. Her writing is remarkable for its lack of self-protection. You get the impression that she could no more post-rationalise her relationship with O'Toole than she could a plague offrogs. When they met, cast in a show as a brother and sister, Phillips was the one being fast-tracked for an international career. But from the moment, early in their romance, when O'Toole, threw her clothes out of the window on to a rainy pavement, andinsisted she dress in his clothes instead, her character was willingly subsumed in his.

The 60-something Phillips - she is not the kind of lady you ask to confirm her age - has retained the rakish chic of her early travesti. Today, she is in stripy Breton jersey, jeans and sailing shoes, full stage make-up and a casual,break-your-fingers-if-you-touch-it bob. The effect is fabulous, just this side of frightening. It is hard to imagine her the submissive victim of anyone's charm. When she met O'Toole, Phillips had already walked away from a marriage to a universityprofessor in Wales. The 1960s were just around the corner. She had read her Doris Lessing and was set to be a New Woman, exploring sexual and social freedoms on a par with men. But, when she got pregnant by O' Toole, the publicity machine insisted theymarry.

An unreconstructed Leeds-born Irishman, he expected the household to run to his volatile whim. If he came in drunk at 4am, it seemed only reasonable that his wife should make him breakfast; Phillips' s RSC and broadcasting career was sidelined. "Only aperson like O' Toole could have knocked me off course that far," she says with something like pride. "He was so incredibly charismatic and fascinating, so wonderful, that I didn't want to be part of the New Woman thing after all. I wanted to be with him."

Even today, she seems dazzled by O'Toole's cod Irishry. "I love Eye- urr- land" she purrs, in a terrible Connemara accent. "It is so different from Welsh culture, do you see? The hand of non-conformism descended on Wales in the 19th century; everythingwas rigid, bound by Chapel and Puritanism. I was quite seduced by the anarchy of Eye-urr-land, but of course the whole damn thing was linked in with him."

National stereotypes apart, it is a useful analysis of the attraction between them: she sensible and systematic, he spontaneous to the point of lunacy. Not every wife would be charmed to be driven, pregnant, at break-neck speed by a drunk down aYugoslavian mountain pass. Few, though, would be insensible to the romance of being led by the hand up the Orinoco river and crowned with priceless pre-Columbian artefacts plucked from the mud. As O'Toole's career rocketed, breaking the sound barrierwith Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, so the pressure on the "perfect couple" increased. The rows, mainly about Phillips's sexual past, which were once whispered in rented rooms were screeched in the privacy of chartered jets. There are times when,treacherously, you long to hear O'Toole's side of the story.

For all the stars at Guyon House, the couple had few real friends. Visitors were either appalled or excited by O'Toole's treatment of his wife, but they drifted off when the first bottles flew. "One of the problems of living with someone who drinksheavily is you stop inviting people home," Phillips explains. "I had nobody to confide in."

Then, in 1973, in a rare moment of attention to her career, Phillips took the part of Emmeline Pankhurst in Shoulder to Shoulder, a television drama serial about the Suffragettes. "It was the first time I had spent time with women. I had always been thegirl in the office, or the leading lady spending all my time with men. So to be with 50 women for 10 months was wonderful and bizarre. I didn't say anything, but I kept listening and I began to see how all these women had the same problems I had butthey'd been reading different books. Feminism had happened. I came off that set a different person. Shoulder to Shoulder was the thing that made me realise I had to push away from the life I had."

In a spirit of dissidence, Phillips built up resources. Her starring role in How Green Was My Valley (1975) was followed by the huge success of I, Claudius (1976), in which she played the Augustus's scheming wife, Livia. For many, it remains her definingrole. "So clever to play a 100- year crone at 38," she trills. "You spend the rest of your life being told how young you look."

Typically, it was O'Toole, who in 1979, sorted out the details of their parting, giving Phillips 24-hours notice to quit the family home. "My house, my furniture, my pictures were there, and I didn' t really miss them, which is odd because, as an onlychild, I get very attached to my things." When I express surprise that the teenage daughters she also left in Guyon House do not figure in her catalogue of loss, she takes it on the chin.

"I know what you're saying. I remember playing Clemmie Churchill and being rather chilled by how her children lost out in her obsession with her husband. But our marriage was like that. O'Toole was just too absorbing. He went away a lot and I was the oneconstantly dealing with the children, but the emotional centre, always, for them and for me, would be him. And that happens in marriages like that. The children come second. I think my daughters have had problems, and they've dealt with them and arestill dealing with them. They were protected from everything that went on. But you can't really hide from children. They may not have seen anything, but they are always aware if something is not right."

Phillips remarried in 1979. Her new husband, the actor Robin Sachs, was 15 years her junior, and the union was dissolved without rancour in 1991, when Sachs went to California to work on his tan and land a job in Dynasty. "It wasn't a very significantrelationship, but it was a very jolly one in many regards," she says. "I now know that marriage doesn't suit me. It brings me out in eczema and boils."

She now lives, alone, in a Kensington flat, where light from the French windows pools on important-looking paintings and well-rubbed fruitwoods. The idea that she might, older and wiser, yet find someone to fill O'Toole's shoes brings an almost outrageddenial. "Never, never, never. Of course not. I could never give that commitment again. It would be completely impossible because, apart from anything else, it involved astounding energy and the kind of endurance you only have in youth. I have intimatefriendships now which are very important to me and I give them everything I've got. But they're friendships."

She hasn't spoken to O'Toole since the divorce ("I never speak to any of my exes"). She once bumped into him on her way to her bank, though. "I looked up and there he was, walking towards me. I said, `Oh, gosh. Hello.' He said, `Hello.' Nothing happened.We kissed each other's cheeks and trudged on." Yet clearly he still galvanises her. Forty years after they first met, she sits up straighter when she talks of him. He leaps off the pages of Public Places like no other subject. "It's true," she saysquietly. "He engaged me totally: sexually, creatively, emotionally. What can I say?" The lovely hands fall empty in her lap.

There has been some literal kicking up of heels. Of late, Phillips has reinvented herself as a cabaret artiste. Her one-woman show, Falling in Love Again, headlines October's "Divas at the Donmar" programme at London's Donmar Warehouse. In it, she singsthe torch songs of Kurt Weill, Joni Mitchell, Jacques Brel, George Gershwin. Is there one lyric that means more to her than any other? Flicking on the inner spotlight, she starts to sing. The melody, edges softened by her smoky snarl, is not immediatelyrecognisable. Then, after a few bars, the tune clicks in: "Thanks for the Memory." n

`Public Places' is published on 2 August by Hodder & Stoughton, price pounds 20

 

E JANE DICKSON, AFTER PETER: Interview - Sian Phillips . , Independent on Sunday, 07-29-2001, pp 12,13.

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