All charming on the English front
Debonair actor Nigel Havers chats about his unusual upbringing, meeting the Rolling Stones and why he’ll never be in competition with Ray Winstone
Words: Alex Canfor-Dumas
Nigel Havers, star of stage and screen and quintessential English gent, talks about life, love, and how defending the Rolling Stones on a drugs charge changed his father forever
“I’VE HAD ONE hell of a roller-coaster ride!” laughs Nigel Havers, the quintessential British actor and star of stage and screen, as he reflects on his more than three decades in show business and on a seemingly charmed and privileged life as the younger son of Baron Lord Michael Havers QC. The actor’s recently published autobiography, Playing With Fire, opens with a description of his mother, Carol, but it could just as well apply to Havers himself: “Mum, I swear, came out of the womb clutching a champagne glass and asking, ‘Where’s the party?’” And, for a man who has been quoted as saying, “I do love a do”, his life, you feel, has been lived with a similar joie de vivre.
In the 1980s Nigel Havers seemed to dominate the television schedules in the “Mr Nice Guy” role with exquisite manners, and that persona was encapsulated in his role as inoffensive GP Dr Tom Latimer in the long-running sitcom Don’t Wait Up. And although he may have played a cad in The Charmer (the TV role he’s perhaps best known for alongside actress Fiona Fullerton) he was a charming cad, nonetheless. For viewers, “smooth” became a word synonymous with “Havers”.
Even so, when we meet during his tour of Rebecca (more of which later), the 57-year-old actor is quick to point out that, while he’s been fortunate in many ways, he’s had to work hard to reach his position of sought-after leading man. “A lot of people assume that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and that I never had to bother with acting – they think it’s something I do as a hobby. That couldn’t be further from the truth,” says the actor, who has one daughter, Kate, 30, with his first wife, Caro. “My father gave me £200 on my 21st birthday [about £1,000 today] and that was that. My daughter, on the other hand, would like me to buy her a flat. That’s how much things have changed.”
SILVER SPOON OR NOT, what his autobiography does reveal is that there was definitely a little bit of gold-dust sprinkled around the Havers clan and it seems to have landed at the feet of three generations. His father, Michael, was a successful barrister who worked on a number of high-profile cases, including prosecuting counsel in the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper. He later became Attorney General under Margaret Thatcher. His grandfather, Sir Cecil Havers, was the high-court judge who ordered the execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. With an aunt and an elder brother who are also prominent and successful legal figures, it’s no wonder that Havers has said, “Law runs through our family like blood through veins”.
However, as both of Havers’ parents were also enthusiastic theatre-goers who socialised with some of the leading actors of the day, including British film star Kenneth More, it was no surprise that the young Nigel should decide before he was 10 that acting was the life for him. “I breathed in enough theatrical ether to make my future seem obvious,” he writes in his memoirs.
He announced at the age of 13 that he wouldn’t be following his elder brother, Philip, to Eton, but would be going to stage school instead. “I’d done my research, and worked out where I was going to send myself: the Arts Educational Trust, 144 Piccadilly, London. It was the smartest address I could find.” And he landed a smart home address to go with it, when his parents agreed that he could live, alone, in their London flat in the Temple, while they remained at the family home in Suffolk. He was only 14 at the time.
Were his parents very progressive, very trusting, or just very unaware of what an adolescent boy might get up to in swinging London? “They did kick off in the beginning,” laughs the debonair gentleman. “But I was very self-sufficient as a youngster – I could cook and everything. I’d been sent to boarding school at six and you really learn to look after yourself at that age or you just get smashed about. So I suppose I was quite mature really. I didn’t over-step the mark with parties and things and I was pretty much in control of the situation. Looking back, I suppose it was quite an innovative thing to do, but this was the 1960s and life was so much safer in those days.”
And while he was gallivanting around London during term time, like some teenage forerunner to Austin Powers, into his young life walked the ultimate symbol of swinging London – the Rolling Stones. While staying at his parents’ house one school holiday, he heard a news announcement that Stones’ members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested on drug charges. “Good God, I hope they don’t ask me to defend them,” his father spluttered. But defend them he did, much to the joy of the young Nigel. “You’ll never realise how famous they were in those days and I was just amazed to be in the same room as them,” he says, shaking his head at the memory of it all. “Their image was that of rebellious, crazy youth. But, in fact, they were very together and very bright. Dad really liked them and treated them like adults, with a lot of respect.” He also won them their case. “If either Mick or Keith had served any kind of prison sentence, the band would never have made it in America and their whole career could have gone down the pan,” he reflects. “That case also changed my father from being a stiff-collared, strait-laced establishment lawyer to a much more liberal left-wing type.”
But Havers himself has almost made a career out of playing strait-laced establishment figures, beginning with his first starring role as the aristocratic Lord Andrew Lindsay in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. Even today, sitting in his theatre dressing-room, he has the air of a man who would be very at home flying World War Two spitfires, or dashing into drawing rooms, shouting, “Anyone for tennis?” In many ways, he has the looks and old-school charm of the late David Niven, and the resemblance has obviously been noted by the casting directors who asked him to play the part of Niven in a recent film about the life of Peter Sellers. If Niven – in a manner of speaking – handed the baton over to Havers when he left the stage, has it already been passed to Hugh Grant perhaps? “Yes, there is a resemblance, isn’t there?” concedes Havers. “I love Hugh. Had I been 10 years’ younger I would have had a damn good crack at his kind of roles. He makes it look so easy, but of course it’s not.”
Where Havers does have the edge over Grant is that his first film, Chariots of Fire, swept the board at the Oscars’ ceremony in 1981. “God Bless America!” says Havers affectionately, remembering that heady time in his life. “We went to LA having been told we’d probably not win a thing; we were up against Warren Beatty and Henry Fonda, after all.” In his autobiography, he recounts the pep talk they were given by the film’s producer, David (now Lord) Puttnam, when they arrived in Hollywood. “We’re only here for the beer,” said Puttnam. “So relax, secure in the knowledge that we are definitely not going to win.” Famous last words. “We won the first Oscar we were nominated for – costume design,” recalls Havers. “I turned round in my seat and looked at David and he gave me the thumbs up sign. We all knew that early wins were a good pointer as to who could do well. Then we won Best Original Score (Vangelis) and suddenly we were on a roll. I think the Americans were amazing to give an unknown British film four Oscars and, of course, it was a fantastic start to my career.”
AND IT’S A CAREER that he’s sustained in film, theatre and TV appearances for over 30 years. After working with iconic film director David Lean in A Passage to India, Havers has carved out a niche for himself as the perfect English gentleman. Just recently he’s played the repressed, upper-crust Max De Winter in a stage production of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. It was a role that was famously played by Laurence Olivier in the film version in the 1940s. Havers’ casting in the role has helped Rebecca become the most successful touring production in history.
Yet the effortlessly charming thespian has weathered dark times, too, most notably the illness and death of his second wife, Polly, from breast cancer in 2004. They had been together for over 15 years. “I’ve never really talked about it,” he says sombrely. “But an experience like that does, inevitably, change the way that you look at things. Polly did say to me though, ‘You’ve got to live your life, so go off and live it’.”
And now that he’s committed to paper the life that he’s lived, how did he enjoy the writing of it? “Well, it was a little hair-raising to begin with,” he admits. “I was asked to write it about four years ago and for about three of those I kept pretending I’d started it. One day, I was at a party where my publishers were and they suddenly announced my book as their next big autobiography. And even gave the publication date! I thought, crikey, this is serious. So I started it last January and was very disciplined – wrote it myself, in long hand, sitting at my desk. All my mates have rung up and said they love the book, so I’m quite pleased with that.”
A recent poll placed Havers in the top 20 of the most powerful people in British theatre, just behind Harold Pinter, because his name can guarantee the staging of a play and pull the audiences in, too. But has his background typecast him as the eternal toff? “Yes, I suppose it has a bit,” concedes the cut-glass-accented chap. “I’d love to try playing a cockney gangster, but why would anyone ask me? They’d ask Ray Winstone, wouldn’t they?”
Currently performing in pantomime, where he is playing Captain Hook till the end of the month, Nigel Havers is, at least, getting to play the villain for a change. But with his legendary charm and impeccable old-school manners only very thinly disguised by grease paint, he isn’t really fooling anyone.
