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Interviews
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An Accidental Actor Sheila Connor talks to Sylvester McCoy Still at the launch party for Me and My Girl, the venue for my interview with Dillie Keane, and the noise levels are even higher. I was introduced to my next “victim” and we managed to find a corner to sit down.
I knew this was going to be an enjoyable interview from the beginning as McCoy has this twinkle in his eye which suggests he looks at life and finds it amusing, although my first question was not one to generate humour. Knowing that his father was killed before he was born – did his mother bring him up on her own? “Yes, she did until I was eight, then she went mad and spent most of her life in an insane asylum. I’m all right with it – it was a long time ago!”
Moving rapidly on – "I understand that you were supposedly destined for the priesthood – is that right?" “That’s right, I did train until I got housemaid’s knee from praying too much. I’ve always had trouble with my knees – it’s all that religion – it’s bad for your knees. I ended up working in insurance because I had a double barrelled name and came from Scotland and when I told them my name (James Kent-Smith) they were quite impressed by that, and also, being Scots – there’s a racial prejudice that we would all love – Scots are very hard working. They obviously got it wrong with me, but I ended up working in insurance. City of London.”
"I believe you began your theatrical career working in Box Office?"
“I began in Box Office at the Roundhouse” (A north London venue which McCoy reminded me is about to be re-opened). “The Roundhouse in the sixties and seventies was a wonderful place where lots of avant-gard plays were put on, and lots of rock concerts. I was a bouncer for the Rolling Stones one night. I got a job there because it was a real swinging sixties hippy place – and I knew the cook! By then I’d dropped out of the City and grew my hair long. Jjust didn’t want to be in the City life, and they said they wanted a hippy for accounts”
So you had no formal training for the stage?
“No formal training but I took to it like a duck to water really. Brian Murphy used to collect the tickets I sold because his wife was an administrator at the Roundhouse, so when he wasn’t working he’d collect tickets, and he just thought I was an actor and he recommended me to a guy called Ken Campbell, so it was all by accident that I joined.”
One of your specialities is playing ‘the spoons’. How did that begin?
“Very early on. We were at a pub one night and someone was playing the spoons. I said ‘how do you do that’ and he showed me. I picked it up very quickly. At a ‘do’ I actually bounced them from Kate O.Mara’s chest to Honor Blackman’s and back……great rhythm! I’ve just finished a show at Trafalgar Studios (The Pocket Orchestra) and I played the spoons to Mozart. “
I have seen McCoy recently in two Pantomimes, in both playing the ‘bad guy’ which he seems to thoroughly enjoy: Aladdin with Brit Ekland, with whom he “got on really well”, and Dick Whittington with Bonnie Langford. Had he worked with Bonnie before?
“Yes. My first musical was Joseph Papp’s rendition of Pirates of Penzance and I married Bonnie every night and twice on Saturdays, and then she was my companion in Dr. Who.”
McCoy was the seventh Dr. Who in 1987, a role which he played for three years until the show was unexpectedly axed, but it carried on through audio versions and the fans kept it going throughout the world. Now it is back on our screens again and he thinks the new show is terrific. “They have much more money: the sets are much better and they have top-notch writers “
In this new show he will play the solicitor, back to his legal roots! – a comic role (he thinks). He has been in quite a few musicals and even had a musical play written for him which was a great success, and has also played Puck in Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Welsh National Opera.
The show opens on 1st September, beginning a forty week tour and he reeled off a list of some of the towns to be visited - “…….Plymouth, Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham, Wolverhampton, Woking - a week off to go and work in Chicago at a science fiction convention - Leeds, Edinburgh, Brighton”. The man has an amazing memory, not just for place names but also for all the shows in which he has worked, together with co-stars and directors.
He doesn’t expect to be able to get back to his Hampstead home very often during the tour, but obviously loves the area as he has lived all around it for about forty years, and enjoys walking on the Heath, although “Sometimes I like just sitting and watching other people walking – I can watch from my patio.”
At this point we were interrupted by Pearly King and Queen who wanted a photo with ‘this lovely handsome man’ and who requested my services, and once I had obliged with the photo speeches began and we were whisked away.
Sylvester, I really enjoyed talking with you and I do hope we meet again!
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