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Butlin’s to Broadway: there’s been nothing like this Dame

Anthony Quinn

Eileen Atkins has had quite the life, a beloved star of the West End and Broadway, a winner of multiple awards, a co-creator of TV’s Upstairs, Downstairs, a Dame of the British Empire – and the late A.A. Gill’s favourite actress. But as this disarmingly frank memoir reveals, the route she took to the top involved hardships and humiliations that are scarcely believable now, and were barely survivable then.

Raised on a Tottenham council estate by a dressmaker mother and a father who read electricity meters, the young Eileen was told by a passing gipsy that she would be a great dancer – ‘another Pavlova’. Close, but no cigar.

She performed in working men’s clubs as London’s answer to Shirley Temple (creepy) and was talent-spotted by an instructor named Mme Yandie (a fraud), who wanted to adopt her. Her mother refused.

Elocution lessons and an encouraging head teacher paved her way to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, though ambition was always at war with her insecurity: ‘I never had the right clothes or the right look or the right background.’

A quick temper would also get her into trouble: Peter Hall once gave her the boot for being rude to him.

Her touring in repertory recalls a 1950s of freezing winters, dismal bedsits and Spam fritters. The glamorous life seems an ever more distant prospect as she tramps up and down Charing Cross Road ‘doing the agents’.

And yet there are happy interludes to lighten the way, like

dining on sausage and chips with Ronnie Barker, holidaying with Vanessa Redgrave (who introduces her to Tampax) or impromptu tap-dancing with Gene Kelly.

This last is a Dear Diary moment to beat all others – too bad she was employed at the time as a stook of corn (for a production of The Tempest).

At another unpromising gig – Butlin’s in Skegness – she meets future husband Julian Glover, whose raffish ease and bookish, bohemian family set off another deep yearning: ‘I was overwhelmed by the sense of what a family was, and I wanted to belong. This was, of course, unfair of me and snobbish. I had a family. I just preferred this one.’

She is the natural heir of Pip in Great Expectations. The account of her wedding day, riven with class tensions, reads like a poignant short story.

What distinguishes this from other stage memoirs is her forthright telling of her tale. She is as clear-sighted about her faults as she is her good fortune, and can look back on her 65 years in the business with a wry smile.

Even her regrets are turned to comic advantage. When she and Glenda Jackson are vying for a place in Peter Brook’s company, the director tells them to take their clothes off. As

Eileen hesitates, her rival is already down to her birthday suit – and gets the job.

Will She Do? is act one. Roll on act two.

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