Phyllida Law by Roger Lewis
Phyllida Law, who has died at ninety-four, was best-known for being Emma Thompson’s mother. By rights Emma Thompson ought only to register as a footnote in the Phyllida Law story – for was there ever a lovelier, cleverer, warmer, funnier lady at large in the world ?
I adored her performances, in Peter’s Friends, Much Ado About Nothing, Foyle’s War and Kingdom. Phyllida had kind eyes, a crisp warm voice, and her glowing halo of hair was kept miraculously aloft, like the nimbus of an Edwardian beauty – Queen Alexandra, for example, or Virginia Woolf.
Indeed, the appeal of Phyllida was that she was anachronistic, harking back to the days of theatre footlights ( “They’ve gone. I don’t know where” she once said ), the gilded proscenium arch with plaster cherubs and red curtains: “I miss it for the weight of the folds, the way its velvet moves from dark to glowing warmth, the way it starts the music.” Who wants bare plain open modern platforms after that ?
Phyllida spoke properly, too, enunciating words perfectly, bereft of any common regional accent or mumbles. You’d hardly know she was from Glasgow, where children “were dirty and had fleas.” She was evacuated at the age of seven and thoroughly enjoyed boarding school during wartime, where she read medical dictionaries and expected to become a doctor.
Instead she trained as a set designer at the Bristol Old Vic, where “they’d accepted me immediately.” Dead Now Of Course was her notebook-style memoir of these early years, which I flipped through and chuckled along with delightedly.
Phyllida was a gloriously dotty and poetical writer. Her sharp little jottings and spot-on observations were a distillation of all that is inimitable and comical about her personality.
At Bristol, for example, she encountered Peter O’Toole, who supplemented his wages selling yo-yos outside department stores. Phyllida also met the eccentric Welsh actor, my old friend Kenneth Griffith, who when playing Oberon seduced the fairies during the interval and missed his Act II cues. The director Tyrone Guthrie used fried eggs as a bookmark, and he told the actors and actresses about to play an erotic scene, “I want to hear fly-buttons hitting the ceiling.”
Phyllida toured the West Country, helping with the props and costumes, ironing and sewing, and taking small roles, in Sidmouth, Newton Abbot and Exmouth. What she mostly recalled were dire theatrical digs. “I sat at breakfast under a pulley full of jock straps.”
The landladies were a piece of work. One of them “covered all the mirrors in the house with towels and retired to a cupboard under the stairs” during thunderstorms. Another was always on the alert for hanky-panky. As a gay actor smuggled his boyfriend upstairs by giving him a piggyback, the landlady’s voice rang out: “Cripples now, Mr Cardew ?”
Phyllida relished the bustle of the theatre, the boxes of greasepaint sticks, the crepe hair and glue. She manufactured false eyelashes out of paper, and she used to make false noses out of Plasticine and Copydex. “But nowadays they make them with mortician’s wax.” Gravy browning was used for stage whisky, tea and sherry.
Moving to London, as a chorus girl, Phyllida found herself experiencing the post-war pea-soupers, when the fog even infiltrated the stalls. “West End theatres closed because the audience couldn’t see the stage.” She met Sir Ralph Richardson, who as a senior personage was allowed to submit a list of the people he favoured for a forthcoming production of The Merchant of Venice. “They were all dead.” Sir Ralph kept a pet rat – and dressing rooms were always rife with vermin.
The theatre was a hazardous existence. The rotund character actor Harold Innocent shoved a box of matches down his costume, went on stage to play an emotional scene, bent down a bit rapidly, “and burst into flames.” Harold had to be rushed to hospital, “smelling of smoke and singed flesh, dressed in pink satin breeches.”
Another mishap occurred to Peter Wyngarde, who managed to ignite his hair with a cigarette. “A fellow actor rushed over, took his hair off and stamped on it. No one had known he wore a toupee.”
London landladies were also incendiary, in a manner of speaking. One of them, known as Mildew, “looked like Marlene Dietrich from the waist up and an unreliable charlady from the waist down.” Mildew’s best friends were the Krays, who were cementing their enemies “into those huge pillars that hold up motorways.” Mildew owned a Collie dog that drank beer, a Siamese cat that could open a fridge, and an alcoholic monkey named Chico.
Phyllida was young and carefree before the Sixties, so missed that decade’s orgiastic freedoms. “We were sexually timid and a bit lumpy,” she confessed. In Glasgow it had been disapproved of for couples to hold hands in the street ( “Why can’t they wait till they get home ?” ) and the sauciest thing ever to happen to Phyllida was when a man in Bristol shouted out, “You’ve got lovely little milkers, pet.”
Nevertheless, she met a saturnine actor called Eric Thompson. “I knew he watched me if I played the piano and we’d had a snog in the back seat of the touring bus.” Phyllida was shocked and thrilled to discover she was in love with him – a sudden emotional jolt, like “the look on the orchestra conductor’s face when you get your harmony right for the first time.”
Phyllida and Eric were married in 1956, having precisely £30 between them. They lived in a crumbling Georgian property in Kensington with a sign on the lavatory: “No Solids From This Facility.”
Eric Thompson devised and narrated The Magic Roundabout. He died in 1982 at the age of only 53.
