The Word Is Murder(79)
‘Anyway, the list went up, and sure enough, Dan was cast as Hamlet. I got Ophelia, which was fantastic. Amanda only got a tiny part, as Osric – they were going to do it cross-gender. She only turned up in Act 5 but she’d played Imogen in Cymbeline earlier in the year so that was fair enough. Damian was going to play Laertes and he was happy about that although a lot of people said he should have been Hamlet. He’d done the ‘rogue and peasant slave’ soliloquy for his Tree and everyone said it was awesome. The production was going to be in modern dress and it was being staged in the GBS Theatre, which was down in the basement, and it was the coolest space in the building. Much cooler than the Vanbrugh.
‘We had five weeks of rehearsals, which sounds a lot but it was incredibly demanding. And then, one week in, everything changed – and the reason I’m telling you about this is that you could say it’s what changed my life. Dan got ill with glandular fever and couldn’t come to rehearsals, so after a lot of discussion he changed parts with Damian, which meant that suddenly Damian and I were working together for hours and hours on all these incredibly intense scenes. When I look back on it, that’s when I fell in love with him. When he was on the stage, he had this … magnetism. I mean, he was impressive when you met him in the street but when he was performing, it was like looking into a pool of water … or a well. He had a depth and a sort of clarity. Lindsay Posner loved working with him and that was how he got into the RSC. Lindsay was doing a whole lot of work at Stratford and the Barbican and he took Damian with him.
‘People still talk about that production of Hamlet. Damian, Dan and I all got agents as a result of it and the artistic director told me it was one of the best he’d ever seen. We did it in the round with no set and very few props. We used a lot of masks – Lindsay had been very influenced by Noh theatre. And there was no doubt that Damian was brilliant. He stole the show. Dan was great too – you could feel the energy and the violence in the fight scene in Act 5 – it was done with fans, not with swords. We actually got a standing ovation and that’s something that doesn’t often happen at RADA, not with agents in the audience.
‘But I remember it mainly because of Damian. You must know the play. Act 3, Scene 1. I was in tears at the end of it. Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown. All the suffering and the madness in the scene stayed with me. At one moment, Damian grabbed me by the throat and his face was so close to mine I could feel his breath on my lips. When he let me go, he left bruises. After we’d got together, he said he didn’t want to act with me again – but by then my acting career was on hold anyway, because of Ashleigh. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that what I loved most was the actor, more than the man. As a man, he could be …’
She couldn’t find the word she was looking for so her father supplied it: ‘A bastard.’
‘Dad!’
‘The way he treated you, the way he used you—’
‘He wasn’t always like that.’
‘He and his mother were like that from the very start. Both of them, as bad as each other.’
Grace looked at him disapprovingly but she didn’t argue with him. And then she was off again.
‘I was signed up by Independent Talent and my first job was an appearance in a TV show, Jonathan Creek. I only had a few lines – I played a magician’s assistant – but at least it was something on my CV. I got a few other jobs in TV: Casualty, Holby City, The Bill. And I did an advert for Stella Artois, which was amazing. I got to spend a week in Buenos Aires! I also started getting a lot of theatre. My best job was the Jonathan Kent season at the Haymarket. I had good parts in The Country Wife and a play by Edward Bond, The Sea. I even got a mention in the reviews. Fiona Brown, my agent, was certain things were going to happen for me. I was getting some great auditions too.
‘And then I met Damian again. He came to see The Country Wife. He hadn’t even realised I was in it but he had a friend who was playing Mrs Fidget. We bumped into each other backstage and went out for a drink. It was terrible really. I mean, we’d known each other and we’d been so close, yet we hadn’t seen each other for years and years.’
‘That was him,’ Martin Lovell said. Ashleigh had finished the rag book and fallen asleep in his arms. He laid her gently on the sofa. ‘All he cared about was his career. He never had friends. He used you.’
‘Don’t say that, Daddy.’ Grace still wasn’t disagreeing with him. ‘Damian was quite famous by now. I mean, people recognised his face even if they weren’t queuing up for autographs. He’d been in a lot of big films and TV shows and he’d got an award from the Evening Standard. He was already working in Hollywood. He was about to start shooting Star Trek. I saw at once that he was different. He was harder than I remembered. He had a sort of steel edge to him that might have come with being so rich and so successful – he’d just bought the flat on Brick Lane – but actually I think a lot of it was a sort of defence. You’ve got to be hard in this business. I’d say it’s part of an actor’s life.
‘We had a wonderful evening. Everyone loved the play and there was a real buzz in the air. We had far too much to drink and we started talking about RADA and all the times we’d had together. Damian had worked with a couple of people from the school. He told me that Dan had dropped out of acting, which is a shame because he was super-talented but that’s how it goes sometimes. You get offered tiny parts or understudies but the big auditions never quite click. Dan very nearly got the main part in Pirates of the Caribbean – in the end it went to Orlando Bloom. He also just missed out on Dr Zhivago for ITV. Amanda had disappeared, of course. Damian talked a lot about himself. Star Trek was paying him enough to put a deposit on a house in Los Angeles and he was thinking about moving out there altogether.