A man of many parts tells how to live without a script

AS a young man he was mortified to fail his English O-Level twice but words have been his livelihood ever since and as an actor he rarely if ever fluffs his lines.

Robert Angell, 54, will have spent 33 years in the profession on Sunday and is now one of the most respected and well-known actors in Yorkshire.

Bizarrely he even won a national poetry competition in 1973 with his poem Fantasies of a Child which was broadcast by the BBC on Radio 4 leading his mother to tell him he was going to be a successful writer.

But the words dried up and the softly-spoken thespian – a cousin of the late Richard Whiteley – has turned his hand to almost everything from advertising chocolate bars for Hungarian TV to taking roles in Coronation Street and featuring in major theatre productions.

He is well known in Hull where he has appeared in many Hull Truck Theatre Company productions over the past 23 years.

Last week he took the train down to London to audition for a part as Lord Astor in Keeler – a new show dealing with the Profumo scandal which shook the Establishment in the 1960s.

And if he doesn’t get that, the work keeps rolling in – he is due to perform in Weekend Breaks by legendary playwright John Godber with the Reform Theatre Company in Sheffield which will begin a small, localised tour later this year. As a teenager he had been an apprentice footballer between the ages of 14 and 16 with Bradford City but the club politely declined his services and he caught the acting bug at Bingley Little Theatre.

He said: “When I was 15 or 16 I played for the Juniors for a couple of years but I grew to 6ft remarkably quickly and they said I was too big for the kids I was playing with and so I ended up with the reserves.

“I got clattered a few too many times and I think they had enough of me and I was asked to leave. They said I wouldn’t make the grade.

“Fortunately I was rehearsing two plays at Bingley so as one door closed another opened...”

His father Eric, a bank manager, was concerned at the notoriously insecure lifestyle this would offer but Robert was determined and after appearing in his first play as the lead in Henry V has never looked back.

He said: “He and my mum Barbara were worried and I think my dad thought I was an idiot, but it has not turned out too badly for me.”

He got his first break as an adult with the play Vivat! Vivat Regina! about Mary Queen of Scots, and went on to take parts in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and even appeared in a stage performance of Planet of the Apes at the end of Cleethorpes Pier.

Inevitably though he has had his periods of “resting” but has never been too proud to take up other jobs when the phone has stayed silent.

These have included a period as a porter in 2000, while other jobs have included spells as a seismologist’s assistant for Shell UK, he has driven a forklift truck, washed dishes and was even a social worker and a play leader on a housing estate during the Lewisham riots in 1977.

Given that acting appeals to him because of the huge adrenalin rush he gets from appearing in front of a live audience, and the unpredictability about where his next pay cheque will be coming from, his brief spell spent sharpening pencils over two weeks is not one of his happiest memories.

“That drove me insane” he says, “though another job I got watching holes being punched in cardboard drove it close and to this day I can’t remember why I was employed to do that. I only managed a week doing that.”

Advertising has provided him with several highly lucrative spells and his heyday was in the 1980s, when he found himself inundated with work, making 45 commercials in just 10 years – some actors might consider themselves lucky to do five in their career.

It turned out that he had one of those faces that fitted the era’s demands perfectly and he slowly but surely became “the face of the 80s”.

How so? “I dunno. It just seemed that my face seemed to fit what advertisers wanted – a guy in his 30s who didn’t mind doing domestic chores or holding the baby.

“I remember filming a beer ad for Tennent’s Extra and straight after that I filmed an ad for headache tablets which tickled me, but the most manic time occurred one year when I’d just flown from Geneva into Heathrow after doing a chocolate bar commercial for Swiss TV to be greeted on the main concourse by all these messages saying: ‘Will Rob Angell please phone his agent?’.

“It was in the days before mobile phones and when I got through to my agent the message was: ‘Don’t leave the airport. Can you be in Nice tomorrow morning?’

“The company had bought me a Club Class ticket on a 747 with just myself and the tennis player Stefan Edberg in the nose of the plane – he was playing in the French Open at Roland Garros.”

These days he is rather more likely to be recognised from his roles in the cult BBC1 school drama Waterloo Road, The Bill and Coronation Street though he hates seeing himself on TV and is the last person to enjoy being recognised by the public.

Inevitably he gets a fair amount of ribbing at his local pub in East Morton, The Busfield Arms and, since he bought another property in Gunnerside, near Richmond, he gets a second round of ribbing from the regulars at the Kings Head. As he says: “I am fairly pub-orientated.”

So what does he make of his career thus far?

“It’s been utterly brilliant. The commercials were fantastic because you never knew where you were going to end up.

“And I’ve been lucky in suffering stage fright for only a very short period whereas I’ve known one actor who was incapable of speech and had to lie down prior to a performance.

“I like the unpredictability of the profession, I just couldn’t be a 9am-5am kind of guy, it would slaughter me.”

One downside is that it is hard to keep relationships together and he says he is still extremely fond of one particular girl.

“But we split up two-and-a-half-years ago. I was always away and you can’t expect someone to put up with that.

“When you choose acting as a profession, you come to realise that it comes with certain conditions and no matter how much you try to lead a normal life the fact is that you just can’t.

“I would never expect a woman to put up with my lifestyle.

“I enjoy touring but after long tours it can become hard work. You just hanker to be at home and it gets a bit lonely. But if you asked me to live my life again I would live it exactly the same as I have done.”

robert.sutcliffe@ypn.co.uk