Robert Lindsay's book confessions

By Nigel Powlson

ROBERT Lindsay always knew he needed to escape his hometown of Ilkeston, but he will never leave his Derbyshire roots behind.

In his new autobiography Letting Go, the celebrated screen and stage star says: "I see people up there (Ilkeston), struggling to make ends meet, always counting the pennies because they have too. I don't deny that I wanted to escape that, but I'm still very aware of it ... but I'm always reminded of my roots and they always drag me back. They come through in my approach to life – it sometimes seems that I have done everything that people told me not too, something I think which stems from that rather 'dark', working class East Midlands persona."

That passage, like much of the autobiography is a candid and honest look back on the actor's life.

"It's an outpouring rather than a work of literature ... before I forget," Robert tells Qt about the cathartic experience of writing his life story.

"I feel like I have let go, I feel like a tension has gone out of my soul, a release of things I have wanted to say about myself and where I have come from and all the hang ups I have had, the relationships I have made a mess of because of my singular ambition. It's a fantastic feeling."

Robert was born in Ilkeston, the son of Norman and Joyce Stevenson, on December 13, 1949.

He failed his 11-plus but found a taste for acting at Gladstone Secondary Modern Boys' School where inspirational teacher John Lally recruited Robert for the Grand Order of Thespians, an odd name for a drama group at a "rough, tough, secondary modern".

But it was the first step on the road to RADA, Citizen Smith, Broadway and more recently the popular sitcom My Family.

"I love my career," says Robert. "I'm so pleased that John Lally steered me in that direction."

But when Robert did get his big break in landmark comedy Citizen Smith, he was soon eager to drop the role.

"I'm so glad I did Citizen Smith but when I was doing it I was sneering at it saying, 'my god, why am I doing this awful sitcom?' In my early 20s I was thinking 'this is beneath me'. But you don't realize when you are that age that it was fantastic – 24 million viewers. He was a hugely iconic figure and people loved him. It helped my career enormously, opened so many doors. When you are young you don't realize that.

"I think my problem has been that I have always been running away from so many things in my life – that's essentially what the book title Letting Go means, running away from Ilkeston, running away from Citizen Smith, running away from Broadway success."

Robert believes that one key incident in his Derbyshire childhood has had repercussions throughout the rest of his life and explains personality traits such as that desire to escape.

It was a beating with knitting needles, given by his pregnant mother, that stuck in the 10-year-old Robert's mind leaving him with enduring feelings of self-doubt.

Joyce was pregnant and tensions ran high in the household during this time because she had already suffered two near-fatal miscarriages. When she discovered that her son had swapped an expensive toy with a friend, she lost her temper and began beating him with knitting needles.

His two grandmothers tried to stop her but Robert was still left with welts all over his body – and mental scars.

"My wife read the book and didn't know," he now says. "She said, 'when did your mother do that? She adored you.' And I loved my mum but it was an incident that happened when my mother had had enough of life. She had had these miscarriages, my father was very ill, we were living in a council house with no electricity and an outside lavatory, two grandmothers, there was still rationing around. My mother had reached breaking point and took it out on me.

"But to hit someone out of violence and anger because you are having a bad day is dangerous because the sense of rejection I got from my mother was awful; I couldn't believe she was doing it."

Robert failed to understand the impact the incident had on his life for many years.

"I grew up thinking that's what happens. But when my former girlfriend had a miscarriage and I was behaving incredibly badly, I went to see a counsellor, which was taboo coming from where I come from, but the first thing he hit on was that moment. He eked it out of me and obviously I had held it deep in my psyche for years and years and I was of course hitting out at women, blaming them. That explains my running away from situations, from success. Many times people would say 'but it's a massive hit, why are you leaving it now, what's your problem?'

"But I want to stress that my mother and I made amends. When my mum died 10 years ago she was waiting for me to get there. It was the unspoken moment between me and the love of my life, my mother, who I actually worshipped as the true theatric in the family. That moment when she passed into the other life, she took with her the happiness of knowing that we were OK."

In fact it was Joyce's death ten years ago that first started Robert on the path to writing his autobiography.

"It was almost like my mother wanted me to do it," he says. "The moment I held her hand when she died I knew then that was the time. With the passing of my mother the diarist had gone, she was the one who knew all the gossip and information about the family."

And Joyce was fiercely proud of Robert's achievements despite the acting profession being out of the norm for a working class 'Ilson' lad. She was especially pleased when he gained a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and got a local -boy-made-good headline in the Ilkeston Advertiser as a result.

"My dad never agreed with that – he was anti royal being a trade unionist and all that. But my mother was quite an elitist, I don't quite know why coming from her background, but she adored the fact that I went to RADA and the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Exchange. To my mum it meant that I had gone legit, I was accepted by a kind of elite society."

Robert's Ilkeston upbringing also shaped his left of centre politics.

"I have always been a Labour man, I hate to say it but I'm moving towards New Labour now for my sins but my dad was strong in the union movement and very popular. I remember meetings in the pub in Ilkeston where he discussed politics and I listened as a lad and was so achingly proud of my dad because he spoke so well of the working man and how he should be protected."

Robert reflects in the book on the day they opened the M1 near Ilkeston and as a lad he walked miles across the fields to Trowell just to see it.

"It was empty there was nothing on it but it was an open road that I knew I wanted to take," he says in Letting Go.

Looking back now he vividly recalls that day.

"My mate said that the road went all the way to London which seemed like a million miles away. But I remembered thinking, 'that's where I'm going'. There was a need to escape."

LETTING GO

BY: Robert Lindsay.

PUBLISHER: Thorogood.

PRICE: £18.99 in hardback.