Tom Courtenay: Actor who left home city for stardom steps into shoes of poet who stayed

A boat painter’s son from Hull whose mother made fishing nets on the city’s docks, he is now an acclaimed thespian and a knight of the realm. It sounds like a picture from a lost world but then gone, too, is practically any trace of his northern accent, although half a century spent pretending to be Dickensian clerks and revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia can perhaps do that to a man.

In a screen career spanning nearly 50 years, Courtenay has starred in such influential films as Doctor Zhivago and Billy Liar – which won him a Bafta for best actor and remains, in the eyes of many, his defining role. But it is the stage where he says he feels most at home and the 73-year-old is back in Yorkshire this month to reprise his role as Philip Larkin in a new version of Pretending to be Me, based on a day in the poet’s life. The original show premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse nine years ago where Courtenay’s ghost-raising performance attracted widespread acclaim and led to a successful run in the West End.

Another actor, his friend Michael Godley, first came up with the idea of a one-man show which seamlessly stitches together excerpts from Larkin’s writings, poetry and essays. The latest version has “the same jokes ... just simpler,” says Courtenay. “I think Larkin was fond of Hull although he liked making fun of it – his biggest digs were at Ted Hughes and that’s something I found and use throughout the show.”

He agreed to revisit the play after being approached by the Larkin Society. “Last year was the 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death and a statue of him was built in Hull and I was asked if I would revive the show to help raise some money for the appeal and I said, ‘yes.’ I hadn’t intended to do it again, but I enjoyed it the first time round and I’ve enjoyed taking it around the country, it’s been the home on my back like a snail.”

He’s just returned from doing a couple of shows in Ireland where he was surprised by the reaction of audiences. “I thought he might be too English for them, but what’s it Larkin says, ‘I may be an agnostic but I’m an Anglican agnostic.’ They liked that a lot.”

The first half of the show focuses on Larkin’s poems and his success while the second half offers insights into the relationship with his mother and the writer’s block that blighted the twilight of his career – Larkin wrote little after his mother’s death. But what, in his opinion, is Larkin’s enduring appeal? “He’s a very interesting character full of contradictions and for an actor that’s good. He says one thing and then says almost the opposite, which makes him so witty.”

The two men share a close association with Hull. Larkin arrived as a well-regarded librarian and died 30 years later one of the finest poets of the 20th-century, having remained in the city despite his growing fame. Courtenay didn’t stay, although in a tidy piece of symmetry he left for the bright lights of London just as Larkin took up his post at Hull University. “I left in 1955, the year he arrived so I never met him,” he says.

Courtenay was brought up in a strong, working-class family and from an early age showed a desire to be on stage reading and performing. But where did this come from?

“You tell me? I really don’t why,” he says. “Even before I went to grammar school if we were reading in class I didn’t want anyone else doing it. I liked it, it was my little knack. I wasn’t any good at cricket and football but this I could do.”

After grammar school he studied English Literature at University College London, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“I chose it because it was on the same street as Rada, although I didn’t tell my parents that. They wanted me to have a good education because they didn’t want me to work on the fish docks, which was good of them.”

He dropped out of university and was accepted at Rada where John Thaw, who became his best friend, was among his peers. He made his professional debut in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Old Vic in 1960, before taking over from Albert Finney in the title role of Billy Liar at the Cambridge Theatre the following year. He was then catapulted to fame on the back of his screen performances in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which earned him a Bafta for best newcomer, and as the whimsical, working-class hero Billy Fisher in the 1963 film of Billy Liar.

Courtenay found himself swept along as part of the British New Wave which became synonymous with actors such as Finney, Richard Harris and Alan Bates and directors like John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. Although he found the attention overwhelming at times.

“I would have really liked it [success] to be more gradual, because it was a lot to deal with as a young man,” he says, not inviting further discussion on the matter. He appeared in a string of big films during this period including Operation Crossbow, The Night Of the Generals and David Lean’s 1965 classic Doctor Zhivago, which earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

However, by the start of the following decade he consciously put the brakes on his film career. “There was a British film industry in those days and now there isn’t. A film like The King’s Speech wouldn’t have been made without American money, that’s just how it is,” he says. “I don’t have much faith in the film world and I couldn’t see myself in it. I did one Hollywood film but I couldn’t have lived over there.”

Instead he concentrated on stage work. He has a long-running association with the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where he first starred as the unquestioning valet in The Dresser, a part he later reprised with his old pal Albert Finney when he returned to the big screen in a 1983 film version, which earned him his second Oscar nomination.

Among his many notable stage credits are Time and Time Again, for which he won the Actor of the Year Award, Michael Frayn’s Clouds and the West End production of The Norman Conquests. In 2000, his memoir Dear Tom: Letters From Home, was published, combining touching letters between him and his mother with his own recollections of life as a young actor in London. “My mother died just before The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, but before she died she realised that acting was my thing,” he says.

During the past decade Courtenay has enjoyed a string of screen roles in high-profile films, starring alongside Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine and Ray Winstone in Last Orders and appearing in a star-studded adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass. He has also played the title roles in major stage productions of King Lear and Uncle Vanya. But of all the great novelists and playwrights whose work he has performed, Charles Dickens is the writer he most admires. “I love Dickens, perhaps no other writer understood the working class like he did and some of the best scenes I’ve ever done were in Little Dorrit, in my humble opinion.” Who are we to disagree?

Pretending To Be Me is on at the Pocklington Arts Centre on February 26, as well as Helmsley Arts Centre (March 10), Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, (March 18), Harrogate Theatre (March 20) and Hull Truck Theatre (April 2).