Working with Dickie Attenborough

During my short and probably best forgotten acting career, I found myself on the pointy end of Dickie Attenborough’s camera on two memorable occasions. The first was a cough and a spit (well, maybe just a cough) as footman to Lady Churchill (Anne Bancroft) in Young Winston where the prospect of welcoming Mrs Robinson home was about as overwhelming as it gets for a fledgling actor with stars in his eyes.

It was a tiny scene, pretty much all in long shot, but the time Attenborough spent ensuring that I and the other household staff knew the full context of it and how that knowledge might colour our unease as characters in the scene was extraordinary. It was gone in the blink of an eye but, during the two days of shooting it, this young actor had the full attention of the director (not the first assistant) and precisely the right motivation for the moment.