From Billy to Harold

Tom Courtenay has mellowed since those days of independent-minded, black-and-white cinema; of kitchen sink drama amid the cobbles and mill stacks.

It was half a lifetime ago that he set foot in Bradford that first time. Just a year out of drama school, he was already a movie star. The film he would make here would cast an indelible shadow across the city and him for years to come.

Billy Liar was the Armitage Shanks of the kitchen sink genre. Billy's drive to leave the north behind and seek his fortune where the streets were paved with gold not cobbles, mobilised a generation. Of course, he couldn't go. The pull of his working-class roots was too strong.

Tom Courtenay was 26 then; now he's 63. Too late to be angry any more.

"Yes, I've calmed down," he says. The softness of his speech makes that obvious, though in truth it was only his characters who were properly angry. The sparkle in his light grey eyes, however, betrays a hint of the ambitious young actor he used to be.

He acknowledges the lasting affection for Billy Liar, but insists it has had little long-term impact on him.

"I haven't seen it for years and years and years. Don't feel inclined to," he says.

"I'm not drawn to look at any of my old films. I saw a bit of Zhivago by accident last time I was in New York. It was on television one night and I watched a few scenes I'd forgotten, out of curiosity. Then I got sleepy and turned it off."

It was 1965 when David Lean cast him in Doctor Zhivago. He was nominated for an Oscar on the strength of it. But Hollywood brought him only unhappiness.

"It was inconceivable that I could have stayed there," he says. "I might as well have gone to live in Morocco."

In the swinging Sixties, Tom Courtenay swung before almost anyone else. His first film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, made him a marquee name, and Billy Liar cemented his appeal. But though the movies liked him, the feeling was not mutual.

"It was clear to me years ago that I couldn't wait around for the film industry to provide me with interesting work," he says. "I'm not saying work, I'm saying interesting work.

"In the early years I found the films from which I made the most money were the least satisfying."

For years, he turned his back on the cinema, determined to hone his craft on the stage. "I felt my fame was all a bit rushed," he muses.

When he returned to film, it was to Bradford again. This time, the Alhambra Theatre was his principal location, for the backstage drama, The Dresser. Once again he was nominated for an Oscar. "Hopefully," he says, "I'd learned a bit by then."

His accomplishments since include the play Moscow Stations and last year's King Lear at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.

"That was the most fruitful experience of my life. I came away not feeling ashamed."

Surely he can't have felt shame at everything else he's done?

"No, but I've often felt that the productions haven't worked.

"Billy Liar, for instance, was not appreciated at the time. At the Venice Film Festival it was completely dismissed. In New York, too. Now it's regarded as a classic."

Surprisingly, he is dismissive of his own performance in the film, preferring his earlier stage interpretation.

"I thought my best Billy was in the rafters of the Cambridge Theatre. On film, I didn't quite feel I knew what I was doing."

He admits to "not much liking" the mechanics of filming, although he's more comfortable now than then.

"I don't get so upset by all the waiting, and the having to do things over and over again. And I find it easier to keep on top of my concentration.

"But what's worse now is that they make you work at all hours. If you make an arrangement to see someone you can guarantee it'll be cancelled. They say, 'We won't need you on Wednesday, Tom.' And then it's, 'Oh, Tom, sorry about Wednesday - we've changed the schedule'."

Perhaps because he spent his time on Billy Liar being route marched from the hotel to the set, he remembers little of 1963 Bradford.

"My chief memory is of being taken to see Sheffield Wednesday play Santos, because our producer was a football fan, and seeing Pele take a penalty. That was quite something. The goalie was rooted to the spot. He never even saw the ball."

Courtenay is in Bradford now, as a guest of the city's film festival, to promote his new film, a comedy fantasy called Whatever Happened To Harold Smith? He plays the title role: it's his first starring film for years.

"I wanted to do it because of the script," he says. "It had its own life.

"I don't get many scripts sent to me but those I do get are mostly formulaic - rehashes of things that made money two or three years ago. You can feel the lack or originality."

The film was shot in Sheffield, a city Courtenay likes. "People tend to be warmer in the north. If you ask the way you might get an answer."

He was born in Hull but rarely goes back there, though he did return to receive an honorary doctorate from the university. ("I thought that was very sweet of them.") Like Billy Liar, he couldn't wait to leave the place when he was younger, moving to London against the wishes of his parents to study acting.

Those family scars have come back to haunt him now, as he prepares for the publication of a cathartic volume of autobiography. "It's about that early time, the early Sixties, and the letters my mother wrote to me while I was doing Long Distance Runner. She died the week before it came out."

He has already signed away the film rights to it, but professes not to have thought about which actor might play him as a young man.

Today, married but with no children, Courtenay divides his time between homes in London and the Lake District.

He does not seem ambitious in the usual sense, though he harbours a desire to take his Lear into the West End. He has, he says, enough on his mind to remain active.

"I keep interested. I don't have to act all the time, although I miss it after a while."

He filmed an episode of Kavanagh QC with John Thaw last year, but hasn't got around to seeing it yet. He does not mind, however, watching himself as Harold Smith, because, he says, "it's like looking at someone else entirely."

He seems to have developed in exactly the opposite way to Billy, finding contentment both in himself and his surroundings.

He seems surprised, though, to hear this. "You think so? Someone yesterday told me I looked unhappy.

"I told them, you should see me when I'm really miserable."

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.