Samuel West has seen his already prolific career take off recently. Yet, in true English style, he is characteristically reticent about owning it. In fact, he tells me an anecdote about Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino filming together to emphasise his point. “Pacino says ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That you’ll never work again?’ And I totally believe that story because actors are needy people.”

Samuel pauses. “Actually I don’t know if that’s true, the ones I know are quite well adjusted and probably no more fragile than any other profession with the same pattern of work where you really don’t know where your next job is coming from. So maybe we just come across as insecure.”

Today, though, Samuel West is in a great mood, having just landed a plum job. However, it is so top secret that he can’t tell me about it.

It follows close on the heels of his recent Hollywood film role as George VI opposite Bill Murray in Hyde Park on Hudson and a part in the enormously popular TV series Mr Selfridge, of which he’s currently filming the second series.

Yet Samuel is still bemused by his current “run of good fortune”. “Despite your visibility it’s always unpredictable, so it’s hard to stay steady. However well you can act, you are only as good as your last job, so you go along to auditions and think ‘I must have proved myself by now surely’.”

Aged 47 you’d think so, but Samuel said it’s something actors never get over and that his own father, the revered Timothy West, still suffers from the same angst: “My father was watching TV recently and saw someone playing a part he would have been great for and he was absolutely furious. “I had to go through his diary and prove he was on tour at the time so unable to have done it, before he calmed down.”

Samuel has managed to find the time, however, to however to return to the Oxford Playhouse, of which he is patron, to read renowned poet WH Auden’s words between new arrangements of Britten’s songs, which should be a roaring success, judging by our response to his directorial piece about the demise of mining last year, The Coalhouse Door.

“Oxford was a great audience. An old socialist with tears in his eyes stopped me on the way out and said: ‘You remind me why I believe in it, great show’, and that sums it up really. It was a gift of a job and when you get it right you feel like more than the sum of your parts. But then it’s very easy for liberals to fall in love with losing,” he chuckles.

Samuel’s directing career has now been stymied by his current acting success, and he’s had to turn down several projects in favour of his currrent work: “Directing is much harder than acting so I have to totally immerse myself in it and put several months aside which I can’t do at the moment. Listen, I’m not complaining — you go in with your eyes wide open.”

Samuel West of all people went in with his eyes open, not only because of his parentage, the legendary pairing of Prunella Scales and Timothy West, but also because he shunned acting until he got to Oxford University, so knew exactly what he was getting into when he eventually relented.

“There was a drama competition in the first term and we were told we had 45 minutes to do a play, and I did three and one of them won,” he remembers. “So quite a lot of my acting career was a result of Oxford — it’s certainly where it started. And no, I didn’t know I was going to be an actor before then,” he pre-empts me, which seems strange when it’s blatantly obvious to the rest of us.

“I didn’t know I enjoyed it. I was quite shy and still am really. But at university, playing someone else, made up for that. And then people seemed to enjoy me doing it.”

An uneasy hybrid of socialism and with a cut-glass accent and education, Samuel says he missed the current vogue for posh boys by a generation. “My cheekbones aren’t what they were and when I left university all the acting parts were in gangster movies,” he said, shaking his head mournfully. And now people seem to have pigeon-holed me in period dress, which is fine, but they forget. Even in Howards End I played a middle-class clerk from the East End, but now I tend to play middle-aged character parts, usually Tories, which is amusing, being very left-wing, but that’s fine. “I obviously have that sort of face and profile. If I wore a tracksuit and said ‘f***’, nobody would watch.”

Being realistic in his business then is a must. “It is extremely useful and advice I’d pass on to any parent, but also to be happy of your colleagues’ success. My partner always says that good work makes life easier for all of us, because it’s always inspiring.”

His parents’ recent Lifetime Achievement Award at the Theatre Awards UK must also serve to spur him on? “They still got a standing ovation, which is unusual at 78 and 81," he says proudly. “And they will have been married for 50 years this month.”

Something to aspire to then? “You do wonder if there’s a point where you will ever feel secure in this industry, but yesterday’s job means I now don’t have to worry for a while. “What can I say? I have been very fortunate.”

 

Look, Stranger!
Oxford Playhouse
Thursday, October 10
For tickets, call 01865 305305 or visit oxfordplayhouse.com