Simon Fanshawe

There is a precedent, of course, but it is pretty unusual for a theatre director to go to Hollywood and make a debut movie that is talked of as a surefire Oscar winner. Dizzying stuff. But, for all the doors American Beauty may open for him, Sam Mendes says his real business is back home in Britain.

Sam Mendes – like American Beauty, the film he has directed – is not what he seems. The echoes between the soul of the film and the man himself are the reason why the film is already being spoken of as a classic. Because, for his screen debut, Mendes – renowned for precise and cool theatrical productions – has made a highly emotional movie. His response to the first draft of the script was, he says, “instinctive”. It was also, as it turned out, another example of his canny ability to make precisely the right choice.

Mendes is the man who reinvented the musical Cabaret, making it a massive hit in London – at the Donmar Warehouse, where he is artistic director – and on Broadway, by rescuing it from designer decadence into contemporary, sparkling musical terror; the man who has already, in little more than a decade, created two landmark Shakespeare productions, with his Tempest and Othello; who, before he was 24, had already achieved two popular classic hits in the West End (London Assurance, with Paul Eddington, and The Cherry Orchard, with Judi Dench); and who also notched up – hallmark of all bright young directors in the 90s – a pension-earning Cameron Mackintosh musical, in his case Oliver!
Serious people who have already caught American Beauty in the US, or at the gala screening that closed last year’s London Film Festival, will tell you that it is a triumph and, in all likelihood, an Oscar winner. And they’re right. The normally restrained Washington Post frothed, “One of the year’s finest pictures… hilarious, painful and achingly tender.” The blousy LA Times: “A hell of a picture.” The New York Times simply called it “a triumph”.

Which, in a way, is odd, because the film cuts at the heart of modern America, of which the media is so much a reflection, stripping away the pretence of well-being layer by layer, all the way through black comedy to poignancy. Kevin Spacey, co-star with Annette Bening, says, “People ask, ‘How does a thing like Columbine, Colorado happen?’ I think this movie answers that question.” And, somehow, that’s nothing like as far-fetched as it might be from another actor about another film. What Spacey means about the Columbine school massacre is that, when the soul becomes a shopping mall, when to live is to own things, it is hardly surprising if kids turn to murder. American Beauty manages to be both hilarious and dark about that crisis in spirit.

Through the dissolution of a suburban marriage – by way of boredom, lovelessness and the fact that, when the wife’s pruning shears match her gardening gloves, it is no accident – the film suggests there is beauty next to you, that you can reach out and touch it, that people are not what they seem and that everyone’s life is infinitely more interesting than they think it is. I should add that the most beautiful sequence in the film is several minutes of a plastic bag blowing in the breeze. And yet the movie is seductive and intelligent, clear-eyed and unsentimental, and tells many stories – of the couple, of their next-door neighbours, of the two children of the two families who find in each other a soulmate, of real estate, of suburbia, of sexual identity, of teen beauty and of murder – confidently cutting from one to another within a deceptively simple framework that defies easy categorisation. Whodunnit? Love Story? Comedy? Teen Angst? Live Action Cartoon? Surreal Fantasy? Or just, The American Condition at the Turn of the Century?

Spacey and Bening are the Burnhams. He is a wilfully disillusioned adman, pathetic and admirable in equal part, who whacks off in the shower (the day goes downhill from then on), blackmails his boss when he is sacked and embarrassingly drools over his daughter’s best friend. She, on the other hand, is an estate agent and a gloss-painted worshipper at the altar of material achievement.

Mid seduction: “Lester, you’re going to spill beer on the couch.”

“So what? It’s just a couch.”

“This is a four-thousand-dollar sofa upholstered in Italian silk. This is not ‘just a couch’.” Collapse of not only this seduction, but of the prospect of any more, ever.

At the heart of the film are the two children, Ricky and Jane, played by Wes Bentley and Thora Birch. The former is certainly a teenage dope dealer and apparently a voyeur, a weirdo who films everything including the girl next door, a dead bird and the signature plastic bag. “Sometimes,” he says, “there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is going to cave in.”

As Mendes says, “Ricky is the film’s conscience, its soul. At first, you think he is a voyeur, but you realise that Ricky is using his camera to reach out and touch people, not just to record… it’s his way of reaching out.” When talking to Mendes, you do feel that Ricky and he might have much in common.

Dark and rather cuddly, with good looks that betray his distant Portuguese ancestry, Mendes is a lot younger-looking than his 34 years. His voice is standard public-school posh, with no concessions to Royal Court street-smart: no aitches dropped, no donkey jackets worn. He is exceptionally polite, softly spoken, not given to excess or exaggeration; only occasionally does he raise his voice. He is warm, yet always gives an impression of self-control, so you could kid yourself that he is unemotional. And there is a certain watchfulness about him, which you might assume in a director, but they’re not all like that. The overwhelming impression is that Mendes is very self-contained.

When I arrive at the offices of the Donmar Warehouse, he sits for 10 minutes or so at his desk in the open-plan office, completely absorbed in his correspondence, while we, the admin staff and I, gossip like hens in a coop not 10ft away. The actor Simon Russell Beale, one of Mendes’s closest collaborators, having played Iago and Ariel for him, recounts one of the rehearsals for the Tempest at the RSC some years ago. “He stopped the rehearsal because he knew the ending just wasn’t working. And then he sat for 45 minutes in the stalls, completely on his own, just thinking. For 45 minutes. You could see his brain working. We were all chatting on the stage. And then he came up with the solution.”

Mendes was born in 1965, an only child. His parents, Peter and Valerie, were a university lecturer and a children’s story writer. He went to Magdalen College School in Oxford, then to Cambridge, where he graduated with a first. Despite having staged what he describes as “several terrible productions” at university, he speedily got a job at the Chichester Festival Theatre, and within no time at all was running the nascent Minerva Studio for its first season.

Then, when he was barely out of shorts, he took over from a senior director who dropped out of a production of London Assurance and graduated to the West End. He had the two hits there by 1989 and was becoming known as something of a wunderkind . He joined the RSC, and in 1992 started to run the Donmar, which he has programmed with an eclectic mix, from Stoppard and Sondheim to Shakespeare. He has encouraged new writing with the Four Corners season (plays drawn from the four countries of the British Isles) and launched into West End successes such as The Rise & Fall Of Little Voice, Company and The Glass Menagerie.

The work that Mendes has produced is not grand and conceptual, but draws its impact from his ability to match actor and text. Critics always praise him for finding the sense within plays, rather than looking for spurious relevance or loading them with contemporary devices. What makes him stand out is his clarity of purpose. Russell Beale says of Mendes’s first show at the RSC, Troilus & Cressida, “Sam analysed the pitfalls of young directors needing to show off and completely avoided them. What he did was just very clear and very simple.” “You’re creating an alternative universe,” is the way the director himself puts it, “so you’re simply telling a story.”

Apart from his directing, there is an entrepreneurial side to his work. He has been credited with turning the Donmar Warehouse into “the sexiest theatre in London”, perhaps because he attracts top-rate performers for bottom-rate money. They come to the Donmar for kudos or to reinvent their careers. The success of David Hare’s The Blue Room, for example, transformed Mrs Tom Cruise into Nicole Kidman. And, like his contemporary Stephen Daldry, former artistic director of the Royal Court, Mendes’ charm and ability to network are considerable. On the other hand, he has no appetite for public campaigning: “I’ll always help the theatre world achieve greater strength, but I don’t want to be a spokesperson for the arts.”

He had a longish relationship with the madly talented Jane Horrocks, and was subsequently linked with Calista Flockhart and Rachel Weisz. The casting of Nicole Kidman in an artistically disappointing but publicity heat-seeking production of Hare’s play made him noticed further afield than the London theatre world and gave him an aura of glamour. Next thing, he was being asked by Steven Spielberg to make the film everybody is tipping to win this year’s Oscar for best picture. All very a,b,c. All very silver-spoon-in-the-mouth. But hardly predictable, even for a middle-class, privileged boy, who plays cricket in Harold Pinter’s cricket team, The Gaieties.

What fascinates about Mendes is his preter- natural confidence. How can you direct Judi Dench at 23? How can you deal with Spielberg on your first film? How do you make such clear choices in life and in art?

He stumbles in his answer. “I am very resistant… there are so many things going through… I don’t think there is one thing in particular. You’re forced to come up with key moments that kind of spur you on and then you begin to believe them yourself. Directing is such a strange thing to do with your life.” There is the sense behind everything he says that his own palpable solitariness, within his charming and clubbable exterior, is not up for examination. Yet he seems to have put it on screen in American Beauty. “There’s no doubt that I found myself drawn to the script because I felt very personal about it. Directing is a very solitary job, in the sense that you never meet other directors. One of the things about running this building is that I get to see other directors work, so I am always learning.”

But he’s only 34, and he has already achieved an enormous amount. How does he do it? Not just by watching others. “There is nothing in my upbringing that explains why I do what I do.” And then he says later, “A great deal of it is buried in my youth. I was very bad academically at school. I didn’t concentrate. I scraped through my O-levels and just got into sixth form, and then decided that, ‘Hang on, I’d better take control of my own life.’

I don’t like talking about this much, because I feel responsible to my parents. I find it unfair to them.” It is a matter of record that his parents divorced when he was five. But he elaborates and says, “My life was turned upside down on many occasions, to the point where, if I didn’t take control of my life, I would have just taken a lot of drugs or something.” And then he says, “the periods of calm and the periods of turmoil with each of my parents were the single most determining thing of my childhood. I took control of my life when I was 16 and kind of said, ‘Stuff that. I am not going to depend on anyone else again.’ Nothing can compete with the fear that everything stable in your life is out of control. Nothing’s frightening after that. Not even Cameron Mackintosh!”

So he spent his childhood being a skilled cricketer, watching movies and reading, sheltering from the uncertainty. He says he was “a troubled fantasist who told stories to himself”. But, in the midst of it all, he seems to have developed one skill, alongside his confidence and the decision to take control of his life. He is remarkably relaxed one-to-one. “I mainly spent my life,” he explains, “with one other person, my mother.” And this has lead to a great ability with actors. “I love actors; I have great respect for them.” He has unlimited willingness to communicate with them precisely in a way that they understand. “I will go out and find what they need. My language to each of them has to suit their brain.”

Russell Beale tells a story: “He stayed with me in Stratford during the technical run of Troilus & Cressida, and I saw him one night with his notebook. He had just scrawled things like ‘shit’ or ‘crap’ or ‘wrong’ quickly during the run-through. But then he spent hours at night sitting up translating each point differently into something each actor could understand.”

Mendes knows this about himself. “I am not a masterclass director,” he says. “I am not a teacher. I am a coach. I don’t have a methodology. Each actor is different. And on a film set you have to be next to them all, touching them on the shoulder saying, ‘I’m with you. I know exactly how you’re working. Now try this or that…'”

He illustrates: “Kevin Spacey likes to joke and piss about and do impersonations right up to the moment of action, on his mobile phone to his agent or whatever. The more relaxed, the more jovial he is, the more he’s not thinking about what he does. When you say, ‘Action’, he’s like a laser beam. His relaxation leads to spontaneity. So to Kevin you’re saying, ‘Give me a Walter Matthau impersonation.'” Annette Bening, on the other hand, “is on her Walkman half-an-hour before the cameras roll, cutting off the set, focused down, listening to music that the character would listen to”. His conclusion on his own method is simple: “All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate.”

The script for American Beauty really came to him thanks to two productions: Oliver! and Cabaret. Spielberg had seen Oliver! in London and says now that “it was a visual candy-store, and I sort of banked his name in my mind”. In 1998, Mendes’s production of Cabaret opened in a converted nightclub in New York, and the producers of American Beauty, Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, saw it, as did Spielberg, whose company Dreamworks had just bought Alan Ball’s script, then titled American Rose, from them.

There were other directors’ names in the frame, but Spielberg approached Mendes, asking him to lunch. “I stuffed my face while he sipped a mud-coloured health shake,” says Mendes. He read Ball’s screenplay and was immediately taken. “It was incredibly multi-layered, but it made me laugh. Then I read it again, and it was full of sadness and loneliness, about imprisonment and escape. Then there was this theme of beauty running through it, and it was so many different things and I just didn’t know how Alan [Ball] had done it. And that really fascinated me.”

He storyboarded the whole film during the run of Blue Room at the Donmar. He had very clear ideas about what it should look like. When you hear him say, “I enter things visually before I enter them emotionally”, it explains much of his work in the theatre, its completeness and unity of style and text. At times, the look of American Beauty has the remorselessly logical illogicality of a Magritte.

There is a moment when the young cheerleader, with whom Lester has decided he is in love, opens her blouse and scores of rose petals cascade out. At another moment, she is submerged in a bath full of them. At these moments, a touch of the surreal hovers a foot above the real. But at other times, the film has the still symmetry of an Edward Hopper. “I wanted a very composed, peaceful visual style to tell a story that was full of emotional tumult,” he says. “And I realised, when I was cutting it, that I had made an even more emotional film than I thought I was making. In fact, the film I read, the film I thought I was making, and the film I actually made, are three different things.”

It was an immaculate script by Ball, a co-executive producer and writer on the sitcom Cybill and co-writer of Grace Under Fire. But it was honed during filming. First, in editing, Mendes managed both to guide the story and to throw the audience a loop. For instance, he added an opening pre-title scene to create the first of several McGuffins, as Hitchcock called red herrings, in which the kids are filmed solemnly and quietly agreeing to kill Jane’s father. The next thing you hear is the original opening, a voiceover from Spacey, as the father, saying, “My name is Lester Burnham… I am 42 years old. In less than a year I will be dead.” A whodunnit?

The second factor, which made a big difference for many of the actors, was that Mendes, with his theatre background, gave them two weeks’ rehearsal. This gave actors, especially the younger ones, time to develop considerable depth and the company a sense of family, which shows in the ensemble of the finished movie. “We sat around a table for much of the time, because I didn’t want them to move. You don’t want them to shoot their wad eight weeks before they’re in front of the camera. But I was trying to fill up their petrol tanks with emotions and tapping into their imaginations.”

The other smart thing Mendes did was to hire one of the great cinematographers, 72-year-old Conrad L Hall, who won an Oscar for Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. Mendes simply says of him, “Conrad is a great man. He embraced my storyboard and made it happen.” But not immediately. After three days of shooting, Mendes had a crisis: he hated what he had shot. He responded with typical surefootedness.

“Everyone was being too theatrical, telling it to the audience. The thing that was lucky was that I had got everything wrong. I made every wrong artistic choice. If I’d got it just a bit wrong, I might have just tried to adjust a little. But, because it was everything, I said, ‘This is not what I wanted it to be.'” Fortunately, the studio agreed. He asked if he could shoot the scenes all over, and they said yes. “Frankly, they were relieved that I thought it was crap, too!”

Mendes could now be on the brink of a movie career. However, he will not be moving to Hollywood. “Nothing that goes on in Hollywood throws anything that goes on here in the shade.” Mendes loves his Donmar Warehouse. It’s family and home. “I made that film, and went there, because it was an American script. I didn’t go to LA saying, ‘I must make a film.’ It has plot and characters, and is not just another attempt to second-guess the mass audience.” He is working himself up. For the first time, the quietish, genial air starts to slip.

“I have no desire to live in Hollywood. I found there an industry with thousands and thousands of craftspeople who are simply the best in the world at their job and are prepared to drop their rates for a project they really love. But I am telling you, and I have worked there, we should concentrate on what we do well here.” It’s now a well-argued torrent.

“What’s happening here is that newspapers have consistently relegated theatre, ballet, visual arts to the bottom of the page. And always above it is film and rock music. But I’m telling you now, stop obsessing – and this is ironic coming from me – about American film. The Observer film section is 16 pages long, and you have to search through the back pages of the Review to find theatre. And it is advertised as ‘What really goes on in Tinseltown’. Who fucking cares? We have so much richness of talent here. And that’s why I am back here. Because it’s a fucking great place to work.”

For the first time in four years, Mendes has no idea what he is going to do next. There were plans to do Hamlet with Russell Beale, but he had to shelve them because of the film. He was to have directed Sondheim’s new musical, Wise Guys, but it’s not ready yet. Having directed Kidman on stage, he moves in the movie stratosphere now, with an Oscar nomination a racing certainty. He even spent New Year’s Eve on the Cruise/Kidman yacht moored in Sydney harbour. But he will return to Britain to see American Beauty open at the end of this month, and then set about taking the Donmar off in another direction.

He has no game plan for the theatre. He is “a great believer in retrospective policy. Do the play,” he says, “and then say it was your policy. Don’t make any great announcements. We’re very light on our feet at the Donmar. We’re a maverick theatre. Always have been.” And Mendes will certainly be around for the next three years or so to see what his policy was once he’s done it. Even if American Beauty wins the Oscar. Which it should. Shouldn’t it? Mendes shrugs and smiles contentedly

This article originally appeared at:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/Feature_Story/interview/0,,125385,00.html

Christopher Eccleston is an actor known for his anguished portraints of men in conflict. He wants to do work of integrity, prefers television, and likes his family to approve. A tall order? No wonder he has a reputation for being gloomy.

Christopher Eccleston is Eeyore with sex appeal. Famously glum, he’s rangy, a Sunday footballer, a marathon runner. He’s also thoughtful and intense. Imagine a sports master who is also a keen vegetarian. He’s taking a break from filming an episode of a new BBC drama called Clocking Off and he talks cautiously, weighing his words with care. Yet his flies are undone, and he hasn’t noticed. And it’s a real surprise when he laughs. It’s not loud, but his eyes flash. And it’s even more of a surprise that he’s talking about his work, his family, and himself at all. In fact, it’s something of a shock that he’s so thoroughly engaging.

Buttoned-up, miseryguts Eccleston, the working-class boy from Eccles, has always allowed his bone structure to cast him as moody and broody, and people presume he’s like that off screen. He’s been drawn towards characters who are in conflict, sometimes dour – even psychotic, such as David, in the homicidal chill of Shallow Grave, one of his early successes. Under Danny Boyle’s direction, he created a tension in front of the camera that carried the film beyond the appearance of normality and into terror. It was as if he was acting behind his eyes.

As Trevor Hicks, in the 1996 TV docu-drama Hillsborough, by Jimmy McGovern, one of his favourite writers, he showed a man trying to rescue what was left of his life, his marriage and his pride after losing two daughters in the football stadium disaster. Eccleston painted Hicks, one of the leaders of the families’ campaign for justice, as an honest man defeated by his own strained pragmatism. There were rages, icy drafts of grief, tears and but precious few laughs. As he says now, “There was no real room for custard pies.” Then there was Jude – pale-faced, ardent Jude opposite Kate Winslett in Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Hardy’s novel – the struggling peasant boy trying to better himself.

The men in Eccleston’s gallery of performances have not been happy. Even DCI Billborough, sidekick to Robbie Coltrane’s increasingly eccentric Cracker, lived moodily and died tragically. And Eccleston reached a peak of agonising manhood with probably his best performance to date, Nicky in Our Friends In The North. A zealous idealist, he finds himself, in his 40s, burnt out with a cynicism that was, in the end, created by nothing more basic than an inability to be reconciled with his father. The emptiness in his eyes was disillusion incarnate.

So, on screen Eccleston has turned in a powerful line of men in conflict searching for some settlement with their world and their lack of power. And he’s appeared to play the part off screen, too, unbending and uncommunicative. Until now. And there’s not exactly a confessional torrent, more a quiet, good-humoured, tentative opening of a door to his passions. “I suppose I’ve relaxed a bit. Actually, I bloody hate my work. I’m not happy with it. I feel very limited as an actor. And early on I was pigeonholed, so I wouldn’t talk about these things.” And he says – a number of times – “I’ve felt a bit lost for a while now. Ever since Hillsborough, I’ve been doing things, work, that I wouldn’t normally have done.”

He won’t be specific, but he must be talking about films such as Elizabeth, in which he played the Duke of Norfolk. It’s not that he has a problem with doing costume drama – “I’d have a go at a 19th-century, cross-dressing aristocratic poet if I was asked: I might not pull it off, but I’d learn” – but in Elizabeth he seemed to be making the most of a part that was written as a one-dimensional villain, lacking any psychological motivation. Eccleston won’t amplify, remaining tactfully vague.

In his episode of Clocking Off he plays “a 35-year-old bloke who’s shagging his brains out”. Then he meets a single woman with kids and eventually falls…well, you can guess how it goes. It’s a bit of a change for him, almost a light romantic role. “When I read it, I thought it was really good. And also I needed the work,” he says. “I also thought it would be nice to be playful, not conflicted. It’s good if it confounds a few perceptions of me.” In the series, written by Paul Abbott (who wrote Cracker after Jimmy McGovern invented it), each programme focuses on the life of one of several people who work in a textile factory. Eccleston agreed to do it because Paul Abbott’s writing “captures the rhythms of working-class people without camping it up”. And so it does. It’s the very best of that kind of television. Or if you hate the McGovern/Bleasdale school of TV drama, it’s “self-indulgent sentimentality, revealing the kind of worship of the working class that only writers who are successful and rich enough to have escaped their roots can feel” – that from a well-known working-class writer, who, for reasons of professional politeness, wished to remain unnamed.

Whatever, Eccleston, who is much associated with McGovern, has become the epitome of Conscience in his acting. That is what makes him more than his own assessment of himself as “a good, middle-range actor” – and may also drive him into a cul-de-sac of typecasting. For my money, Clocking Off has a sparkling economy in its writing and manages to dignify its characters with a complexity that, in his worst moments, escapes McGovern’s maudlin over-romanticism of working-class families. It is also my guess that Eccleston will not remain stuck where he is. He is far too versatile an actor, even if few have bothered to notice.

To Eccleston, all this is very important. “The work I have chosen to do has meant that I have played a lot of conflicted people. That comes out of my conviction that what’s on our TV screens should be of value.” He quotes Hardy later on, from the beginning of Far From The Madding Crowd. ” ‘In short he was a man of salt and pepper mixture. On a good day he was a good man and on a bad day he was a bad man.’ And I went for that, because it means playing a character with all the contradictions and grey areas, and it has an integrity in the way it is depicted…A lot of my work comes from my responsibility to my family and what we believe in and what I was taught.” And that – family – is the crux of it. His attitude to his work was born with his first screen job in the late 80s, playing Derek Bentley – the teenager who, in the 50s, was hanged for killing a policeman, and now pardoned – in a film called Let Him Have It.

“I was very naive, and I had done only a couple of theatre jobs and I got this telly job because I was a nobody. And there was a big fuss about it, of course, with my friends and family. But in the middle of shooting, I started to listen to the dialogue and how the characters were being made to talk and relate to each other by the director. At the same time, I had researched learning disability and epilepsy – which was Derek Bentley’s problem – and I had some instincts about how that should be presented. I found myself growing very uncomfortable with the way I was being asked to portray the learning disability…specifically romanticised chirpy, cheekie cockney. Really ladling on the pathos. I was surprised how much it upset me. I remember it making me very angry, because I thought it’s not like that. They’re not just telling lies about people whom I know but they’re making value judgments about their audience.” He is warming up now. “Okay, Bentley was retarded, but it ain’t sweet. Does it feel sweet to the person themself to have a learning disability? I saw two very clear paths. The blue-eyed pathos thing, very lovable and cute, or the other road, which is being truthful. And I took that road.”

Why didn’t he just take the money and shut up? Why did he choose to be so challenging on set. “I didn’t feel I was making a choice. It was a compulsion. I did think, ‘Why not keep your mouth shut, kid?’ I mean, I was an absolute nobody from nowhere. But I said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.'” So who, or what, taught him to be like that? His parents? Pause. Temporary shut-down. Prodded, he starts to talk. “What my dad taught me was whatever job you do, do the best that you can, and for me that means giving a character their dignity, even if it’s undignified. Give them their truth. It all comes from my parents. My inability to keep my mouth shut and take the money all comes from my parents.”

Eccleston was born in 1964, near Manchester. He’s one of three boys, the youngest by eight years. The other two are a builder and an upholsterer, who both now work in television and film. “They were,” Eccleston says, “both manually very accomplished.” He, on the other hand, was hopeless. “Every time I look at a piece of machinery, it blows up.” He often makes a comparison between his work and theirs. “My brother makes very good furniture, and I want to see if I can make very good performances.” Someone once said to his father, 70 this year, “You must be very proud of your son.” And his dad replied, vehemently, “I’m very proud of all my sons.”

“That’s the kind of fairness I was brought up with,” says Eccleston. As a child, he played a lot of sports, “and when I got fouled and the referee didn’t call it, I’d go wild and I’d get myself involved in monster fights. I’d get out of the showers and they’d be there waiting. Because there was something to tussle over. I suppose I’ve always been like that.” Although later, he also says, “I’ve never really been a bad boy. I can’t fight my way out of a paper bag.” It was ever thus with the youngest – especially boys with older brothers – they talk big, but they’re soft as butter.

His mother and father were both manual workers. “I used to watch my mum and dad go out at 8am and then come home at six and go out again at eight in the morning. That was one of the things that made me want to be an actor, to avoid routine, the routine that I saw grind my mum and dad down a bit. I think they feel that, intellectually and emotionally, they’ve been under-used by the jobs they have done. And it all got poured into us, the family, which was great for us. In fact, a lot of the men on the estate, not just my dad, were in repetitive work, not very demanding…” he checks himself “…though not to undervalue what they did.” Then he pauses. “I wanted a job that I didn’t hate.” Half-an-hour before, he had said, with such finality, “At the moment, I bloody hate my work.” He smiles wryly.

He left school without any qualifications because he was “a lazy bugger and didn’t apply myself”. So he went to sixth-form college in Eccles to re-sit all his exams, and failed them all again. But it was a very different atmosphere, “because everybody wanted to learn. And I came out of myself and turned into a bit of a loon.” Then he went to Salford Tech, and someone put him in a play. “I think they just needed a big lad. Although,” he says quite rightly, “I think, if I’m honest, what I always had was a physical presence.”

The play was Lock Up Your Daughters, and he was completely miscast as a romantic lead. “All my energy went like that,” he says, indicating a tight, rolled-up ball, “because I was terrified.” The play was not particularly important, but Mrs Sorah was. She was the English teacher. “A few of them thought she was a bit of a cow. But she wasn’t afraid to show her feelings about the things that we read. I took her on, in a way. She taught with a passion. And she taught us about Sassoon and the other war poets. And his journey, his act of conscience, was very striking to me. He started writing poetry that was a call to arms, published in the Daily Telegraph. And then, two years later (1917), he was writing Blighters, about the return to England and sitting in a music hall watching them do a sketch about the war.”

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home Sweet Home’, –

And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

“Poetry and classical music had always seemed rather frivolous, but these were poems, art, that had come out of something very essential and that captured my imagination. These blokes went to war and they felt compelled to write about their experiences.”

After Salford Tech, much to everyone’s surprise, he got a place at Central School Of Speech And Drama. But, after graduating, he didn’t really work for three years until Let Him Have It. Since then, he has been most noticeably in the business of portraying working-class men with a sense of truthfulness. “I remember being transfixed by the opening shots of Kes. It looked like our street, the same light as when you were doing your paper round.” His desire for truth seems to come not from anger about his roots, quite the reverse. “I saw a value in our life,” he says, “I was just very loved, really. You’d have to ask them if they think of me as different. But I feel a lot closer to them when something like Hillsborough gets a response because I think it’s probably important to my mum and dad and brothers that I’m not pissing about doing Noël Coward. It’s probably important to them that people tell them they saw Hillsborough last night…that it was something of value.”

He also grew up with that generation of dramatists – Alan Bleasdale, Alan Clarke, Ken Loach – on his TV screen, who made it their life’s work to show the reality of the lives of “the many not the few”. And he’s aware of how the impact of performances ripples out far more from TV than from theatre. Despite the excitement it might generate, he has never – at least until now – engaged with the idea that theatre could be interesting as a future direction for him. “I was an usher at the National Theatre, when I was a student, and I wanted to borrow Siegfried Sassoon’s tank and roll right over the audience.” This is said with not the slightest levity. And it kick-starts an outburst about ticket prices, preaching to the converted, how Shakespeare should be banned for a while and all the money given to theatre-in-education groups to tour the regions, etc, punctuated only by a brief shared memory of Michael Gambon’s towering performance as Eddie Carbone in Alan Ayckbourn’s production of Arthur Miller’s View From The Bridge at the National Theatre in 1987. “I remember the young girl first walking into Eddie’s house, and this huge man registering his desire by jumping up and sitting on the sideboard like an adolescent.” He says, admiringly, “Gambon has an extraordinary emotional range.” Even if he’d like to firebomb the National, Eccleston can’t help revealing, as he says later, that he is “fascinated by acting…absolutely fascinated by it”.

And he will have the opportunity to put his doubts and suspicions about theatre to the test in February, when he will play Jean in a West End production of a new translation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, by Frank McGinnis. “Well, the pressure’s on now,” he says laughing. “And it’s totally hypocritical of me, really, after all the abuse I’ve given theatre in the past. But I’m doing this for myself. The kind of people who watch Jimmy McGovern’s stuff on telly won’t be coming, and the tickets at the Theatre Royal will be expensive. But it will give me a chance to rehearse a character for four weeks, not go to work until 7.30pm every day, and not have someone shout ‘cut’ every two minutes.”

And the intensity of Strindberg will suit his style. In Jean, he gets to play a working-class butler, who “shags the head of the house” and drives her to suicide in order to protect himself. Eccleston used to think Strindberg melodramatic, until he met some friends of an old girlfriend. “They were a married couple who had a real relationship of complete mutual dependency and mutual hatred.” So, despite this being in the West End, maybe it will be another bit of Eccleston’s truthful realism, rather than standard posh theatre.

Anyway, theatre for him is less about theatre than it is about what he wants to see on TV. “I hope that someone from a council estate like me watches what I and others do and says, ‘That’s my life; that’s my accent; I have those problems with my dad or my mates.’ Jimmy McGovern writes for the telly because he doesn’t see his audience in the theatre.” Eccleston wants to be part of “a revolution on British television that went back to the Monday Play and Play For Today that created the impressions that I got as a youngster. It would be great to get back to quality drama on TV and away from formulaic, star-driven stuff. Rather than what can we put x, y or z in, it should be, ‘What does Jimmy McGovern want to write about?'” Eccleston even says, a little whimsically, “Sometimes, when I have sat at home feeling under-used as an actor, I’ve thought that I should contact Channel 4 and try and create a rep system of actors and writers and bring back Play For Today. Maybe not as an actor, but as a producer.” He probably won’t do it, because actors are actors and producers are producers, and they are, by and large, very different animals. But what he has to say is more than a whinge. It is a passion.

Eccleston has had time for these thoughts because, over the past year or so, he has sat at home quite a lot; he admits to having taken several jobs “just to get me out of the house”. He didn’t work for nine months until August 1998. Then he had seven weeks on a film and didn’t work again until May of last year, when he did another film, this time with Michael Winterbottom, the director of Jude, called With Or Without You. “Not working for so long was the worst time of my life.” To add to that he has recently had a major disappointment: he and a well-known French director called it a day on a project he’s passionate about. “I want this more than anything I ever wanted.” This from a man who doesn’t speak hyperbole, even as a second language.

But he’s not exactly either poor or forgotten, even if, at the moment, few projects measure up to his vision of what he’d like to do. And three years ago he moved back to Eccles and bought a house. He did it on impulse. He had ended a relationship and realised that, as he got older, he wanted to be near his family again. They are “pretty realistic about unemployment”. And he never really worked in London anyway.

Over recent months he has been working on an American indie film called Invisible Circus, with Cameron Diaz, whom he describes as “a really truthful actor who really does just go off wherever she is taken… totally generous”, and a television project called Killing Time, which was broadcast on New Year’s Day. It was a collaboration with Simon Armitage, the poet from Yorkshire, and a director called Brian Hill, who’s from Rochdale. Aah, the comfort of fellow northerners. “Brian and I started off with one of those ‘my council estate is rougher than your council estate’ kind of conversations, and then we just got on with it.” It was a two-handed documentary, linked with a poem by Armitage, in which Eccleston and Hermione Norris – “the blonde one in Cold Feet” – played Millennium Man and Millennium Woman. They went around the country, speaking to people who then gave them objects for a Millennium Bonfire.

It was, he says, a “genuine piece of collaboration. We shaped it together. This one woman, who had just had a child, gave away a cocktail dress to symbolise the end of that part of her life. And a farmer, who’d had to sell up his farm because of BSE, gave me a rib of beef. I was off-script when we weren’t doing the poem, and I loved it. I spent a lot of the time being me. It was a lot more exposing because it wasn’t a character. It was my way of speaking, my interests.” And it wasn’t moody, either. Perhaps, some teenager in a council estate in Eccles saw it, and it will change their life. Like telly changed Eccleston’s. But I wonder what his family thought. Because that’s what really seems to matter the most.

This article originally appeared at:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/Feature_Story/interview/0,,122551,00.html

Once he was a theatre-crazy stagehand. Then he became a struggling producer who backed a couple of turkeys. Now he’s worth £350m, has five homes around the world, and describes his tastes as ‘stylishly common’. Simon Fanshawe on the marketing genius who pioneered the international mega-musical

Cameron Mackintosh is a global brand. Decisiveness has made him a considerable reputation and a great fortune. He creates the impression of doing everything at speed and bustles like The White Rabbit through his country house. But while he is no business slouch, he is, according to one friend, “like a charming puppy whose game you want to play and whom you always forgive for the occasional lapses in house training”.

These days the 53-year-old mainly works, and entertains, in his house in Somerset, a 13th century priory in 600 acres, where he lives with his partner of 15 years, the Australian photographer Michael Le Poer Trench. The kitchen is the hub of the house, bigger than any of the other rooms. “When I cook I just stand there and shout ‘peel this, cut that, get me a drink’ “. In the drawing room is a grand piano, which he doesn’t play. “But the composers do,” he says. They write, he produces and everybody makes money.

In the current Sunday Times Rich List, Mackintosh is valued at £350m. He is 54th, level pegging with his first collaborator, the Aunt Sally of the British musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber. As the critically acclaimed Lion King opened in London this week, Disney executives owe a debt to Mackintosh as a pioneer of the globally successful mega-musical.

Cats in 1981 was Mackintosh’s first proper money maker, even though he had had a taste of success with Side By Side By Sondheim, an immediate hit in 1976. Then there was his first solo effort which became the international success that is Les Miserables. It opened at the RSC in 1985 to the kind of poor reviews which might have overwhelmed a less enthusiastic and loyal producer. It has now taken £1.5bn at the box office and is estimated to have been seen by 45m people worldwide. After “Les Mis” there was another collaboration with Lloyd Webber, Phantom of the Opera in 1986. And it wasn’t until Miss Saigon in 1989 that Mackintosh felt “that the press woke up to the fact that I didn’t work for Andrew Lloyd Webber”.

With these four shows in the West End, on Broadway and around the world, Mackintosh became one of the most significant figures in postwar theatre.

He is not without a moderate helping of vanity but he has little enthusiasm for discussing his status and deflects questions about it on to comments about his relationship with the press. “It’s the Faustian pact of all time. That’s why I don’t normally do interviews down here at home. By and large I’ve had a pretty good run with the press.” This contrasts sharply with Lloyd Webber’s experience. “Andrew’s always been very naive in the way he treats the press. And I’ve said that to him”.

Two years ago, at the West End opening party of Cinderella, the ballet by Adventures in Motion Pictures, one journalist asked Lloyd Webber if, with AMP’s second success in the West End after Swan Lake, he thought the musical with words was dead. Lloyd Webber was defensive and told the journalist that he was now writing some of his best songs and that his next show was going to be his greatest. (It turned out to be the underwhelming Whistle Down the Wind.) The journalist moved to Mackintosh and asked the same question, which was greeted with a roar of laughter from the man who at that stage of his career was trying to make a mega-hit of his latest show, the poorly received Martin Guerre. “That’s a fucking stupid question, even from you,” he said. “Have a drink”. Both responses were characteristic.

Mackintosh is described by Stephen Sondheim as “an over-excited, boundlessly and unabashedly enthusiastic child in the playground of musical theatre. He is the kid with the toys. They’re his toys and he’s going to play with them. If you took all his money away tonight, he would simply start again.”

All his collaborators use the same metaphor. Julia McKenzie, who has directed and acted for him, says: “He’s a child about the business”. Martin McCallum, who runs the business side of his companies, says: “He just has a childlike simplicity about things. He won’t see anything difficult about anything”.

George Biggs, one of the West End’s most enduring figures, who at one time or another has run almost every theatre in London, and now works for Mackintosh, says: “He just has a schoolboy enthusiasm. He loves two things: theatre and buildings”. Helen Montagu, who co-produced the Sondheim show, says: “Whatever he does he does it with this childlike flair”.

Cameron was born the eldest of three brothers. “There have never been brotherly jealousies,” says the youngest, Nicky .

They lived in Cuffley, Hertfordshire. Their father, Ian, was a jazz musician, playing in a band with the cartoonist Wally Fawkes, known as Trog; hence the band’s name the Troglodytes. But Mackintosh’s father forswore his life’s love to run the family timber business. His mother, Diana, is half-French and half-Maltese. “Our mother had her head screwed on,” says Nicky, who now runs a successful restaurant in Chiswick. “Dad was a musician, whatever goes with that. He was a good person, no prejudices. He would give anyone the benefit of the doubt, whereas my mother was a little sharper. I think Cameron gets his determination from her.

“She knows the value of everything. She was born in Malta and her experiences gave her the ability to make everything go a long way. A chicken that was supposed to be for two she made last for six. And Cameron’s not a spendthrift either. If he loves something he’ll spend money. But he’s not foolish with it”.

It was a large family which revolved to some extent around the boys’ paternal grandmother’s house in Enfield. “There was granny and lots of aunts,” says Nicky. “Once a year Cameron would organise a show. There is a photo of him aged about 14 with a boater, Rob [the middle son] with tails and me aged 5 in my father’s flat cap. He had got me to learn My Old Man’s a Dustman. He was theatre mad from a very early age”.

After boarding school at Prior Park in Bath, Mackintosh went to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London but left early. “There was lots of ‘History of the Greek theatre’ and I was just impatient to be practical and get on with it”. He had a brief spell in the chorus of a touring production of Oliver! and worked as a stagehand at the Theatre Royal in 1964 on Camelot. He and the lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner, by then a three-times Academy Award winner for An American in Paris, Gigi and My Fair Lady, became good friends.

Mackintosh’s desire to work in the theatre was overwhelming. “When I started I was like a sponge. I just did everything and that’s what I say to anyone who says ‘how do I become a producer?’ ‘Do anything anyone asks you’ “. Sue Higginson, who now runs the National Theatre Studio, was Mackintosh’s first secretary. She says: “He wants his own way, but he created this family thing at work. He was a fantastically good employer”.

He became a producer and gained a reputation with theatrical managements as “being rather good with the number two dates”. In theatre language that means not touring shows to the prime touring spots of Brighton and Bath, but to the Civic at Rotherham and the Quay at Peterborough. It is faint praise. Like all young producers he was just keeping his head above water. “I was still living in a £3.50- a-week apartment in Wardour Street in Soho. I didn’t have a car or a mortgage. I worked on the premise that I had risk enough in my professional life and if it all went wrong I could slam the door, pay the rent and cook.”

But Nicky remembers him as “always seeming successful.” And Tom Lehrer, the American satirist whose songs he turned into the revue Tomfoolery in 1980, says: “Well, now he’s gone from rags to riches, but he always had exquisite taste in rags”.

In 1969, only a few years after starting to produce, Mackintosh took a major tumble with his first West End musical, Anything Goes. He ended up £40,000 in debt. “Though funnily enough,” he says, “when you go into the business not knowing anything about it other than really wanting to do it, you sort of assume that this is normal. I never had a fortune. I was always scraping together £25 here and there to get a pair of French windows out of hock”.

Fortunately, he had an understanding bank manager. “I had heard that Harold Fielding the legendary American producer, used this bank in Leicester Square. And I thought they must know about theatre. And they did.

“Then I had an even bigger debacle with a production of At Home with the Dales, which was written by the man who played Dr Dale of Mrs Dale’s Diary on the radio. It got rather good reviews but absolutely no one wanted to go and see it. We ended up, this cast of 10 in this little play, booked for two weeks into the Winter Gardens in Blackpool.” The Winter Gardens is a 2,000-seater. “We were playing to about 20 people a night. I knew I had to stop. The bank manager said ‘You haven’t got enough to pay the actors have you?’ And he gave me £500 on condition that I paid them because he said if I didn’t, Equity would bar me and I’d never work in the theatre again”.

Mackintosh left production and went to work as advertising man ager for the national tour of Hair. “I invented Hair Rail. It was my first promotion.” It offered audiences inclusive theatre and rail tickets from outlying stations to come into the towns and see the show. “I don’t think anyone had done it before.”

When Hair ended he got a job company managing a tour of a play with comedian Eric Sykes, but pulled out to go back into production with the inauspicious, middlebrow piece Murder at the Vicarage. It was a reasonable success and Mackintosh again displayed a flair for marketing by touring it back-to-back with another Agatha Christie show, Black Coffee, and calling them The Christie Festival.

By 1972 he was back in the West End, producing a musical of Trelawney (of the Wells) which had started at the Bristol Old Vic. Then, in 1973, he mounted his very first musical from scratch, The Card, based on an Arnold Bennett novel. It had a pedigree creative team. The script was by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, the score was by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, and, significantly, choreography was by Gillian Lynne, who subsequently worked with Mackintosh on Cats.

Because they neither write, direct, compose nor act, producers are notoriously overlooked in theatre. Mackintosh is fond of saying “Who remembers who produced Shakespeare?” But Mackintosh’s name is known worldwide. He has an acknowledged grip on marketing. Sondheim says: “He is a better promoter than anyone in theatre today”.

And his money allows him to promote a new show to such an extent prior to opening that its advance at the box office makes it virtually critic-proof. According to Julia McKenzie, who directed and co-devised the first production of the new Stephen Sondheim revue, Putting It Together, which will open on Broadway next month: “He’s monstrous. He wants to do everything. When we were putting this show together he wouldn’t stay away”. Sondheim says: “He loves to interfere – it drives me crazy – in every individual department. But it is his major contribution. You feel that there is a captain of the ship – there’s a boss who is looking out for everybody’s interests”.

Mackintosh, who backs his own taste in every detail, doesn’t argue with any of this. “Although theatre is utterly collaborative, it is impossible when the producers are a group of people. You’ve got no one definite batting for the production team to go against. Although of course I value other opinions – and if I have to overrule someone it usually means there is something wrong – but in the end it’s got to be my taste. When some of my backers once started to say ‘We’ll back that show but not this one’ I said, ‘Well I think you should go off and pick your own.’ If they feel they have their own taste they should go off and produce themselves, not back me. Whether one agrees with it or not I’ve got a strong sense of taste. I have always gone for what I like”. And his verdict on his own taste is concise: “stylishly common”.

Trevor Nunn, who co-directed Les Miserables, says that from his first experience of Mackintosh, “he has changed over the years from a very exuberant, youthful producer to someone who is all knowledgeable and massively experienced”. He describes Les Miserables as “entirely the story of Cameron’s determination”. This clear resolve subsequently led to Mackintosh and Nunn, now director of the National Theatre, parting company. Nunn was the first director of Miss Saigon. But before casting had begun, Mackintosh asked him to step down. “His conclusions were – and still are – inexplicable to me,” says Nunn, “but he has the absolute right as producer to take decisions for the good of the show as he sees it”. Are they still friends? “Well, we’re still in business”.

As is Miss Saigon, but only until the end of this month, when it finally closes after 10 successful years. (According to last year’s Wyndham report into West End theatre, Miss Saigon and Les Miserables have each taken more worldwide than any Hollywood movie barring Titanic. Phantom of the Opera and Cats have each exceeded even Titanic’s global takings). Mackintosh has equally high hopes for his new original musical, The Witches of Eastwick, which opens next May.

It is based on the novel by John Updike, which was subsequently filmed with Jack Nicholson and Cher. Mackintosh has backed the musical’s writers, John Dempsey and Dana P Rowe, over several years now and particularly through a savaging from the critics for their first work in London, The Fix. “They have their own sound but they are absolutely rooted in the great traditions of musical comedy. Their instinct is to home in on the great American musical and give it some edge. It’s been very important to keep them working because before these guys were literally having to do any old job and then take 10 days off to write together”.

Most of this kind of support comes through Mackintosh’s Foundation which, according to the Charity Commission, gives out about £1m annually to a variety of projects. There have been two major institutional grants. It endowed Oxford University with £1.75m for a Chair in contemporary theatre and it gave £1m to the National Theatre for the revival of classic American musicals.

Mackintosh funds several students a year through drama school, paying fees, grants and all expenses. He also supports the Mercury Group of young writers of musicals. Anthony Drew and George Styles, whose musical Honk! is to be the National Theatre’s Christmas show this year, first met him when they were young hopefuls winning the 1985 Vivian Ellis songwriting prize. “He completely kept us in bacon sarnies at one point in our career,” says Drew. “He never drops you, there’s always something going on in the background”.

Their patron has kept faith with them through a number of “not-quite-right” productions of their musical The Just So Stories. He helped them negotiate an option with Steven Spielberg, which in the end expired, and also introduced them to one of London’s best agents, Patricia McNaughton. After the news that a production of Just So at the Tricycle Theatre on the London Fringe was not after all going to transfer to the West End in April 1992, the two got a parcel. “It had a letter inside,” remembers Drew, “that just said, ‘Two tickets to anywhere in the world you want to go’. We were terrified that we might choose somewhere too expensive. So after a lot of thinking about it, we settled on a safari in Africa. But we asked Tee, his secretary, to just check with him it wasn’t too much. The only comment he came back with was that it was a very long flight and we had to go business class”.

Mackintosh is at an interesting point in his career. He maintains: “I love living in the country, I love living in Scotland and therefore for me to want to actually not do that, I’ve really got to love a project a lot. I’ve been producing for 30 years and it’s no novelty”.

But he doesn’t look as if he is slowing down. He has the Sondheim review opening on Broadway; an entirely re-written and new version of Martin Guerre was incubated at The West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and is now destined for New York after its current tour of the States; and The Witches of Eastwick is being cast for the West End.

He will never be short of money. His shows will continue to be presented globally for many years – Les Mis opens in Bueno Aires next year. But in the next few years he will turn his attention beyond West End shows to the theatres themselves.

Currently London is seeing the biggest sale ever of its theatres. Associated Capital Theatres, which owns eight West End theatres as well as the Donmar Warehouse, is up for grabs. And theatre group Stoll Moss,bought by the Australian Robert Holmes a’Court, is also up for sale. The group, whose theatres include the Palladium and Drury Lane, is said to be valued at £100m.

Mackintosh is coy about the nature and value of a bid. But, asked if he is going to buy Stoll Moss, he says: “Well someone is, and certainly I would be very interested”.

Bids closed last month and Stoll Moss’s bankers are being noncommittal, but the word is that there will be interest from Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group; Stephen Whalley Cohen, who operates St Martin’s and the Savoy; Peter Holmes a’Court, son of current owner Janet Holmes a’Court; and the American group that just bought the Apollo group, SFX.

It’s about the latter that Mackintosh (and others) are concerned. “I think it’s better to have people who own theatres from the country of the theatres because the theatre business is very difficult. My belief is that corporate theatre – production and ownership – will be fairly shortlived because it doesn’t stack up for stockholders. Stoll Moss, despite Janet’s investment, was still run by the financial controller of an Australian company. But theatre has always survived on mavericks. I believe that with ownership goes tremendous responsibility”.

He knows that owning theatres will not make him money. He has already invested £2m in the Prince Edward, one of the five he already has. “These theatres need a lot of money pumped back into them,” he says. “Over the next years we will all have to take decisions about how to preserve the character of these old theatres but turn them into places for the 21st century.”

McCallum, his business manager, puts it more bluntly: “To invest in theatres you have to be either extremely committed or extremely stupid”. And Mackintosh isn’t stupid.

He has plans for them too. He will clearly not keep all of them but will rationalise his own group so that he has one of each size and sell the others on. “I’m really keen,” he says “to make sure that there is a balance of ownership”. And his real enthusiasm is reserved for the idea of having a larger version of the Cottesloe (the National Theatre’s 200-seater) or the Donmar Warehouse. “Over the next five years I want to look at ways of bringing other kinds of theatre into the West End. But I haven’t found a site yet”. And he knows that to try and do that on a conventional commercial site just does not stack up financially. “Whatever theatres I have, I will be a custodian for a certain part of their life. It’s like me with houses. I don’t spend money on houses as an accountant, thinking it will make more money. I know that, hopefully, because of what I’ve done, this house will be there to be enjoyed by someone else in 200 or 300 years’ time.

He has five houses altogether – in Somerset, the South of France, New York, London and a small lodge in Scotland, near Mallaig on the west coast, which he inherited from his aunt Anthea. He has since acquired much of the 13,000-acre Nevis estate around it. He says he “bought the view to ensure that the area wasn’t broken up or spoilt… I see my responsibility to Mallaig as preserving the way of life, not in aspic but in spirit”. He has invested his foundation’s money in a health clinic, crofting and a swimming pool for the community. The total investment is thought to amount to £500,000 so far.

He was also involved in attempts to help the neighbouring community of the isolated Knoydart peninsula, who were attempting to buy out their “laird”. Originally there was a plan for Mackintosh to buy the freehold and lease it back to the inhabitants but, in the end, the locals wanted to own the freehold themselves. “It was completely amicable,” says Mackintosh, who has contributed £75,000 to their efforts. He has also recently bought up some of the land around his Somerset estate. “This way I am able to to give this younger generation their independence – working the land they grew up on but can’t afford to keep any more”.

Mackintosh is an old-fashioned patron, who believes in the responsibility that comes with wealth as much as in the musical theatre that has made him his money. Nunn describes him as having “many dichotomies. One side of him wants to own a string of theatres and the other just wants to live in this tiny hut in Scotland. He’s probably at his absolute happiest when he’s cooking for friends”. Above all, Mackintosh enjoys the role of host. To his audiences as much as to his friends.

Life at a glance

Born: October 17 1946.

Educated: Prior Park, Bath; Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

Career: Stagehand at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – later assistant stage manager; producer of musicals. Knighted in 1996.

Productions: Little Women (1967) Anything Goes (1969); Trelawney (1972);The Card (1973); Winnie the Pooh (1974); Owl and the Pussycat Went to See (1975); Godspell (1975); Side by Side by Sondheim (1976); Oliver! (1977), new production 1994; Diary of a Madam (1977); After Shave (1977); Gingerbread Man (1978); Out on a Limb (1978); My Fair Lady (1979); Oklahoma! (1980); Tomfoolery (1980); Jeeves Takes Charge (1981); Cats (1981); Song and Dance (1982) Blondel (1983); Little Shop of Horrors (1983); Abbacadabra (1983); The Boyfriend (1984); Les Misérables (1985); Cafe Puccini (1985); Phantom of the Opera (1986); Follies (1987); Miss Saigon (1989); Just So (1990); Five Guys Named Moe (1991); Moby Dick (1992); Putting it Together (1992); Carousel (1993); Oliver! (1994); Martin Guerre (1996); The Fix (1997).

Recreations: holidays, cooking.

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,257898,00.html