Katherine MacAlister meets Edward Fox to chat about his career in cinema and playing John Betjeman in Sand In The Sandwiches
 

Edward Fox is waiting for me calmly in the Oxford Playhouse, full head of hair swept gracefully across his brow, sporting cords, a gilet, tweed shirt, yellow socks and brogues, a wonderful cross between the Dorset country gent and the thespian that we all know and love.

Charming, thoughtful and astute, those guileless blue eyes miss nothing. Here for the world premiere of his new play Sand In The Sandwiches, a one-man show about Betjeman, the poet and the man, of whom Fox is obviously a great fan.

“He has such a wonderful impish childishness about him while remaining constantly human,” he tells me.

Remarkably unfazed by the challenge ahead, Fox says: “I always used to think ‘this is the hardest part I have ever had to play’, and then the next play was the same, so you acquire a briefcase of technical equipment that you arm yourself with to help you become a proper actor, because it’s hard no matter what and acting is a craft. It’s not a Sunday occupation.

“Or as Fred Astaire used to say: ‘If it doesn’t look easy you aren’t working hard enough.’” And he chuckles.

But then Edward Fox should know; classic films such as A Bridge Too Far, The Day Of The Jackal, The Go-Between, Gandhi, Edward VIII in 1973’s Edward and Mrs Simpson and even Never Say Never Again, scattered throughout his extensive CV.

“Never Say Never was quite fun actually. It was a late casting so I’m presuming that someone else dropped out, and of course there was no money in it because Sean got it all, quite rightly.

“I rewrote my scenes actually which didn’t go down very well but it made them more interesting,” he remembers.

The 79 year-old has also been awarded an OBE, and two BAFTAs, but despite his screen roles it is the theatre he loves the most.

“It’s the immediacy,” he accedes, “that it lives and dies in the moment.”

“Everyone thought I should go to America and capitalise on my success after Day Of The Jackal, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to play endless parts where I was just a man with a gun. I wasn’t really interested in being a film actor anyway.”

Fox had won the part of the assassin in Day Of The Jackal despite Roger Moore and Michael Caine going for the part. “I think every male actor in Hollywood would have liked that role actually,” he chuckles.

Did his national service years put him in good stead? “Yes, it helps if you know how to use a gun and in many other ways. I’d bring it back in a flash even though I had a miserable time – it was an interesting misery. And it does mean that you have a constructive idea of what you want to do when you come out.”

So was it his fate then to be an actor, with parents already in the business? “I remember someone telling me I was far too serious to be an actor. But then I couldn’t possibly do anything else so it probably is a genetic disposition,” he laughs.

Which might explain why both his children, Emilia (of Silent Witness fame) and Freddie are both actors, alongside cousin Lawrence Fox.

It means Edward knows Oxford well, Emilia was at St Catherine’s studying English although he says it was a fairly pointless exercise as she seemed to spend all her time in the theatre doing plays.

So does he and his actress wife Joanna David go and see everything the children are in? “We try to, not obsessively of course, but I think it’s important as a parent, and we are so proud of them.”

Fox started off in rep of course, first appearing at the Oxford Playhouse with Sybil Thorndyke back in the 60s. Small TV parts followed before his breakthrough role in The Go-Between, then Day of The Jackal and suddenly Edward Fox was a big name.

“As an actor you are not working all the time, you can’t avoid that if you are choosy like me, if you are a maverick and plough your own furrow. But yes I have been lucky. So you always have to be ready, or as Bottom sings in Midsummer Night’s Dream: “When my cue comes, call me.

And now here he is, aged 79, in Sand In The Sandwiches, crafted over four years with his old RADA pal Hugh Whitemore. So is he nervous?

“Of course it is a responsibility but that’s not something that weighs heavily on me, I just crack on and enjoy it. And I like a challenge.

“And everyone likes Betjeman’s poetry, and know it up to a point, but there is so much variety to work with ranging from the comedic to the sad and tragic, mixing it up so you never quite know where you are with him. This sees Betjeman go from public school to Oxford, to becoming a rather inadequate teacher, and journalist which he made a living from, his TV fame, all the while writing poetry. We look at his great love affair with Elizabeth Cavendish, despite his marriage to Penelope, and then his Parkinsons concluding with an uplifting view of his fate, so it’s a brilliant run through of his life and work with a real flow and energy.

“Because we really don’t look after our great minds unless they are commercially viable, but don’t get me onto that because I become a cracking bore.”

Not a big fan of celebrity culture then? “It’s disgusting. Actors should be known for acting. So I have tried to teach my children to be well mannered and kind. What more can you do,” he shrugs in exasperation.

As for the future, Edward Fox is in talks about playing Prospero in The Tempest, and then he pauses as if if he scarcely dares tell me, adding casually: “If I ever get round to it I’d love to play King Lear. Because he knows what its like to be really angry in a very heterosexual way, which is the only way to play him or he gets lost,” and then shrugs and says if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen. He last played Lear aged 28 – too young, he adds.

“I tell my children that all you can hope is to be better on the last night than you were on the first and I think that’s a pretty good reflection on my career, to always want to be better, and I don’t say that with any kind of false modesty,

“So whether a part it’s physically tiring or not, if you do the job, do it properly and play it every night as if for the first time, that’s the only thing you can do.”