When I was still at school I earned money by working as a gardener at weekends. It was mainly old ladies who also liked to chat but the organisers knew I wanted to be an actor and sent me somewhere special. It was to an actor called Alfred Marks – a very funny man and a good comic actor. He would have known all the Carry On actors and his house used to belong to Peter Sellers. He even had his attic set up to show films and had original seats from the Palladium where he had starred in panto.
It was quite a big garden and I ended up working on it for about two years. He was away touring a lot of the time but I got to know his wife, an actress, and their two children.
Ten years later I was in the London Symphony Chorus and we were rehearsing at the newly opened Barbican Concert Hall. He was one of the soloists so in a break in rehearsals I went over and reintroduced myself. I’m sure he didn’t remember me but he couldn’t have been nicer and invited me to sit with him and the other soloists and conductor and even invited me to his dressing room after the second show. There I saw his wife again.
Fast forward another 15 years and I had a director staying with me who was directing a national tour of The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov. I told him about Alfred and he immediately wanted to audition him for the part of Firs the butler. By this time Alfred was near the end of his life. No one knew it at the time but he was dying of cancer. He played the part and I went to Leicester to see the opening night.
Life is strange sometimes. I think he knew this was going to be his final acting role. First the butler is overlooked by the family, locked into the house at the end of the play and has the final speech alone in the empty house. I like to think that he thought that was fitting for man of the theatre – and how funny it only happened because of a schoolboy gardener.
