Robert Lindsay at Cambridge Arts Theatre: ‘You can take everything from an actor except their panache’

Looking back on a career during which he has been chased down the street for autographs and out of pubs by jealous boyfriends, Robert Lindsay is happy with his current level of fame.

He is appearing in a new series of BBC drama Sherwood that holds a special personal meaning for him, having grown up in a mining community, and he is proud of his achievements on Broadway and the West End as well as the two huge sitcoms that fixed him in the British imagination - Citizen Smith and My Family.

But it was after starring in his first ever Hollywood movie and watching it bomb with the critics that he realised it had been a lucky escape. And he will discuss the aftermath as well as many funny moments from life in the spotlight in An Audience With Robert Lindsay later this month at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

“I went through a really big crisis when I came home to England after its demise,” Robert says of the movie, called Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool.

“My favourite review, and I don't mind quoting it, was, ‘What a charming film, only marred by Robert Lindsay being run over by his own vehicle’.”

Some of the reviews were “harsher than that”, he admits.

“But a lot of actors refuse to talk about it. I felt it was important, if there are students who come and see the show, for them to realise that the industry or the theatre world is not about climbing a ladder until you get to the top. It's called Snakes and Ladders - there are ups and downs. And I certainly tell students that when I do classes at drama schools.”

Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool, was a Carl Reiner comedy about a Nottinghamshire miner who dreams of dancing like Fred Astaire and going to Hollywood. He wrote it especially for Lindsay after seeing him on his very successful run of Me and My Girl on Broadway with Emma Thompson in the mid 1980s, which won praise from many big names. The plot reflected Robert’s own story of a working class man from a mining village finding fame on stage.

The problem was, explains Robert, that his politics “got in the way”.

He says: “I should have just enjoyed the fact I was doing a Hollywood musical.

“I was a huge success on Broadway, and I went through that whole very strange thing that actors do sometimes, believing their own publicity. Perhaps I became a little bit over-confident.

“My instinct was to return to England and carry on with my theatre career. But Hollywood comes calling when you're a big hit on Broadway, and you're visited by so many stars, and you're told how wonderful you are, and you're told you are the new Gene Kelly and the new Fred Astaire. I knew I wasn't. I mean, I knew I was acting, but these amazing people like Mel Brooks and Ann Bancroft and Carl Reiner and Gene Wilder and Steve Martin came to see the show, and then suddenly I was doing a Hollywood movie, which actually on reflection was one of the happiest times of my life.”

But with this new star power came the opportunity to influence the script.

“I interfered with it so much,” he admits. “I was very political at the time because of the miners’ strike, which is interesting, because I'm doing (BBC drama) Sherwood at the moment, and I tried to put it into the film about a striking miner, to see if I could level it off with my own thoughts and feelings about something. And of course, the worlds of Hollywood and striking miners in Nottinghamshire collided. It was a fun musical. There are some wonderful things in it, but I think it's important to talk about success and failure together.”

The film was based on an idea that Robert gave to Carl Reiner when they began talking about working together.

“When I was a kid, my mum and I used to go to our local Ritz cinema in Ilkeston. And I was weaned on all those wonderful films like Singing in the Rain and High Society. We used to sit and watch those movies when I was a kid. And then they closed it, and it became a bingo hall. And when I was in my teens, I used to sit with my mum, while she played bingo and there was a real sadness about it. I wanted to reopen the Ritz. So I told Carl Reiner ‘I want to do a film called Putting on the Ritz’. And sure enough, we met Irving Berlin to discuss using that song. Can you imagine? When you meet all those amazing people, you get a little carried away with your own success. Anyway, that's what we did, and the film was an unmitigated disaster.

“Although it's really weird, you can get it on DVD and my kids have watched it because they weren't alive at the time, and they loved it. They said, ‘Oh, my God, it's so charming’. And there are some wonderful moments in it. Likewise, some of it's really embarrassing.”

However he is now sure that this ‘disaster’ was anything but in terms of his personal life.

“It was really important to me to have that failure,” says Robert. “I think if I'd not, I probably would have ended up as a complete drug addict somewhere, or drunk too much, because I really did believe that I was what people were telling me.”

He adds that for anyone who enters the entertainment business will find success is “so fragile and so vulnerable”.

“You go up and down. And then when you're up, someone really slams you, like a critic. There's always things around the corner waiting for you to bring you back down to earth. Mine was a big bump and I needed it, actually.”

Robert, who has won BAFTA, Laurence Olivier, and Tony awards in his long career, has announced his first ever live dates this autumn to share a look into his own personal experiences and stories behind some of his most famous roles.

An Audience With Robert Lindsay is set to feature special clips and behind-the-scenes imagery, sharing moments from his West End and Broadway triumph in Me & My Girl, playing Wolfie Smith in Citizen Smith, the biting political satire of G B H, the hilarity of My Family, and his many stage performances including Hamlet, Richard III, Cyrano De Bergerac and The Entertainer.

“I’m a bit nervous, to be honest,” says Robert. “I've never been on stage as me. So it's going to be a bit weird. Every time I think about it, I get butterflies in my stomach, and I never really get nervous about anything appearing on stage, because I'm usually hiding behind someone or someone else's words, but to be actually standing there as myself for 90 minutes, is a bit daunting.

“I've got a pal at Pinewood Studios, a film editor, who's been searching through 52 years of TV films and theatre shows that I've done and edited them so I can also have a presentation of things I've done and characters I've played.

“I've got pictures of me and my school plays and my amateur dramatics, I've got pictures of me on my first television all the way through college and Rada, and then my first sitcom, which was Get Some In.”

He promises plenty of outtakes, especially from behind the scene in My Family, and an insight into his life when he gained instant fame playing South London ‘revolutionary’ Wolfie in Citizen Smith from 1977 to 1980.

“A lot of it was very pleasant. There are rewards from that kind of fame, but it didn't sit well with me,” he says.

“There were many incidents that were quite unpleasant, actually, such as press intrusion into my private life. Also, there were moments in restaurants and pubs with groups of people who were celebrating, particularly women. Women can be very dangerous when they are asking for your autograph and sitting on your knee in a restaurant, and then men get very, very jealous, and then there's suddenly a huge fight. And you know, the times I've had to leave restaurants, but that's all gone now, thankfully...”

He explains that as the show had 24 million viewers a week - “half the country” - he was constantly being spotted.

“I couldn't go anywhere, so I escaped, I left, and it was tragic, because John Sullivan [the show’s writer] and I were really close friends. We played football together. We lived close to each other. He'd written it with me in mind, and he was heartbroken when I left. Not that it bothered him too much, because he then wanted to write something. What was it called? Only Fools and Horses, which was reasonably successful… Ironically, the last episode of Citizen Smith was called Only Fools and Horses. If you think about it, those characters are very similar. You’ve got the gangs in the pub, the South London boys. I loved John, and I was very sad when our relationship ended. I never really spoke to him after that.”

At one point he was so famous as Wolfie Smith he even upstaged pop star Sting, which he plans to recreate on stage during his chat.

“I'm tempted to do a little moment on my guitar, on all my four chords, because it does make me laugh. I actually played those four chords in front of 20,000 screaming kids. I hosted Sting and The Police in a tent in Tooting Common many years ago. I was I was dressed as Citizen Smith, with a beret and the yak skin and the Freedom for Tooting T-shirt.

“Actually, they had built a marquee. It was massive. And Sting was so impressed by the audience who absolutely just went crazy when I came on stage and everyone's screaming, ‘Power to the People’. Sting suddenly realised that actually Citizen Smith was very, very popular. And he kept coming on in a beanie hat, dressed as a roadie, and kept whispering in my ear, ‘Just stay on. Stay on’.

“I was about to introduce him and the band. And he said, ‘No, no, no, you're doing well, stay on’. So I thought, ‘Well, what do I do?’ Mike Grady, my cohort in Citizen Smith was on with me, and we grabbed our guitars, and we started playing. Oh, my God, it’s embarrassing when I think about it. We played it as Bob Dylan and sang: “There's a wind just blowing through this country. Can you feel the Liberty? Can you feel the strength? Can you feel the power? Can you hear the wind in me, don't believe the politicians. Don't believe the publicity apes. They'll con you. They'll wrong you, shave your hairs off your gooseberries and tell you they're grapes”.

“Mike and I knew these chords. And look, they were screaming for more.”

Although he has won awards and acclaim for his theatre work, Robert is still probably best known for that sitcom roles and playing put-upon dad Ben Harper in My Family.

“When I started the business, I only wanted to do theatre,” he says.

“And I ended up doing sitcoms. Well, I did sitcoms because I had to pay electricity bills and the mortgage, and I was desperate just to get a job to earn money, because there certainly wasn't money in the theatre, certainly then. And then suddenly, you're Wolfie Smith, everywhere you go.”

However, he will let Cyrano de Bergerac have the last word on the actor’s life.

“On the evening I will do a little piece I did from Cyrano de Bergerac, which I did years ago at the Haymarket in London, one of my greatest performances, I think. He has a speech at the very end, which is when he's about to die. And I suppose in my 75th year, I have a belief now in my own mortality. He confronts death and all his villains, his enemies, with a sword and says, ‘I will fight you. And there's one thing when I go to heaven, when I meet God tonight, I will bow and sweep the deep blue firmament of stars with something none of you can have, and that is my panache’.

“And that's the one thing actors have that you can never take from them.”

An Audience with Robert Lindsay is at Cambridge Arts Theatre on Sunday 22 September. Tickets are available from the box office from £29.