Julia Llewellyn Smith
At 79, and returning to the stage to play John Betjeman, Edward Fox is charmingly unafraid to speak his mind
Edward Fox’s children – actors Freddie and Emilia – like to tease him, calling him “virtually a long-buried fossil”.“They’re perfectly right,” chortles the star of The Day of the Jackal and Edward and Mrs Simpson, who is now 79. “They both think I’m extremely stupid.”
Among the views the younger Foxes mock is their father’s desire to bring back National Service, under which he served with the Coldstream Guards.
“I mentioned it to [the former Tory shadow defence minister, and no relation] Liam Fox on a plane once and he said, 'No, no, the Army wouldn’t like it.’ But it would be a good idea.
“When we did it, it was a bore – but it taught you to pull yourself up. You entered the depot at Caterham aged just 18 and being screamed at by officers for the next 12 weeks was a bloody good thing for a young man. I didn’t know what had hit me. I look back at all that with enormous gratefulness and affection.”
Affable, diminutive and dapper in an immaculate suit and waistcoat, red tie and shiny brogues (“I look like an old snake!”), Fox is refreshingly unapologetic about his retrograde views. “My ability to be indiscreet is nonpareil and I don’t give a damn,” he chuckles, in his patrician drawl.
He recently caused some controversy when he told a gossip columnist: “Men need to play the field and spread their seed.”
His explanation for this remark tallies with his sense that the young are a wild species, hard to tame (by military discipline or otherwise). “There’s an element of truth in that,” he says. “All young people are animals that have a great deal of difficulty controlling themselves and being controlled as the years go on.”
At what point do you learn that control? “By the time you’ve upset a lot of people…” Fox has previously hinted at dalliances on the part of both himself and his wife, actress Joanna David, a partnership that has lasted 45 years.
We are speaking on the eve of Fox’s return to the stage, to play John Betjeman in a one-man show, Sand in the Sandwiches by Hugh Whitemore, which celebrates the life of the poet. It is about to start a UK tour that he hopes may end in a West End transfer.
“I hope it will help people appreciate Betjeman more. He’s an absolutely unique voice, very much of his time, a time that’s passed,” says Fox. “He spoke to me as a young man, he speaks to me even more as an old man.”
Among Betjeman’s – and his era’s – virtues are respect for “the elder generation of men, like my father, who fought in the war”.
“The older generations have some use,” he continues. “There’s not many of my lot left, they all die like flies or they become decrepit and drunk.”
Fox is also certain Betjeman would share his loathing for “bloody ridiculous” contemporary London. He and David now live mainly in Dorset, but also have a house in upmarket Little Venice.
“It’s the Russian mafia round there now – you never see anybody except a lot of bloody awful dogs that yap and Filipina women looking after them. London’s a deeply uncivilised city. I am incredibly lucky, but most people live in hellholes. It’s not an exaggeration.”
Learning the show is no small feat, not to mention performing it nightly. Fox, who has two Baftas, for his performances in A Bridge Too Far and The Go-Between, says he was inspired by John Gielgud.
“He must have been over 80 and he said: 'At my age, one should learn a big part once a year just to keep your hand in’, and he’s absolutely right.”
Fox is from a famous theatrical family: his father was an agent; his mother an actress; his elder brother Robert is a producer; and younger brother James is also an actor (Performance, The Remains of the Day), as are James’s sons Jack and Laurence.
The latter recently revealed that he’d argued with his Lewis co-star, Kevin Whateley, about his background, saying the Foxes were working class because “we aren’t rich and go to work. Kevin kept saying this was bull----”.
“Laurence isn’t working class, he’s talking out of the back of his head,” chortles Fox, to whom this is news. “Whateley is absolutely right. What’s he talking about? He’s been to Harrow and gone straight into a very successful television series, it’s absolute rubbish.
“If you went to public school, you’re certainly not working class. Whether or not that makes you more fortunate than someone who is working class is entirely another matter. Personally I would have exchanged four years of Harrow with almost anywhere. I didn’t enjoy it. But I am not working class, nor do I ever want to be.”
Edward Fox avoided acting at Harrow himself and dropped out of Rada early, but his big break was being picked, over names such as Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, to play the assassin in The Day of the Jackal, the 1973 film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel about an attempt to kill French president Charles de Gaulle.
“Afterwards, the last thing I wanted to do was move to Hollywood,” he says, looking revolted at the very idea. “But anyway I wasn’t very popular there, because the film didn’t make money in America. I sat opposite Jules Stein, founder of the MCA agency, and rather naïvely asked, 'Has it done well?’, and he said, 'Good, not smash’.”
Such a philosophy, he thinks, is the problem with most modern cinema. “If Hollywood thinks smash is the only thing that matters, you’ll never get good.” Many films, he adds, are now “excruciatingly dreadful”.
Jackal apart, Fox’s best-known screen role was as Edward VIII in the 1978 ITV hit Edward and Mrs Simpson. “I think the Royal family liked it – I sat next to the Queen Mother twice at dinner and she was charming. She didn’t really mention it much, which I took to mean she didn’t think it was too bad.”
Ageing, he says, has made him “both more foolish and more intelligent and both, curiously enough, are rather delightful”. What’s delightful about the foolish bit? “Knowing you are foolish!”
In general, Fox has a horror of “pompous” actors. “The arbiter is what the Russian actor, Stanislavski, said: 'There are actors who love the art in itself and there are actors who love themselves and the art.’ I’m sick of actors who love themselves. You’ve got to do it a bit, but the media has induced self-regard, so now it’s taken to extremes and is incredibly boring.”
Despite his fuddy stance, Fox is modern in some ways. He’s been with David since 1971, but married her only in 2004. “I never thought marriage was particularly important.” They changed their minds to placate a vicar friend who was terminally ill. “It was important to him that we married and in the end it became important to us. Marriage ceased to be a piece of paper and became something of meaning.”
The Fox family’s marital journeys have been bumpy: his father was a notorious philanderer; Emilia is divorced, with a child from another relationship; recently Laurence announced his divorce from actress Billie Piper. Fox himself had a brief marriage to actress Tracy Reed, with whom he had a daughter, and was living with Dame Eileen Atkins, 10 years his senior, when he met David.
“We’ve been through various ups and downs, but I hope my wife felt secure – she knows who I am, I hope. It’s very wonderful to have that. I’ve known many theatre marriages which are wonderfully good – Sybil Thorndike was a classic example with [her husband, actor] Lewis Casson. I was in a play with her and said, 'You’ve been married a long time’ and she said, 'We’ve had the roof off many times’.”
He roars with laughter. “If you haven’t had the roof off then you’re from some other planet. You’ve got to have the roof off. The question is, what do you do when you’re trying to mend the slates? You have to come to terms. Liking somebody is a very big feature in life.”
And Fox, after all, is likeability incarnate.
Sand in the Sandwiches opens at the Oxford Playhouse on October 25 then tours. Details: sandinthesandwiches.com