A conversation with Dame Eileen Atkins

Eileen Atkins

Part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Tabard Theatre

Eileen Atkins spoke about her life in the theatre in an interview at the Tabard with Richard Digby Day on Sunday 8 June, as part of the Tabard Theatre’s 40th anniversary celebrations. She was gloriously indiscreet and at times rather emotional as she looked back over her long career.

Dame Eileen is best known for her work in the theatre, where she has delivered powerful performances in classic and contemporary plays in the West End, on Broadway, at the National Theatre and the RSC.

Now 91, she has worked continuously since 1953 and was made a Dame for her services to theatre in 2001. She recently appeared in the film Wicked Little Letters (2023) with Jessie Buckley, Olivia Coleman and Timothy Spall. She lives at Strand on the Green.

Richard Digby Day with Dame Eileen Atkins at the Tabard theatre against the backdrop of the set for Red Peppers and Aged in Wood; photograph Shelley Hasseldine

The Shirley Temple of Tottenham

“I was a revolting little creature as a child”, she told the audience at the Tabard. “My mother and father used to take me around during the Blitz to working men’s clubs in Tottenham. I was the Shirley Temple of Tottenham.”

That came to an end when at 13, the school put an end to it, but she still thought her future lay as a dancer.

“As far as my mother was concerned, I was going to be a tap dancer. I was the wrong size for a Tiller girl”.

Her mother Annie was a barmaid and factory worker, her father Thomas a gar meter reader, and there were no books in their house growing up, she said.

“There is one man who I have everything to thank for. My mother realised the people who did well spoke properly,” but they could not afford to pay for elocution lessons.

“We had a religious teacher who said ‘come to me whenever I’m free and I won’t charge you. I saw him every night after school”.

Two of the women on the staff were suspicious of this arrangement and took it in turns to keep an eye on them, but she said, “there wasn’t a hint of anything unpleasant. I had a marvellous time with him, from 12 – 16, and he got me into drama school”.

Starting in the business

“The leading lady hated me, just for being young”

Her first job was playing Jaquenetta in Love’s Labour Lost at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. It was rained off halfway through the season, but it was her first professional gig, and it led to more work with the powerful director and producer Robert Atkins.

She had auditioned for him when she was 12. Unbeknownst to her mother, she had gone to the open-air theatre and asked him for a job. He told her he didn’t want “shop girls” and she had replied indignantly that she wasn’t a shop girl, she was a schoolgirl.

He asked her to show him what she could do and told her to come back when she was older, and he would give her a job.

After Love’s Labour Lost, she heard him discussing her and another actress for the part of Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“They said ‘Amanda’s got the body and no voice and Eileen’s got the voice and no body’. Robert Atkins said: ‘We’re going to entrust you with the part of Hippolyta’. I said: ‘What are you going to do about my body’? He said: “We’re going to build you up”.

She is very petite. She gained experience playing juvenile leads in a repertory company in Stockport.

“I was having a foul time. The leading lady hated me, just for being young”.

She was rescued by a friend from drama school who got her involved in playing summer seasons in Cornwall.

(L) Dame Peggy Ashcroft by Howard Coster, National Portrait Gallery; Dorothy Tutin in Troilus & Cressida, 1962, RSC

Working with some of the great actresses of the day at Stratford in the 1950s:

“We thought they were too old for the parts. We thought they were dreadful”

Richard Digby Day said the first time he had seen her on stage was at Stratford in As You Like It with Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Dorothy Tutin.

“That was the first time you were working with actors of that calibre. Could you learn anything from them?”

“I’m afraid not”, Eileen replied, upending the convention whereby actors habitually pay tribute to their colleagues, no matter how awful privately they think they are.

“We thought they were too old for the parts. We thought they were dreadful”.

These were the days before television “got its grip” and with the benefit of being able to see the actors’ faces it became necessary for the actors to be vaguely the right age for the parts.

Most actors have a rival, or at least a contemporary, who get a lot of the parts they would have liked to play. With Eileen, this was Vanessa Redgrave. She knew she lost out on several parts because Vanessa was married to the director, she told the audience at the Tabard.

She was not getting the parts she wanted and almost in despair when she was offered her first television part. appeared as Maggie Clayhanger in all six episodes of Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways in the summer of 1959, with Judi Dench and Brian Smith.

She then landed the part of Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wester’s play Roots at the Bristol Old Vic, which follows the transition of an uneducated working-class woman obsessed with Ronnie, her unseen liberal boyfriend, to a woman who can express herself and the struggles of her time.

“Beatie was so perfect for me I couldn’t bear anyone else to get the part”.

Leonard Rossiter played her father: “He was a wonderful actor”.

Beryl Reid in the film version of The Killing of Sister George; IMDb

The Killing of Sister George

It was another part at Bristol Old Vic that delivered her big break. The Killing of Sister George, about two gay women, was immensely shocking at the time (1964). She liked the play, by Frank Marcus, but thought she was not feminine enough to play the role of the pretty young thing who caught the eye of the older woman, played by Beryl Reid.

Director Val May and producer Michael Codron persuaded her to give it a go.

“I made a silly joke to Beryl when we first met. I told her I was a method actor, ‘so I’ll be moving in with you’. She told them: ‘Keep that girl away from me’.”

Her main recollection of the production was of the sound of seats going up as people left: “you just heard this bang, bang, bang. Everywhere we went, we cleared the theatre”.

Until that is, the production came to London. They thought the director was mad when he said they were opening in London, as they play had been such a flop everywhere else.

“Beryl and I thought it was going to be a disaster, but people laughed. I said: ‘Beryl, what are you doing behind my back?’ because we’d forgotten it was funny. It was a huge success in London, and it ran for two years”.

After that, people knew who she was, and she was never stuck for work again.

She has won the BAFTA TV award for Best Actress and three Olivier awards and has had success as a writer as well as an actor, though she told the audience at the Tabard she never thought of herself as a writer.

(L) Sir Alec Guinness, photograph Allan Warren; (R) David Suchet, photograph Phil Chambers

Great friendships

She spoke about her relationship with Alec Guiness, who saved her from getting the sack in a production at the Royal Court where she disagreed with the director on how her part should be played. He was determined she should play it as an older woman, and she was equally determined that was not the right way to play the part.

“The gave me an old wig. I was so angry I took it to the hairdresser and got it dyed bright red”.

She and Alec Guinness had the best notices, she said, so she felt vindicated. Guinness had a reputation for being difficult to get on with.

“I found him very easy to get on with”, but she said: “When he got old and I started to do well it started to go wrong. I can’t say what I really think”.

After Alec Guinness died, the British Library acquired his papers, which revealed that despite his success in films such as the Star Wars series, Bridge Over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago and Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, he was insecure, painfully sensitive and given to petty and vindictive malice.

She talked also of her friendship with David Suchet. She met him when he was Orlando to her Rosalind in As You Like It.

“He said: ‘I’m not wearing lifts and I’m not wearing a piece, (a wig), and I loved him from that moment”.

Richard Digby Day asked who were the actors she most admired and most enjoyed working with.

“Lawrence Olivier and Maggie Smith – though her tongue could be very cruel – but there will never be anyone like her. Judi Dench – I think she’s magnificent. Paul Scofield was wonderful.

“Peter Hall says within ten seconds an audience can tell if they’re watching someone wonderful”.

Conversely, the director Peter Brook was “full of shit”.

Top (L) Christopher Beeny, Karen Dotrice, Gareth Hunt, Gordon Jackson, and Jean Marsh; (Above) Gordon Jackson; (Below) Pauline Collins in the original 1971 – 1975 series

Bottom (L) Eileen Atkins; (R) Jean Marsh & Anne Reid in Upstairs Downstairs in the 2010-2012 revival; IMDb

Upstairs, Downstairs

Eileen Atkins plays down her success as a writer, but she and fellow actor Jean Marsh created the highly successful TV series Upstairs Downstairs (2010-2012) for ITV.

“We were watching The Forsyte Saga and we were just saying they never write about the scrubbers. We talked more about how the working classes were then”.

She took it to the director of a TV series she had been in, who was about to submit a new round of scripts for commissioning, and who said if they could get it done quickly, they would include it.

“We asked someone how to do it, and we stayed up for two nights writing it, and they picked it.

“I don’t think of it as being clever, but now I realise we did hit on something that wasn’t happening at the time. We had a wonderful cast. I thought Pauline Collins was wonderful”.

Their success with Upstairs, Downstairs led to them write The House of Elliott, the BBC series which ran from 1991 to 1994, about two sisters who established a dress making business in the 1920s and went on to run their own haute couture fashion house.

“I still don’t think of myself as a writer,” she said. Nor does she take the same satisfaction from working in television as she does from working on the stage.

“I’m a theatre actress, and that’s what I always want to be”.

During Covid Eileen used her time to write her autobiography Will She DO? – Act One of a Life on Stage

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