Zoë Wanamaker: We need more giants like Obama

It’s all true about Zoë Wanamaker. She’s like a wood-nymph from the Tolkien franchise. Pixie features, nut-brown eyes, a mischievous tight-lipped smile and a warm cackling laugh. Next week she makes a guest appearance at the Hampstead Arts Festival to discuss her acting career. Had she heeded the advice of her parents — Sam Wanamaker and the Canadian actress Charlotte Holland — she might never have followed them on to the stage.

‘You don’t want to go into that. It’s full of disappointment and rejection,’ they told her. ‘Do something else. Get a proper job.’ Wanamaker’s idea of a proper job was to become a painter. ‘I went to art college for a year to learn to develop my painting technique. And that was really, really [long pause] wonderful, but at the same time, a very good realisation that I didn’t want to work by myself. It’s a very lonely business trying to be a painter.’ She told her parents that she was determined to try for the stage. ‘It had been pretty apparent to them from early on. My dad always used to say, “You only want to do it to dress up.” He could have been right.’

Her parents insisted that she learn secretarial skills first and she enrolled on a shorthand course only to discover she was dyslexic. She had to cheat to acquire her diploma. She worked for months as ‘a terrible Dictaphone typist’, and then won a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama. After several years in repertory she joined the RSC and made her West End debut. Later she became a member of the National Theatre.

‘My first West End show was a play called Sylvia, about a dog. It was by E. Gurney, Gurney someone, I can’t remember his first name [A.R. Gurney], and it was a big success in New York.