As Luck Would Have It, by Derek Jacobi – review

Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know what she means. It’s strange how he has always been singled out for prizes and high honours — why not Ronald Pickup, Charles Kay, Edward Petherbridge, Frank Finlay or the late Jeremy Brett? Ian Richardson absolutely hated him — just couldn’t contain his envy and incredulity, at least in my presence.

Though I’ve never been able to believe in Jacobi on stage or screen as a villain or as a passionate lover, by being fundamentally unthreatening (and shrewd), he is esteemed — just like the Emperor Claudius, his signature role. He is a good courtier, having been a pal of Princess Margaret’s and a guest at Windsor Castle, where the Queen said to him, regarding the plot of Richard III, ‘Some things never change!’ He even holds the Order of the Dannebrog, first class, awarded to him by Queen Margrethe ‘during a celebration in Tivoli Gardens’.Jacobi possesses exquisite manners, and when he dined with Margaret Thatcher and she told him she would never give a speech in a darkened auditorium because ‘I need to see their eyes!’ it is to Jacobi’s credit that he didn’t wet himself there and then from sheer terror.

He was born in 1938 in Leytonstone,  and this book describes a lower-middle-class childhood that could be illustrated by Raymond Briggs; stucco late-Victorian terraces, small vegetable gardens, tinned salmon for tea and Hitler’s bombs falling in the road. ‘Everyone has their first banana story. I had no idea what to do with the first banana I held in my hand.’ Fancy. No wonder Jacobi was ‘probably seen as soft, girlish and a bit fey’. His father, who managed the crockery department in a Walthamstow shop, was excused active service in the army ‘because of bunions’.