She scorns the idea she’s a national treasure and insists that wisdom doesn’t come with age… But every page of SHEILA HANCOCK’S new memoir shimmers with laughter, defiance and profound insights into life as an old RAGE pensioner
- Read more: My grandkids constantly tell me: ‘You can’t say that, Nana’
With the warm-heartedness and candour that is her hallmark, Sheila Hancock, the grand dame of British acting who was 90 in February, has written a book about dealing with old age and widowhood, after the death of her actor husband John Thaw.
In the first of our two-part serialisation, she relived the day she got her damehood.
Here, she tells how, despite ageing, she always finds reasons for joy…
SHEILA HANCOCK: ‘I am two years older. Either I spend money on making it more old-lady-friendly, or I pass it on to someone else to experience its joys’
SHEILA HANCOCK: ‘hat they see is cracks in the walls, the lack of privacy, the neglected grounds, the potholed track. One potential buyer even complained when he heard [my neighbour] Denis’s cock crow’
September 2022
My first time in France in two years. Everything seems altered – including me. The journey there now seems arduous, the track down to the house feels perilous, as does climbing into the bath to shower, and descending the steep stairs with no handrail.
I am two years older. Either I spend money on making it more old-lady-friendly, or I pass it on to someone else to experience its joys.
So – I can hardly bear to write this – my beloved French home is on the market. It feels like a betrayal – of the 30 years of refuge and solace it has given [my late husband John Thaw] and me.
I have been showing possible buyers round and it is upsetting. For a third of my life, I have loved my home and thought it beautiful. I know it is simple, without a pool or central heating, but I thought people would see its glory and fight to own it.
But that hasn’t happened. What they see is cracks in the walls, the lack of privacy, the neglected grounds, the potholed track. One potential buyer even complained when he heard [my neighbour] Denis’s cock crow.
Admittedly the old bird is tone-deaf but if he gets too rowdy a bit of Mozart usually shuts him up. The buyer (or not, as it turned out) couldn’t get away quick enough when I told him that.
I now realise I have neglected the poor little house since John died. I hadn’t noticed there really are huge cracks. This year has been scalding hot with hardly any rain, and these medieval houses have no foundations, so the walls do move.
The locals ignore them. When I told Denis next door, there was a lot of French shrugging.
Ah, Denis! If a buyer wants to be private, I suppose this is not the house for them. I enjoy having chats with the neighbours, and in the summer seeing Lydie’s little ones jumping around naked outside my kitchen window.
The close relationships between the inhabitants are a big bonus for me. They are my European family. How will I bear eventually to say goodbye?
Sheila Hancock with her late husband John Thaw with daughters Melanie (left) and Joanne (right)
SHEILA HANCOCK: ‘The close relationships between the inhabitants are a big bonus for me. They are my European family. How will I bear eventually to say goodbye?’
SHEILA HANCOCK: I considered going into battle again. But then I thought: ‘Sod it. I can’t be bothered’
November 13, 2022
I am fascinated by Liz Truss. She has seemed to thoroughly enjoy destroying the economy and nearly democracy itself.
She was thrown out, but she is still having a ball. She has a new outfit for every event and obviously a hairdresser, and maybe make-up artist in tow.
I was open-mouthed to see her at the solemn Cenotaph ceremony today. She had been Prime Minister for only a disastrous 44 days, yet she saw fit to attend. Has the woman no shame? No awareness of what is right and proper?
She pranced on in a new black hat, lipstick to match her poppy, with all the living prime ministers. As is the tradition. But even Boris Johnson served a few years.
Is it perhaps something she has to do to prove her right to an ex-prime minister’s lifetime pension? Or is she just terminally stupid? And what must the new King think? It’s taken him 74 years to get there.
November 2022
On the opposite bank of the River Thames in London where I live there is a venerable private school.
A few years ago, we residents on the other side received a letter informing us that they were seeking permission to do a major development. I was suspicious that the trees in front of the school, which for most of the year make it invisible to us and the thousands of people that walk on our side, would be sacrificed to give the splendid new building a good view of the river.
So, of course, I trekked along to take a look at the designs, duly made an objection, even demanded a meeting with the then-headmaster, was given lots of promises and have kept an eagle eye on the now neglected and sickly trees ever since. Today I received another letter about more permission for further major developments.
The school now has its first female head, so, in a sexist way, I hoped she might agree that ignoring all those who take pleasure from the seasonal changes in the ancient trees as they use the river path, in favour of the view for a few privileged young men, might be unfair. So what am I going to do? Nothing.
I considered going into battle again. But then I thought: ‘Sod it. I can’t be bothered.’
Read more: My grandkids constantly tell me: ‘You can’t say that, Nana’. But I don’t want to be a national treasure… I want to be free to speak: As she turns 90, beloved actress SHEILA HANCOCK passes judgment on everything from Covid to cancel culture
This is new behaviour for me. I have begun to believe my sense of duty is a destructive element in my life. It has made me a censorious, boring and above all exhausted human being.
It stems, I suspect, from my childhood. For instance, I think how appalled my father was by my school report that said I was ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘a born leader but [she] must be careful to lead in the right direction’.
He actually wept when he read it. The war had given him an understandable horror of leadership in the wrong direction. But was I really such a self-centred and dangerous child?
There was that time one of the teachers found me doing a striptease on a wet indoor break time. I had got down to my green serge knickers, which I was slowly rolling down in a 12-year-old’s version of sexiness, when Miss Carter intervened. In those pious days I suppose it was the equivalent of children looking at porn. I was made to feel dirty and dangerous and repentant.
Was it my teachers’ dismay and my father’s concern that condemned me to a life of – that amorphous word – duty? Filled me with a desperation not to let people down? I know it deprived me of a hell of a lot of fun.
But who am I letting down now anyway? My teachers and parents have gone their way. My children have left home. There’s only me, and the world won’t miss my input. So bugger the trees.
November 2022
Our former Health Secretary has just eaten a cow’s anus. Matt Hancock has also swum with eels and crawled through a tunnel full of rats and maggots.
Maybe standing stoically at that lectern during the pandemic, lying about how well he was doing, was good preparation for dealing, seemingly unemotionally, with the horrors of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here. Dear God, what have we come to?
I’ve tried not watching the news or reading the papers, but the sense of a country in decline permeates my indifference.
I’m not sure how we got our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. The electorate had nothing to do with it. He seems a nice enough little bloke. We haven’t heard much from him.
Even though inflation is sky-high, the whole country seems to be on strike, or threatening to be, and my lovely GP is too overworked to answer her phone, Covid is still rampant, climate change is causing floods and fire and bringing bewildering scorching then freezing weather, and people are queuing at food banks. A loss of trust in politicians is making people seek other solutions than government.
I have been thrilled to hear of several areas taking a community responsibility for their energy supply – getting together to install solar panels, or insulate, and one place even having its own windmill.
December 2022
Something strange has happened. As part of the BBC centenary celebrations (bless them!) I was invited to appear on the Today programme where they would show me some correspondence discovered in the archives. Letters from me, 70 years ago.
I have absolutely no recollection of writing them, so the girl that emerges has taken me by surprise. They were lucky I didn’t use really bad language, as is my wont, on their live broadcast.
Garry Richardson, who presented the programme, agreed to take me to the BBC Archives in Reading so that I could take a proper look at the material. The first letter was beautifully written on lined paper sent from a YWCA hostel.
It is addressed to Dear Sir – it not occurring to me in those days that an important person could be a woman – and signed Yours Faithfully, and explains that I have enclosed a stamped addressed envelope for them to tell me if there is any possibility of having an audition. It was written in 1949 when I was 16 and just starting my training at RADA.
In those days, the Academy was like a finishing school. There were a few older ex-servicemen there on state scholarships, like my dear friend Tony Beckley who was in the Navy, or Paul Eddington who, as a Quaker, was a conscientious objector and who spent his war in ENSA, the theatre organisation that entertained the troops.
But apart from me, I only remember one other working-class person there at that time – Shani Wallis (best-known for her role as Nancy in the 1968 Oscar-winning movie, Oliver!).
SHEILA HANCOCK: ‘In the early Fifties, I was playing in tatty repertory companies and touring to second-rate theatres, staying in grotty theatrical digs’
SHEILA HANCOCK: ‘The era of the emergence of the working-class actors and subjects had arrived’
I was miserable at RADA. In those days received pronunciation was essential for an actor. Getting rid of my accent in voice classes, where everyone else effortlessly spoke with elegant vowels and said ‘going’ not ‘goin’, was humiliating, although I pretended that I too found it funny.
Thank God regional accents are cherished now.
And yet RADA didn’t crush me, because here I am in 1952 writing to the BBC declaring: ‘I am a 19-year-old struggling actress who knows no one with influence.’
There follow several more letters begging for an audition, culminating in one saying: ‘I may say this audition has become a positive obsession with me and you will get no peace until I do it – I only want an opportunity to show what I can do – even if you hate me.’
In the early Fifties, I was playing in tatty repertory companies and touring to second-rate theatres, staying in grotty theatrical digs, so the desperation is understandable, but the bold determination in a girl from the lower class is extraordinary. We were just not supposed to be so pushy and unladylike.
For heaven’s sake, I still wore a hat and gloves when I did the round of agents in Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. But behind the scenes, I was obviously full of suppressed rage.
In the archives is a report of the audition that I eventually had, although I have no memory of this event that must have meant so much to the young Sheila. It made me spit with rage reading it.
For Diction, it said, ‘perhaps a little over-careful’ – thank you, RADA, for two wasted years of torture. For Tone – whatever that is – it said, ‘would pass for educated’.
What? What the bloody hell does that mean? She is obviously ignorant but might hoodwink people into thinking she went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College?
The adjudicator gave me an A for Acting, so he must have thought I was talented, but his closing comment was: ‘I have a feeling this actress might be useful for character juveniles.’
The Juvenile Character category was for people playing maids and similar subsidiary roles. Not leads. Good God, no. Not from her background.
Fortunately, I obviously did not see or hear about the report at the time – or hear back from the BBC. There is a pathetic letter from me saying: ‘You haven’t even acknowledged my being there.’
There was a happy ending, though. Also nestling in the archives is my 1961 contract for The Rag Trade. I played a lead – a gawky, vacuous girl with a cockney accent.
It was a huge success. The era of the emergence of the working-class actors and subjects had arrived. I asked the archivist why these letters had been kept, and she suspected that somebody in the department had been intrigued by this frustrated girl and wanted to follow her story.
In one of my letters in 1959, still pleading for a chance, I say: ‘I beg of you to allow this as I should hate to be inscribed as hopeless to the end of time in the secret BBC files.’ So, thank you to that imaginative archivist for pursuing my youthful journey. It sheds a different light on the wilful, slightly dangerous child mentioned in that school report. That stroppy girl survived.
Looking back, this lack of recognition of her existence was obviously what hurt – the shut doors, that injustice, that rejection. I am proud of that unsupported girl’s ability to keep fighting indifference. I guess that might also be the root of my sense of duty – to see that it doesn’t happen to others. Try as I may to shirk it, that is actually who I still am.
December 2022
Nearly 90. I have never been one to make much of a fuss about birthdays.
Especially since 2002, when John died the day before my birthday, so I tend to remember that event more – for the first few years with grief at his absence, now with gratitude for the years of his fabulous presence. But now everyone keeps demanding to know how I am going to celebrate ‘the big one’.
I actually hate parties. My deafness is such that in a crowded place I can’t hear even people close to me. I hate standing around juggling plates and glasses and ending up having nothing to eat and drink.
But my family and friends will not permit me to avoid a ‘do’ of some sort. To refuse would be ungracious. For I am deeply, deeply grateful.
I will have a party to say thank you to my dear, funny, honest, sympathetic, endlessly supportive friends. And I will take my family to Bailiffscourt Hotel for a few days (I’m spending the kids’ inheritance).
Old Rage will be out on June 8
SHEILA HANCOCK: In my fiery youth, I once went to lunch there with [actor] Donald Sinden and deeply embarrassed him by invading a curtained area where women guests were absolutely barred
SHEILA HANCOCK: My accident has thrown up another problem which is less easy to brush aside. The main disaster is that with my broken wrist I can’t drive for a while. This is my worst dread come true, losing my car
It is a wondrous, crazy place, compiled in the Twenties and Thirties by the, I suspect, slightly mad Lord and Lady Moyne, of buildings and bits and pieces and furniture from ruins all over the country, to create a fantastic mock medieval dwelling.
I have been going there since the hippie Fifties.
I went on several occasions with my dear [first] husband Alec, and later John. Now I will go with the family that they fathered, but were not, like me, privileged to see turn into a fascinating, loving, powerful entity.
We will be in the wonderful Sussex countryside near to the vast elemental sea, a fitting setting for me to give thanks for my enormously blessed existence. And to contemplate what’s next.
It’s like Mary Oliver says in her poem, The Summer Day:
‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
‘I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields which is what I have been doing all day.
‘Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
Yes, what is it? We’ll see.
- Extracted from Old Rage by Sheila Hancock, to be published by Bloomsbury on June 8 at £9.99. To order a copy for £8.99 (offer valid to 17/06/23; UK p&p free on orders over £25), visitmailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
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