A daunting experience

Tom Hollander’s first meeting with a theatrical agent didn’t turn out quite how he expected

It was the late Eighties and it paid to be brash. But I wasn’t brash I was green. Just down from university and wearing a second-hand double-breasted suit I had a meeting with London’s Most Powerful Agent. On Wall Street, Gordon Gekko. In Soho, Michael Foster. A man whose legendary temper had caused him, telephone in hand, to break his own finger while dialling. The extent of his rages were matched only by the size of the deals he got for his actors — deals rumoured to be so huge that other actors binge-drank at the thought of them.

A week before, I had received a note while backstage at Richmond Theatre, halfway through a performance of the amusingly titled Sheep Go Bare (the 1988 Cambridge Footlights Revue). It was the kind of note young actors want to get from powerful agents.