Derek Jacobi does not enjoy talking about himself. ‘It all sounds so
awful,’ he says. ‘You want to
sound bright and witty and you never do. All
the things you’d like to say disappear once you’re asked to put them into
words. You either sound boring or
self-absorbed.’
Modest man, Jacobi. He can
be seen this week on Channel Four in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
production of Cyrano de Bergerac, a part that brought praise cascading over him.
When the play was produced in the theatre in 1983, Michael Coveney of the
Financial Times wrote:
‘The audience, myself included, rose to its feet in a spontaneous
ovation for a performance of glorious romantic flourish tempered in steel.’
Later, in 1984, Jacobi won two best actor awards for that
performance—one from the Society of West End Theatres, and the other from the
Long New Standard newspaper.
The Concorde-nosed Cyrano role has Jacobi as poet, swordsman and owner of
a proboscis so pronounced that it enters a room several seconds before the rest
of him.
The triumph of Cyrano was made that much greater because not long before accepting
the role Jacobi had a crisis of confidence.
He panicked. He felt that
directly he walked on stage his carefully learned lines would evaporate, that he
would be stranded out there. He
thinks this feeling might have come about because he had been concentrating on
television and film work. He says
Sir Laurence Olivier described the feeling best. ‘It was not just a loss of
nerve but a catatonic state of gut-rotting terror.’
He can smile about it now. ‘I
had never before doubted that I could learn the lines, I’d never before
questioned that demand for people to watch me and approve of me, but suddenly I
had a quality of fear I had never known before.’
His doubts, his modesty, make for an attractive person. Someone once
described him as an invisible man, you could push questions at him and they
would simply come out the other side. But
it isn’t totally true.
He has clear blue eyes, almost a choir boy’s face, and two false teeth.
He used to be a heavy smoker but stopped with the help of hypnosis.
He is 46 and a self-confessed loner.
‘I tend to run away from conflict,’ he says.
‘Conflict and decision-making, I find it more difficult to cope with
the real world than the creative side of my life.’
Jacobi was an only child brought up in Leytonstone in East London, in a
terraced house in Essex Road, to be precise.
He was born in the front room. It
was an English teacher, Bobby Brown, at Leyton County High School, who nurtured
his interest in the theatre. ‘He
was one of those easy-going teachers that the yobbos took advantage of.
And when they knew I fancied acting they sent me up gutless.
The result was, of course, that I become more of a Teddy Boy than they
were.’
The school’s production of Hamlet,
with Jacobi as the Prince of Denmark, went to the Edinburgh Festival, and
17-year-old Jacobi received a flood of offers.
He turned them down, however, choosing to go to Cambridge University
instead, and went on to be a member of Birmingham rep and the National Theatre
Company.
‘When I am acting,’ says the self-effacing Derek Jacobi, ‘I can
forget my ordinary little self. I am only really at ease when acting. Being myself, or rather, trying to be myself, makes me very
nervous.
His best known television role was, of course, that of the stuttering
emperor of Roman times, Claudius. The
I Claudius series was made 10 years
ago and its success brought him the award of best actor on television from the
British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
When he isn’t acting, which isn’t often, Jacobi likes to work in the
garden of his London house. He goes
for the heavy work. ‘Digging and
moving paving slabs,’ he says. ‘I
find it relaxing.’
Very occasionally he will force himself to go shopping for new clothes
but it is an experience he loathes. The
modest Mr. Jacobi explains: ‘I
like casual clothes but, as I have no shoulders to hang things on, they slope
dreadfully. When I try things on in a shop I think I look rubbish.
‘Really, you see, I’m only at my best when I’m acting.’