The big interview: Tim Pigott-Smith

We’re having lunch at The Ivy, perhaps the most famous celebrity hang out in Britain.

I look around, turn to Tim Pigott-Smith and say: “I think you’re the most famous person in here.”

Pigott-Smith smiles a decidedly Hollywood smile, all perfect teeth and says: “Well, I don’t know...” The smile also says he wouldn’t be so gauche as to agree outright with the statement – but if the cap fits and all that.

Pigott-Smith arrives late and wastes little time in showing why actors of a certain generation are the type to make an entrance as opposed to just walk into a room. Immediately, he sits down at the table, the stories tumble out.

The names pour forth, a panoply of British stage greats – Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Robeson, Anthony Quayle, Laurence Olivier – all of whom Pigott-Smith either saw on stage or worked with. We’re in London because Pigott-Smith is about to tackle the greatest role a stage actor ever takes on, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.

While Hamlet has more lines, the title role in Shakespeare’s King Lear may be the greatest challenge in the theatrical canon. It requires gravitas, fitness, muscularity and a grasp of stagecraft to play it. But you also need to have the life experience behind you as well. Shortly after drama school, someone told Pigott-Smith that they would, one day, like to see his Lear.

“It’s true, they really did. So it’s been there, dangling at the end of a rope through my career, but obviously you have to wait until you’re old enough to play the part,” he says.

“It is the Everest for older actors. There isn’t another part like it.

“Mind, if you start thinking about it too much, thinking it’s going to be the pinnacle of your career, you’re stuffed.”

Pinnacle? Unlikely. Yet another highlight? Probably.

After leaving Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Pigott-Smith joined the full company and earned his stripes, working in rep and developing his stagecraft.

When TV came calling in the mid-80s he landed a role that most still remember him for, that of the uptight police chief Ronald Merrick in wartime India in the landmark TV series The Jewel in the Crown.

Merrick was a fascinating character, an ambitious grammar school boy who saw the Raj as his means of advancement and detested the attitude of the upper class British who ran the show.

He was socially awkward and a racist but an utterly compelling character. Pigott- Smith’s triumph was to make this man, for all his faults, sympathic and engaging.

Although he has appeared in Hollywood films from V for Vendetta, Remains of the Day, Gangs of New York and The Quantum of Solace, and is still in many quality British TV dramas – most recently, The Hour, it is as Merrick that he is still best remembered. This is despite a wide ranging stage career that many actors would envy.

“Dame Peg, Peggy Ashcroft (the names really do tumble out during conversation) was in Jewel in the Crown and she said it was the first time she’d been recognised. I couldn’t go anywhere without people stopping me. It happened in Spain once, I was walking down the street and someone was shouting “El Diablo, El Diablo”.

“It changed my life for the better, there’s no doubt,” he says.

These days with Sky Plus and the advent of the box set culture, we maybe take for granted expansive and ambitious television series, but it was not ever thus.

When Jewel in the Crown arrived on screens in 1984, it was a grand, sweeping piece of work.

“In that era people didn’t even have video recorders in their homes. If you were going to watch something, you had to sit down and watch it there and then.

“The surprising thing is that viewing figures really weren’t that phenomenal, but it seemed to go on to develop quite a reputation.

“It is sort of a nice millstone to have around your neck.”

As much as he enjoyed the recognition and trappings that came with becoming a recognisable star, Pigott-Smith is and always has been a theatre animal.

He still remembers his first trip to Stratford, when he was 10 years old. Now 65, he recalls: “It was 1956 and I was excited beyond words. For some reason I felt very strangely at home. I never found it difficult to understand Shakespeare, it was somewhere I loved being.”

When he was 16 the family moved to Stratford and he saw one of the great post-war stage actors play the role he is about to take on in Leeds.

“The year I moved to Stratford, I went to see everything. The great production of that year was Paul Schofield’s Lear. It was the revolutionary production by Peter Brook and I can still see it. I have pictures in my head of that production. So memorable.”

It was clearly quite an influential moment in the life of Pigott-Smith – has he stopped to consider that his performance might have a similar impact on some youngster in Leeds?

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it,” he says.

What is particularly gratifying for the actor to be taking on the role at this moment in his career, is that it is a recognition that he has worked long and hard at it. That’s something he doesn’t necessarily see happening with the generations of actors coming up behind him.

“When we left drama school, six went to Bristol Old Vic, five went to Coventry, three to Salisbury – there was a network of rep companies that ate up young actors. These days you say to a young actor ‘have you done any rep’ and they say ‘oh yes, Twelfth Night’.

“The conception of what it is has changed hugely. There must be 80 per cent less work for young actors and their aspirations have changed. They want to go straight into telly and high profile, visible stuff rather than theatre companies and learn the job.

“I did Pygmalion in the West End and that’s a play that where you have to really get your tongue around the speeches.

“The great linguistic tradition of British theatre depends on actors being well spoken and the kids just don’t get the chance to practise now.

“The raw talent I see is absolutely astonishing, but the training ground that gives them a chance to flower and grow just isn’t there any more.”

If it sounds like Pigott-Smith is a “not in my day” dinosaur, complaining about the way things are done now, he isn’t. It’s more the case that he simply has an enormous amount of respect for his profession and loves being what he calls part of the “brotherhood of actors”.

“I still love going to the theatre. At the minute I am playing Monday to Saturday but I have been to shows on Sunday afternoons.

“Theatre is such a wonderful thing, it can completely free your imagination, change the way you think and feel about something.

“I think of it as a laboratory in which we examine what we are as human beings.” It is the perfect moment for Pigott-Smith to start discussing Lear. We met a couple of months ago, when he was still in another play in the West End, but already the actor had been grappling with the text for six months.

Last year I watched Ian McKellen on stage in Sheffield, rehearsing for his one man show. He warmed up by tossing out speeches from Lear. Pigott-Smith relates the lines with far more intensity.

“Oh it’s going to be wonderful I can’t wait to get started. There’s some stuff in the script that is just unbelievable – some of the stuff he says over Cordelia.”

He takes a long pause and begins to quote. ‘Does a dog, a rat have a life and thou no life at all? ‘(That’s not an accurate quote, but that’s the line).

“‘Reason not the need..’ Reason not the need, what a wonderful thing to get to say on stage.

‘You unnatural hags, what I shall do, I do not know, but they shall be the terrors of the earth..’”

Piggot-Smith finishes the lines and appears transformed. There is less intensity now in his eyes, which appear to light up when he discusses the prospect of taking to the stage and saying these lines.

“Isn’t that wonderful, terrifyingly monumental stuff? I can’t wait to get started.”

Nor, if his little lunchtime performance is anything by which to judge his Lear, can I.

* King Lear, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Sept 23 to Oct 22. 0113 2137700.