condition, because he said, ‘Your trouble is you’re pregnant.’ I was already playing Mother Rabbit as very pregnant with lots of children, and now I really was.
Michael and I both thought the baby was going to be a boy, and decided on the name Finn. On 24 September 1972 I gave birth to a girl, and we called her Finty. She was actually christened Tara Cressida Frances, but has always been known as Finty to us and everyone else. We didn’t think for a moment that she would be an actress. She wanted to be an acrobatic nurse, and I encouraged her, she would swing down the ward and take your temperature hanging upside down.
I wanted to give up working, to see that she was safely in the nest, but Michael said, ‘Please don’t.’ So I tried to arrange it that in the beginning I was with her during the day, and going to the theatre in the evening when she was in bed. Then when she went to school later on I could do things like television during the day, to be with her in the evenings. To a large extent that was how it worked out. But I did do the BBC film of John Osborne’s Luther not long after she was born, and I laughed the whole way through it, as all my nerve ends had gone to pieces after the birth.
My return to the stage was far from auspicious, and Michael and I only did it really because it was in York, at the Theatre Royal. The director, Richard Digby Day, had tried before to get us to go there, but the play he chose was Content to Whisper , adapted by Alan Melville from a French stage adaptation of a novel, La Lumière Noire . It has to be the most terrible play known to man, and very soon Richard knew it too. Sydney Tafler was the worst laugher with whom I have ever shared a stage. Sometimes it was so dreadful he just could not get the words out.
The only good thing about that return to York was being with Mummy and the rest of the family. She and Michael’s parents hit it off immediately, and the three of them used to come and stay with us at Christmas and Easter. One night Michael said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all just live together?’ That was absolutely my idea of heaven, it is like a proper Quaker community, certainly for bringing up a child, but also the whole idea of looking after your parents. What appals me more than anything else in this country is just sending them off somewhere, where they sit like zombies in a room and they are just there to die. That is not to demean what the staff do in those homes, but I don’t think it is healthy for the inmates.
We eventually found a converted stable block with eleven rooms just outside Stratford at Charlecote. Mummy moved in at the beginning of 1974, and Michael’s parents, Len and Elizabeth, a little later. Finty remembers it so well, being brought up with her grandparents. It was not a very pretty building at all, it had been converted from some old stables into a modern L-shaped house with stone steps up to the front door, and it could actually have been converted very beautifully. It had three double bedrooms, all with their own bathrooms, a couple of little rooms, one of which was a study, a big drawing room and a kitchen. So everyone had their own room, but there didn’t seem any point to me in getting a place where we could all live in separate rooms. Of course that sometimes created quite a lot of tension. I wouldn’t say for a second that it was always easy, I was in tears quite often, but the good times far outweighed the bad, and I don’t regret a day of it.
When we were playing at the Aldwych and staying at Hampstead, we would drive up to Stratford every Saturday night after the performance; no M40 then, so it was quite a long drive. I would cook the Sunday lunch for all of us. We had to buy a toaster every year we were there, which was twelve years. I never knew how they used to break them, but we bought a new one every Easter.
It was the year after that before Michael and I rejoined the RSC, and moved back to
Michael and I both thought the baby was going to be a boy, and decided on the name Finn. On 24 September 1972 I gave birth to a girl, and we called her Finty. She was actually christened Tara Cressida Frances, but has always been known as Finty to us and everyone else. We didn’t think for a moment that she would be an actress. She wanted to be an acrobatic nurse, and I encouraged her, she would swing down the ward and take your temperature hanging upside down.
I wanted to give up working, to see that she was safely in the nest, but Michael said, ‘Please don’t.’ So I tried to arrange it that in the beginning I was with her during the day, and going to the theatre in the evening when she was in bed. Then when she went to school later on I could do things like television during the day, to be with her in the evenings. To a large extent that was how it worked out. But I did do the BBC film of John Osborne’s Luther not long after she was born, and I laughed the whole way through it, as all my nerve ends had gone to pieces after the birth.
My return to the stage was far from auspicious, and Michael and I only did it really because it was in York, at the Theatre Royal. The director, Richard Digby Day, had tried before to get us to go there, but the play he chose was Content to Whisper , adapted by Alan Melville from a French stage adaptation of a novel, La Lumière Noire . It has to be the most terrible play known to man, and very soon Richard knew it too. Sydney Tafler was the worst laugher with whom I have ever shared a stage. Sometimes it was so dreadful he just could not get the words out.
The only good thing about that return to York was being with Mummy and the rest of the family. She and Michael’s parents hit it off immediately, and the three of them used to come and stay with us at Christmas and Easter. One night Michael said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all just live together?’ That was absolutely my idea of heaven, it is like a proper Quaker community, certainly for bringing up a child, but also the whole idea of looking after your parents. What appals me more than anything else in this country is just sending them off somewhere, where they sit like zombies in a room and they are just there to die. That is not to demean what the staff do in those homes, but I don’t think it is healthy for the inmates.
We eventually found a converted stable block with eleven rooms just outside Stratford at Charlecote. Mummy moved in at the beginning of 1974, and Michael’s parents, Len and Elizabeth, a little later. Finty remembers it so well, being brought up with her grandparents. It was not a very pretty building at all, it had been converted from some old stables into a modern L-shaped house with stone steps up to the front door, and it could actually have been converted very beautifully. It had three double bedrooms, all with their own bathrooms, a couple of little rooms, one of which was a study, a big drawing room and a kitchen. So everyone had their own room, but there didn’t seem any point to me in getting a place where we could all live in separate rooms. Of course that sometimes created quite a lot of tension. I wouldn’t say for a second that it was always easy, I was in tears quite often, but the good times far outweighed the bad, and I don’t regret a day of it.
When we were playing at the Aldwych and staying at Hampstead, we would drive up to Stratford every Saturday night after the performance; no M40 then, so it was quite a long drive. I would cook the Sunday lunch for all of us. We had to buy a toaster every year we were there, which was twelve years. I never knew how they used to break them, but we bought a new one every Easter.
It was the year after that before Michael and I rejoined the RSC, and moved back to
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