THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL

Stephen Pile, Telegraph Magazine, 1991

We can ask these questions now because the man is perched at the summit of his profession. When his CBE is topped up to full-blown knighthood, let no one be surprised. He is (and I quote Nicholas Hytner, his director at the National Theatre) 'up there with the two or three best actors in the country'. It is typical of this man's career that even now, when he is 63, not enough people seem aware of his talent. Of course, we all know him as Sir Humphrey, the civil servant who captured the British imagination in Yes Minister. But this has blinded most of us to the sheer range and greatness of this enormously gifted actor.

Next week he starts a National Theatre tour in Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III. The play, a sympathetic portrayal of the king's apparent madness and its effect on the politicians surrounding him, is a mixed blessing. But Hawthorne keeps it afloat single-handed in the title role with a full-blooded, spitting, roaring performance that will show his full stature to the people of Newcastle, Bath, Sheffield and Bradford until the end of May.

Until recently his Who's Who entry described him as an 'actor, writer and cartoonist', which says more about his confusion than his achievements. True, he eked out his meagre early income drawing satirical caricatures for The Star in Johannesburg. He was much influenced by Ronald Searle, but gave up the enterprise because his drawings upset people.

As for his writing, it is more talked about than on paper. In the Seventies, he wrote two short plays for lunchtime performance at the Soho Poly. More recently, Hamish Hamilton commissioned him to write a comic memoir of his early life. After eight pages, an offer to give back the advance, several lunches and a doomed attempt at turning it into a novel, the project has foundered. 'It was too painful to write.'

And this brings us to the heart of the void. Today, Nigel Hawthorne is a happy man. His face, that of a well preserved elf, is recognised and loved all over the world.

He is not married, but has found domestic contentment in Baldock, Hertfordshire, surrounded by four dogs and hundreds of roses. A countryman, private soul, vegetarian and keen gardener, he recently organised a gala to raise funds for the local hospice of which he is patron. Such is Hawthorne's clout that he drew to the Hertfordshire stage the cream of today's theatrical profession, plus Prince Edward.

He is acclaimed and admired, but for all this late golden period he has not forgotten his lost years. To this day he claims that his main sensation in life is one of panic. 'I feel I am in a permanent state of preparation. I don't feel that I have achieved anything.'

In spite of his dislike of formality, he arrived at the National Theatre immaculately turned out in blazer and Yves Saint Laurent shirt. He got straight to the point. 'You have to understand that throughout my life I have more or less played my father. George III's attitude to his sons I took from him.'

Hawthorne stared out of the window and marshalled the damning catalogue. 'He was a rude, autocratic man who drove badly. If anyone tried to overtake him, he would accelerate. My mother tried to divorce him at 70 because he had bought his secretary a car. They were obviously having a wild affair. He was a doctor and he played the piano, but he played loudly. He was small and strong, a club man and a freemason. People were wary of him.'

In 1932, Dr Hawthorne tired of life as a Coventry GP and took his wife and four children to South Africa 'for the prospect of good weather'. His offspring had an idyllic life on the beach at Cape Town with the mountains looming behind. Three of his children were straightforward souls � one son became an engineer. And then there was Nigel.

He was sent to the Christian Brothers School where everything was taught by rote and thrashing. 'I wasn't very successful. I had an ability in art which, at a different school, might have been noticed. I grew into a moody, difficult, introspective boy. I avoided people as much as possible.'

True to form, father wanted his first born to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor. This, of course, was out of the question. 'I was occasionally obliged to hold people while he was stitching them at home. I used to faint a lot, particularly at the smell of methylated spirits.'

Thwarted in his greatest wish, Dr Hawthorne next believed that his son should join the diplomatic corps. 'The fact that we didn't even learn French at school, but Afrikaans, a language that nobody else in the world speaks, was irrelevant.

So what did Nigel want to do? 'Nothing fitted into place. I was unrequited in every aspect of my life. I didn't know who I was or who I wanted to be with.' He had a vague feeling he wanted to act, but didn't know why. 'There was always something there that I couldn't put my finger on. Only at 50 did I fully realise I wanted to be an actor.'

In his youth acting seemed a satisfactory way to escape from himself, which was not a reason that satisfied dad. The family was hostile to all forms of art, except loud piano playing. Nigel's decision was incomprehensible to his parents and they were disappointed in him to their dying day.

He worked in rep in South Africa for �3 a week and, after a year, had saved the fare to London. He arrived in 1951 with savings of �l2. 'My need was to come to England. I wanted to do good work. I always have.' Here beginnes the 15 years of unremitting rejection and failure. 'I found it very difficult to establish myself. Other people were doing exciting things, but I was just touting for work. It was debilitating and degrading.'

It was also a lonely and isolated life. 'I used to bet myself that I could spend all day walking round London and no one would meet my eye. He got the occasional job in remote rep companies, but after three years, he recalls, 'Dad wrote to say, "You can always come back".' In 1954, with his tail between his legs and a crushing sense of defeat, Nigel Hawthorne did just that. 'I thought, "What's the point?"'

He began four years of unrewarding work in South African theatre that was deadened by apartheid and a diet of safe, unquestioning comedies. Incredibly, he never once thought of giving up. Finally, he took a deep breath and went back to England. The years of rejection continued.

For two decades he auditioned at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and every year they said 'Thank you' half-way through his piece. 'I was like a Woody Allen character. People just looked through me.'

Once he auditioned at Stratford before Glen Byam Shaw and Sir Anthony Quayle, who talked throughout. 'Thank you,' they said. 'You weren't even listening,' Hawthorne bawled in frustration. His lowest point came when he auditioned for a part in a West End revue entitled All Square, starring Beryl Reid. He was doing a walk-on role in Bromley at the time and came up to London with a prepared song. Then, as now, the idea of standing up and actually singing filled him with dread.

'I decided to sing You Always Hurt the One You Love like a sadist. I arrived early and the pianist asked if I wanted to practise. I said "no" because I thought somebody might walk in. When the audition began, the pianist started playing with these frills and arpeggios.

'I stopped and said, "I don't even recognise the tune." This ruined the whole thing and my confidence petered out.' At the end a weary voice in the stalls said, 'Back to Bromley, Mr Hawthorne.' At one point he was reduced to being a stunt man. 'In a film called Nor the Moon by Night you can see me rushing round a forest fire.'

He was achieving precisely nothing. In this dispiriting landscape of bit parts and walk-ons, a solitary beacon glowed. At the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London, the legendary director Joan Littlewood spotted the hint of gold that was invisible to all others. He joined her company in 1965. 'Joan got this desperately self-conscious person. I couldn't get up and dance. I still can't. But she saw that something in me was possibly interesting.'

Littlewood resorted to shock tactics in an attempt to make him take risks. During the run of Mrs Wilson's Diary, a satirical play about life in Harold's Downing Street, the aim was to be topical. When Roy Jenkins became Chancellor of the Exchequer, his part was hurriedly written into the play. Joan handed it to Hawthorne and told him he was on stage in an hour.

He survived this test of nerve and her next task was to encourage him. 'You have a big range, she said. 'Don't just settle for what you think you can do.' At the time, he thought he was an acceptable stage Englishman sitting behind a desk. 'I could also be a funny Englishman. But I did not extend beyond conventional men. Joan wanted me to be unconventional and take off. She kept casting me as drill sergeants and brought out the physical in me. She brought me out of myself. She was the great teacher of my life.'

After three years his range had grown and we had lift-off. He was 40. In 1969 he went to Sheffield to play Falstaff in Henry IV. In the audience was Kenneth McReddie, who had just set up as an agent. 'I was bowled over by this actor of whom I had never heard. I thought, this is absolutely a great actor. This is the real article. He was doing something special. There was a vitality, a sense of depth, a terrific wit in his performance and it was very real. You believed him. He mesmerised you.'

McReddie wrote a note congratulating him on his performance. Here, at last, was somebody in the outside world who believed in Nigel Hawthorne. He has represented him ever since. 'I banged the drum until people saw I was correct. The turning point came when Hawthorne played a barmy judge at the Soho Poly, in a courtroom play called The Trials of St George. 'It was the first time I ever felt,' Hawthorne now says, 'completely in control.' It was a masterly comic performance that got him noticed.

'Quite a few casting directors saw that,' his agent recalls, 'and started using him in bigger roles.' As the Seventies progressed, Hawthorne played a succession of impeccably etched character parts. This solid acting finally paid off when he entered the sunlit uplands of the theatrical profession and started being offered leading roles. In 1973, he took over the title part in the West End run of The Philanthropist, by Christopher Hampton. 'I went cold when I saw the play, I thought, "This is me." I have never felt such a complete identification with a part. It was the character's complete uncertainty about everything that I responded to.'

For the first time his name was in lights outside a theatre, and he invited his widowed mother (his father had died in 1968) to see this triumphant justification of all his years in the wilderness.

'I walked her into the Mayfair Theatre and said, "Well, mother, did you see it?" "See what?" she said.' He walked her outside and then back in again four times. 'Did you see it?' he repeated. 'Oh, what is it?' said his mother, now getting ratty. 'Your son's name is up in lights,' he explained. 'Why didn't you say so?' she snapped. 'How do you expect me to know if you don't tell me?' Furthermore, she was unimpressed by the evening and complained that there was too much swearing in the play.

But if Nigel Hawthorne never managed to impress either of his parents, he was certainly beginning to impress everyone else. His subsequent performance in Peter Nichols's Privates on Parade had Trevor Nunn rushing up to him saying, 'You must come to Stratford.' After decades of cruel auditioning Hawthorne replied through clenched teeth, 'I've been trying to come to Stratford for 20 years.'

But even bigger things were afoot. In that audience was Sir Antony Jay, who had just co-written the earliest scripts of Yes Minister. They contained a part, Sir Humphrey Appleby, that required 'the anguished, frightfully proper suppressed fury of a butler'.

'I suggested Nigel for the part,' Jay recalls, 'because I had seen in Privates on Parade how marvellous he was at adding to a part things that belong to it, but that the author hadn't thought of when he was writing it. Nigel saw the underlying raving neurotic in Sir Humphrey and brought out his suppressed panic.

The performance looked effortless, but it was not. 'I was fighting for confidence all the way through it,' Hawthorne says. None the less, the five series made his name.

On this subject he can wax lyrical. 'It has enabled me to be selective and provided me with more money than I ever dreamed of having. It has also given me recognition in my profession. It gave me acknowledgement for what I was doing. That was all I wanted. I wanted to give my parents justification for doing my job.'

Sir Humphrey brought him real fame, but the nation had embraced the character and confused it with Nigel Hawthorne. Mrs Thatcher invited him to lunch at Number 10. He was taken off to Israel to meet Yitzhak Shamir, the Prime Minister. (In Jerusalem, traffic evaporates when Yes Minister is on). At the American embassy a long queue of diplomats and dignitaries formed to shake hands not with Hawthorne, but with Sir Humphrey. They talked to him as an equal about world affairs.

At this point he could have settled into a comfortable career as a cele- brated comic actor with television vehicles galore. But he did not. Celebrity holds no appeal for him. He dislikes being recognised and would prefer not to do curtain calls if at all possible. 'I would rather just go home.' His ambition now, as throughout, is to do good work.

He has never seen himself as a comic actor and, at the peak of his fame, he set off in the opposite direction. He took the most serious part on offer. Having won four TV awards for his comic gifts in Yes Minister, he next reduced to tears all who saw him in Shadowlands.

It is a memorable play about how the crusty, unemotional C. S. Lewis fell in love in old age with a woman who was almost immediately diagnosed as dying of cancer. Hawthorne played the old bachelor with a humanity and a dignity that marks all his later work.

Nicholas Hytner went to see it on Broadway with the actor Jonathan Pryce. 'We were completely poleaxed and wiped out by it. Jonathan said, "If that isn't great acting I don't know what is."' And so, as late as 1990, a director at the National Theatre could say, 'I didn't know Nigel was a genuinely great actor until I saw that.'

Today, this kind and still shy man feels no bitterness about his long struggle. 'It wasn't wasted. I am using all that experience in what I do now.' His agent says he is 'zealous on his behalf for good parts'. But Nigel himself is less obviously ambitious.

He merely wants to continue doing good work and to choose the surprising rather than the obvious roles. A good example of this is his next project.

'I want to do a one-man show with dancing girls about Sir John Betjeman. I am hoping to interest the Royal Ballet. I solved how to do it on the train coming up.

He reached into his bag and pulled out a copy of Summoned By Bells. He opened the book and held up a portrait of Betjeman's soft and alarmed features in old age. 'Look at that face. It's pure panic,' he said.

Betjeman, needless to say, reminds him of his father. Dr Hawthorne shared, according to his son, Sir John's playful flirtatiousness with women. The doctor also said things like, 'Oo, Nigel, I are tired' in a joke language left over from childhood.

Hawthorne found the relevant passage, said, 'This is the key' and read aloud as if it were a paying performance:

'Catch hold,' my father said,
'Catch hold like this!'
Trying to teach me how to
    carpenter.
'Not that way, boy! When will
    you ever learn?
I dug the chisel deep into my
    hand.
'Shoot!' said my father, helping
     with my gun
And aiming at the rabbit �
'Quick, boy, fire!'
But 1 had not released the safety
    catch.
I was a poet. That was why I
    failed.

Hawthorne closed the book and we talked briefly about the prospects of knighthood. He was properly non-committal. 'But it would have been nice if my parents could have seen all this.' Void filled.

'The Madness of George III' is on tour from April 21