He’s best known as a sitcom stalwart, but Robert Lindsay is delighted that his first post-pandemic job is a musical. “That’s what people need,” he tells Emma Higginbotham
In a few short weeks, Robert Lindsay will face a live audience for the first time since covid closed the theatre world. To say he’s looking forward to it is an understatement.
“I can’t even breathe I’m so excited! But also I’m terribly nervous. It’s been a year of contemplating your navel and not doing the things you normally do, and suddenly you find yourself in a rehearsal room with 40 dancers and a pianist. And let’s be honest,” adds the 71-year-old, “my dancing years are behind me.”
There aren’t many actors who can glide effortlessly from sitcoms to Shakespeare via hard-hitting dramas and high-kicking musicals (even if he can’t kick quite so high these days), but Robert’s shiny clutch of Bafta, Tony and Olivier awards is testament to his versatility, both on stage and on the box.
Next month he’s at the Barbican, playing hapless gangster Moonface Martin in the ocean liner-based musical Anything Goes. With a Cole Porter score including such bangers as I get a kick out of you and You’re the top, it is, he says, the ultimate feelgood show for post-pandemic life. “It’s got all the ingredients that I love, which is music, theatre and comedy, and I’m so pleased that it’s a musical, because that’s really what people need.”
It seems that people needed a comforting fix of Mr Lindsay during lockdown too. Last summer, BBC One aired classic episodes of My Family – the much-loved sitcom in which he played grumpy dentist Ben Harper alongside Zoe Wanamaker as his wife, Susan, from 2000-2011 – in its primetime Friday night slot. “The reaction was amazing,” he says. “People said ‘Oh thank God, it’s so funny. We just really enjoy it and forget our problems for a bit’. It was so sweet.”
The Harpers’ comfortable middle-class lifestyle couldn’t be much further from Robert’s own background. The son of a carpenter and a cleaner, he grew up in council houses (complete with outside loos) in Ilkeston in Derbyshire, and money was always tight; from the ages of five to seven he had to share a bed with his grandmother.
Performing came naturally to young Robert. His primary school teacher consistently chose him to read aloud, and at his frighteningly rough secondary school, where new boys were routinely stuffed into a dustbin and thrown down the stairs, he evaded the bullies by playing the clown. “I always blagged my way out of dodgy situations,” he says. “I’m still doing it.”
Life as a teenager revolved around school plays and am-dram, and the plan was to become a drama teacher. “It wasn’t my plan, it was everyone else’s plan,” he clarifies. “Acting was regarded with some suspicion in a town that was dominated by the mines and the steelworks. Even my own parents were concerned.”
Nevertheless, he declined his teacher training place and successfully auditioned for Rada instead. Parts in theatre, film and TV followed, but in 1977 his big break was being cast as loveable but lazy revolutionary Wolfie Smith, Tooting’s answer to Che Guevara, in BBC sitcom Citizen Smith. Written by John Sullivan, who went on to create Only Fools and Horses, it regularly pulled in 20 million viewers. Robert was mobbed wherever he went, and recalls being chased “like the sitcom equivalent of a Bay City Roller”.
With designs on being a ‘serious’ actor, he left after four series and spent the next few years doing Shakespeare, but the beret-topped spectre of Wolfie followed him everywhere. “I remember walking down the street to do a matinee of Hamlet, and a builder on a roof screamed [Wolfie’s catchphrase] ‘Power to the people!’ and of course I did it back, and then he slipped down the tiles, grabbed the guttering, which snapped, fell onto a shop awning which collapsed under his weight, and came over and asked me for my autograph,” he recalls. “I got to the theatre and said to the director, ‘I’m never going to escape it’. He said ‘come here, look, what’s that queue for? They want to see you in Hamlet’. I said ‘no, they want to see Wolfie Smith!’ He said ‘yes, but they’re coming to see Shakespeare for the first time’. And then I realised how powerful TV was.
“I will never lose Wolfie. People mention him all the time, and that’s fine, I’ve learned to accept it now. I used to fight it like crazy; I was adamant that I was going to be taken seriously as an actor, but as I got older I realised that ‘that’s showbiz’.”
Mind you, there’s been plenty of serious acting to sink his teeth into: a Bafta-winning turn in Alan Bleasdale’s gloriously dark G.B.H. for Channel 4, iconic roles including Fagin, Cyrano de Bergerac and Richard III, and interesting contemporary figures too – he’s played both Aristotle Onassis and Tony Blair twice. Nor is he new to musicals: his star turn in Me and My Girl scored him an Olivier in London and a Tony on Broadway in the 80s, and in 2014 he wowed the West End in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. So in a career that spans stage and screens big and small, where is he most comfortable? “Working!” he bellows, and laughs.
“I’m a workaholic, and that’s what’s hit me over this last year. My wife said ‘since we’ve been together you’ve never, ever stopped working’, and I think that’s a problem in many ways. I’d love to choose my work, but in this profession it’s very difficult.” Even for Robert Lindsay? “Even for anyone, unless you find yourself financially in a situation where you can sit and wait for the right job to come along.
“Perhaps growing up in Ilkeston all those years ago, where we had nothing, other than love, gave me a money hang-up,” he says. “I’ve used the TV shows as my mortgage payment, but the theatre really is my passion. That’s what I love and I’ve missed so much.”
:: Anything Goes is at the Barbican (barbican.org.uk) from 23 July – 17 October
Robert was first married to Cheryl Hall, who played his girlfriend Shirley in Citizen Smith, and has a daughter with actress Diana Weston. He’s now married to former Generation Game co-host Rosemarie Ford; they have two sons and live in Buckinghamshire.
At 120 episodes, My Family is one of the UK’s longest-running sitcoms. “Zoe and I had known each other for years and it just seemed a fun thing to do; we had no idea it would be so successful,” says Robert who, despite his grouchy character, regularly had letters from children saying they’d love Ben to be their dad.
During lockdown, he raised money for the theatre community with a Zoom reading of Private Lives alongside Emma Thompson, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Emilia Clarke and, for a few “hysterically funny” moments, a random man who’d been given the wrong log-in code.
Anything Goes also stars Felicity Kendall, who shared one of his first TV appearances – a bit-part as a juvenile delinquent in a borstal in The Good Life: “She came to give a speech about gardening, and Richard Briers (playing Tom) said ‘what was she like?’ And I said ‘she was fantastic! I saw right through her dress’.”
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in June 2021 (c) Waitrose