This is what she said.
‘I always wanted to be an actress, for as long as I can remember. I loved drama class when I was at school and I went to the theatre whenever I could afford it. I’d go to the National first thing in the morning and queue up for ten-pound seats or I’d get tickets right at the back of the top circle. I worked part-time in a hairdressing salon in the school holidays so I could afford it, and Mum and Dad were brilliant. They always supported me. When I told them I wanted to apply to RADA, they were a hundred per cent behind me.’
‘I tried to talk you out of it!’ Martin Lovell growled.
‘You came into town with me, Daddy. When I had my first audition, you sat in that pub round the corner.’ She turned back to us. ‘I was eighteen years old and I’d just taken my A levels. Dad wanted me to go to university and apply when I finished but I couldn’t wait. I had four auditions and they got more and more difficult. The last one was the worst. There were thirty of us and we were there for the whole day. We had to do a whole lot of classes and all the time we knew we were being watched by all these different people and that at least half of us wouldn’t be coming back. I felt sick with nerves but of course if I’d shown it that would have been the end of me. And then a few days later I got a telephone call from the head of RADA – he actually rings everyone personally – to say that I’d been accepted and it was like “Oh my God! That’s impossible!” It was all my dreams come true.
‘Then, of course, I had to work out how to pay for it. Dad said he’d put up half the money, which was amazing …’
‘I did it because I believed in you,’ Martin muttered, contradicting what he had said a moment before.
‘ … but I still had to find the other half. There hadn’t been local authority grants for five years and I couldn’t borrow the money, so there was a time when I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to go. In the end, RADA helped me out. There was a famous actor – they never told me his name – and he wanted to support someone who was just starting out. Maybe it helped that I was black. I heard they were keen to have a proper ethnic mix, so half my fees were taken care of and the following September I began.
‘I loved being at RADA. I loved every minute of it. Sometimes I felt completely exposed. It was an incredibly tense atmosphere and they made us work really hard. There were only twenty-eight of us in the year and a couple of students – a Scottish boy and a girl from Hong Kong – dropped out, so it was very intimate but at the same time you had to make yourself vulnerable. That was part of the training. There were times when I thought I just couldn’t do it and I’d go home and cry but then a teacher would encourage me or my friends would support me and somehow I’d get through it and I’d be stronger when I came out on the other side.
‘You want to know about Damian. You have to understand that we were very close as a group. We all loved each other. We really did. And we weren’t competitive at all – at least, not until the very end when we had to do our Tree and the agents were circling.’
‘What’s a tree?’ I asked.
‘Oh – it’s a showcase. You have to perform short scenes and monologues and lots of agents come to see your work. It’s named after the actor Beerbohm Tree.’ She picked up her train of thought. ‘At the beginning, of course, everyone got into different cliques. There were three girls from the north of England and we were all a bit scared of them. There were a couple of gay guys. Some of the students were older, in their late twenties, and they felt more comfortable with each other. To begin with, I was completely on my own. I remember sitting in a big circle on the first day, thinking to myself that these were the people I was going to spend the next three years of my life with and I didn’t know any of them. I was terrified!
‘But then, as I say, we got closer and almost from the very start if there was one person who stood out, it was Damian. Everyone knew him. Everyone admired him. He was the same age as me and he had hardly ever been in London – he lived in Kent – but he had this extraordinary confidence and the teachers were all over him. Nobody said he was a star; it didn’t work like that. But Damian always got the best casting and the best feedback and everyone wanted to be his best friend. Somehow that ended up being me. We didn’t sleep together, by the way. Well, we did … once. But it’s like I told you, we only got together after we’d left, quite a few years later.
‘Damian and me were very close but there was another girl he fancied – Amanda Leigh – although Damian always said that wasn’t her real name. She was crazy about the actress Vivien Leigh, and people said she’d changed her name to be more like her. I’ll tell you a bit more about her later. So there was Damian and Amanda and me and another boy, Dan Roberts, who was also a brilliant actor. A lot of people thought that Damian and Dan were into each other but that wasn’t true. The four of us were best friends and we stayed that way for the whole time we were there. It was only after we left that we all went our separate ways but I suppose that’s the business. My first job was with the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow. Damian was with the RSC. Dan was in Twelfth Night in Bristol. And I can’t remember what Amanda did but the main thing is we were apart.
‘I could talk to you all day about RADA. What I remember most is just this sense of belonging, of being with the right people in exactly the right place. They made us work incredibly hard – movement classes, voice classes, singing classes – and you had a ton of homework too. Nobody ever had any money. That was the funny thing. We’d hang out in this disgusting café called Sid’s and all the boys would be eating huge plates of chips and sausages and stuff like that because it was cheap. Some nights we’d go drinking at the Marlborough Arms. That was the pub where you waited for me, Daddy. But mainly everyone just went home and did their Lloyd or whatever else they had to do and then crashed out.’
I had no idea what doing a Lloyd meant. But this time I didn’t interrupt.
‘But if you’re interested in Damian, then I have to tell you about the third-year production of Hamlet, because that was when everything sort of came to a head. It was a really, really important production – first of all because it was Hamlet and whoever got that role was going to have a fantastic launch pad. Loads of agents would be there and it was going to be directed by Lindsay Posner, who’d done a whole load of great work at the Royal Court and we’d all seen his brilliant American Buffalo at the Young Vic. Everyone thought that Dan would get cast. He’d only had small parts in the last two productions and the rumour was that he’d been held back on purpose because he was going to be given this great chance to shine. Also, his Tree hadn’t gone as well as expected – he’d fluffed some of his lines. So it was his turn.
‘We were all excited, waiting for the list to go up. There was a tiny, cramped space near the pigeonholes where they’d put up the cast list and everyone would crowd around to see who was going to play what and which theatre was going to be used. By now, we were getting nervous too. We’d been there for three years and we were getting close to the end. The worst thing that could happen to you was to leave RADA without an agent. So these last productions really mattered.