A South African who became one of the leading lights of the British stage has now written his autobiography. Antony Sher spoke to Shaun de Waal
Sir Antony Sher’s autobiography, Beside Myself (Hutchinson), is not simply a luvvie’s memoir. Despite its easy and often humorous style, Sher digs deep, talking about everything from his one-time cocaine addiction and his new-found stage fright to his need to achieve, his being caught between his mother’s conviction that he was destined for greatness and his father’s apparent indifference to his artistic aspirations.
His mother, almost the stereotype of the doting Jewish mother, always had very high expectations of him ones he could almost never live up to, despite the glories that have attended his stage career, his triumphs in Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Tamburlaine, and his parallel career as a novelist. When I asked him whether she has a favourite among the many roles he’s played, he says she’s thrilled with anything he does “She’s my greatest fan. I can virtually do no wrong.”
But her expectations are still high: “I’d no sooner got my knighthood,” Sher laughs, “than she said, ‘Maybe you’ll be a lord as well.'”
And yet it is Sher’s father who is the most intriguing figure in Beside Myself, perhaps because he remains something of an enigma. He was an Afrikaans-speaking, Nat-voting boerejood, son of a semi-literate immigrant smous. Brought up in the tiny Afrikaner town of Middlepost, he was a heavy-drinking businessman who never quite understood his son’s creative drives, and slept through his son’s plays. There is pain in Sher’s portrayal of his father, but also a kind of rapprochement with the ghost of the man whose death and its aftermath is a structuring motif of the book.
Chatting to Sher in a Johannesburg hotel-room, I suggest that he makes good use of what, in Beside Myself, he calls the “damage” method actors use in their performances.
“Well,” he says, “I think it is true of anyone in the creative arts that even the bad things that happen to you can turn into material. It sounds like a callous thing, but it is true. The death of my father is one of the best threads in the book, but in reality it was something I found difficult and troublesome. He turns into a character that I really enjoyed writing, though he wasn’t a character I really responded to that much in real life.”
Sher writes, too, of how his father has, in a way, ghosted some of his performances. “I’ve often ended up kind of playing him, even sometimes when I’m not aware of it. Particularly in the South African roles he seems to crop up.”
The second paragraph of Sher’s autobiography tells of his early-childhood memory of having messed his bed. “I cup an especially shapely turd in my hands and start toward my parents’ room.” He is intercepted by his older sister, who is horrified: “The object in my hands instantly transforms itself. A moment ago it was marvellous now it’s foul … The shock of this never leaves me. It will recur again and again in my life: me bearing forth some seemingly splendid thing, only to bump into a critic.”
Is this the seed of Sher’s drive to succeed, his burning ambition to bring forth marvellous things, but also his fear that what will come to light will be shit, not art? He talks later in the book of the appeal of cocaine, how it had the magic property of switching off the paralysing internal critic. Some of his novels and some of his roles, including his Shylock, whom he sees as an exemplar of the persecuted becoming the persecutor have been criticised for what seems a degree of self-loathing.
He hid his South African origins and evaded acknowledging his homosexuality for as long as he could; he felt like an impostor when he met the queen “just a little gay Yid from somewhere called Sea Point on the other side of the world I shouldn’t be here”.
Is there some link here, I wonder, to a desire to overcome his father’s indifference?
He refers to the fact that each successive novel of his has been reviewed less widely, though Middlepost, his first, was acclaimed in the British press. “Many literary editors have tended not to review me,” he says. “I suddenly started to experience the fact that far worse than the bad review is being ignored. And that rang a little bell with [my sense of my] father it’s not like he was hating me, it’s like I simply wasn’t there. He wasn’t noticing me.”
Would it have been possible to write this book while his father was still alive?
“I think so … but it wouldn’t have been as good a story. He is a major character going through the book. I think I could’ve written a lot of it while he was alive, because my family has always been remarkably tolerant.” The only surprise the book held for his mother, he says, “was the coke stuff. I don’t think I even told her I was in a clinic during that period. I made phone calls to her from the clinic just like I would do on a Sunday evening from home.”
He notes, though, that his father “would never have read the book. My mother would probably have read him selected bits, doing her own kind of censorship as she went.”
Sher speaks in Beside Myself about his initial fascination as an actor with make-up, the transformation of his features as though he wanted to be someone other than himself. But as the years and the roles and the pyschoanalysis went by, he came to see that acting is more deeply about what Anthony Burgess called “the visible soul” revealing a part of your inner self.
Yes, he says, “the initial attraction of acting was disguise hiding away in public. It took me many years to realise that acting is not about hiding, it’s about revelation. The acting that I respond to is when you can see the actor’s soul.”
Yet, I suggest, acting in some sense is revelation through disguise. The disguise enables the revelation.
He recalls the comment of his high school art teacher, recorded in the book, who was horrified by Sher’s decision to ababdon art for acting (though he still draws and paints). “My teacher said to me, ‘But acting is interpetive, it’s not first-rate.’ That remark haunted me. But I think he was wrong, actually. When Judi Dench plays Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown [in which Sher played Disraeli], there’s such a revelation about human behaviour.
“When Billy Connolly as John Brown says to her, ‘How are you bearing up?’ referring to the death of Albert, and she struggles not to cry, then tells him to get out of the room, it’s as great as any piece of writing by a great writer or a piece of music. It touches one, and one recognises oneself in something like that. It ceases to about her playing Queen Victoria and becomes like any great art, about human experience.”
Sher is planning to write and star in a play about Demitrios Tsafendas, assassin of Hendrik Verwoerd, having bought the stage rights to Henk van Woerden’s book on Tsafendas, A Mouthful of Glass. “I’m just fascinated by the subject, because he’s the ulitmate outsider, the ultimate displaced man; he doesn’t know what he is. I’ve never written a play. I don’t know quite how to do it yet, but it’s an exciting form to try.
He is less interested in writing fiction now. “Something like the Tsafendas book gripped me more than fiction, because it has actually happened. I’m fascinated by real lives, by real stories.”
Today, at the interview, Sher is dapper in a black suit and a blue shirt, but in Beside Myself he describes himself as rather scruffy, unconcerned with his appearance off the stage and his hairstyle of the day is whatever is required by the role he’s busy with. “So,” I ask him, looking at what seems perfectly ordinary hair, “your present hairdo is for what role?”
“My present hairdo,” he laughs, “is in preparation for the role of the composer Gustav Mahler, on the West End, which Greg [Doran, his domestic and professional partner] will direct. It’s written by Ronald Harwood [author of The Dresser], another son of Cape Town, and who is related to my mother. We’ve never worked together before. That’s quite an exciting project, especially since Mahler was Jewish and converted to Catholicism to get the job of running the Vienna State Opera, so it’s a great piece about identity and ambition themes which tend to crop up in my life story.”