Radio Times – Jan 20th 2001

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“I loathed Thatcher. She was the opposite of everything I believed”

Andrew Duncan meets Sylvia Syms
From her sterling role in Ice Cold in Alex to her lifelike portrayals of Mrs Thatcher, she has become one of our most revered actresses. And, like her character in At Home with the Braithwaites, she doesn’t mince her words – particularly when she talks about her turbulent private life

Like many an apparently intimidating person, she disguises insecurity shyness under brusque exterior. A formidable grande dame, spurned in mid-life by her husband of 33 years she clatters from one subject to another often leaving sentences unfinished. “I don’t usually invite journalists into my house. I get bored with publicity. I was on Punch and Judy [I assume she means Richard and Judy on ITV’s This Morning] and it’s all the same,” she explains, as we settle into the cosy, memento-packed front room of her terraced house in Fulham, west London – “The smallest I’ve owned, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. It’s worth a lot of money – next door went for £700,000 recently and it’s in a terrible state.”

She is dressed in a blue ensemble with a long lengths of fake pearls she hurls over her generous embonpoint and she laughs and swears. “Please don’t mention the bad language,” she beseeches. I make no promises, and an actress with a career spanning more than 44 years from Ice Cold in Alex to a nurse in Peak Practice doesn’t need them. When she relaxes she is raucous, wry and humorous.

The previous morning she met the The Queen at a Rada event. “I saw all these famous people, including Richard Attenborough, the most wonderful person in the world, to whom, as you know if you read newspapers, I’ve been bigamously married for years. They’re always confusing Sheila Sim and me. I was congratulated when he was knighted and after he became a ‘Lord’ the Observer wrote his profile, explaining I was campaigning for the Labour Party in Darlington while on tour. I have this assertive act, but I thought, ‘I’ve only done one thing at the National, never won an Olivier, and these grand people won’t know me.’ I never felt I was with the ‘in’ crowd because I always try to lead two lives, being an actress and a wife. I only discovered a little while ago that quite a lot of people are fond of me.”

She lives alone.”You have to be celibate as an older woman, otherwise it’s tricky. I must be careful what I say. I made a flippant remark when asked if I’d marry again – ‘Most of my friends are gay’ – So they wrote, ‘She finds solace among gay men.’ Well, I may, but we don’t have sexual relations,” she guffaws. “What can you do? I joked to a journalist that I’ve still got great tits – I thought she was a jolly young woman, even though she asked stupid questions and worked for the Daily Mail – but she took it seriously. Anyway, at 66, I’ve discovered what an older man wants of an older woman, besides possibly a casual ‘sexual experience’ [her exact word is unpublishable], is a housekeeper. If they pick younger ones, they want a nurse, as you must have seen in Hollywood. It’s rare to remain friends with heterosexual man. They won’t accept friendship unless they’re screwing you.”

Tut tut, I demure. We are in the age of new men. “There aren’t many. David Beckham is one. You realise why a girl like what’s her name – Posh? – went for him. She’s shrewd, and understands the media, like Liz Hurley, although if Liz has any brains – and who am I to give advice? – she should stick to producing. Acting won’t get her anywhere except playing the same parts. I admire Joan Collins, although I haven’t seen her since she was married to Tony [Newley] and we were both pregnant. She’s not the greatest actress in the world and I don’t find her voice attractive, but she has a sparkle in her eyes that says, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ She has tremendous talent and the most beautiful body. She still diets, unlike some of us.” Collins even wrote a novel, I recall. “That’s crap probably.”

She was a classic beauty of the fifties. “This sounds naive but I didn’t realise how lovely I was. I had nice skin but big hips. I hated seeing girls have to flirt with older men to get anywhere. Some handled it superbly and I can’t tell you how much I admired them. I won’t mention names – that would be crass. I used my husband, poor devil, as a barrier.”

“I love my kids desperately…I decided not to go to Hollywood and took jobs for money because I had school fees to pay”

She resisted even the demure glamour pictures of those days. “I have boxes of photographs in the attic, but I refused to do pin-ups. They put you in another category and you weren’t a serious actress. The only time I showed my legs was in Expresso Bongo, although I was nude in a couple of films – The Desperados, a really crappy western where I was seen coming naked out of a pool, and I stripped off my top in The Tamarind Seed. I didn’t terribly care about that. It was a bit of a fight to resist.”

Childhood traumas, she believes, inspired her desire to become an actress. Born in Eltham, Kent, she was evacuated from her parents, Ted, a civil servant in the ministry of agriculture, and mother Daisy, when she was four. “My sister was 12, my brother 14, so they at least understood what was happening. But I was put on a train, with a label, a gas mask and small bag, and sent to a strange place. I had terrible nightmares and swore to myself I’d dream no more. Many years later I went to a hypnotherapist and – there’s a recording – a child’s voice, only it was me, cries out, ‘I want my mum. I want my mum.’ It was so loud it woke me up.”

Daisy committed suicide when Sylvia was 12, after suffering a brain tumour. “It was a tricky atmosphere at home. I didn’t have a day’s happiness, I can tell you. I hated my life and I’ve suffered from depression since I was young. I felt strongly the loss of my mother. I had no time to be a child, or have someone to run home to. My father and I didn’t get on and I didn’t like him, although I owe him a lot for his interest in music, art and film. I went to a Catholic boarding school, but only stayed a couple of years. It was strange to be sent there by a father who preached left-wing politics, and ‘Up Stalin’, but it was cheap.”

Ted eventually remarried. “Auntie Dorothy – I was never asked to call her ‘Mother’ – did her best. She took this extraordinary family and understood things about me which others didn’t. I had a near-breakdown at 16. You didn’t talk in those days. She sent me to a place in Devon – probably the earliest psychotherapy centre – and it changed my life. It was no longer a sin to talk about my mother dying, how I hated some people, was jealous of my sister – who is the person I love most in the world next my children – I thought everyone loved her and I’d never been popular.”

After returning from Devon, she determined to apply to Rada.”No one in our family acted, and at school, they urged me to be a hairdresser. But a woman at the centre told me I had a massive storage centre in my head and could learn to use my experiences – love, death, passion, jealousy, sibling rivalry – in a creative way.”

The year before her “breakdown”, she’d met Alan Edney, a buyer for Harrods, on a blind date (“my first boyfriend”) and they married in 1956. Apparently unable to have children, they adopted a son, Ben, in 1961, and the following year, she gave birth to a daughter, Beatrice, who is also an actress. She put a burgeoning career on hold to look after the children. “Alan was a terrific guy in many ways, brilliant academically, but never achieved his potential. At first I resented him because of it, but it’s pointless blaming others. I made my career what it is, and can’t moan. I decided not to go to Hollywood and took jobs for money because I had school fees to pay. I signed disgraceful contracts because I was a thicko who understood nothing about business.”

In 1960 she made The World of Suzie Wong with William Holden, after which producer Ray Stark tried to lure her to America. “He came to supper and said, ‘You’ll have to get rid of the husband.’ I thought, ‘Ooooer, sorry.’ It was a shocking thing to say. I don’t know why my generation had this phobia about being best at everything. I’m a marvellous cook, and I clean, dust, and garden. I made four films in a year, worked like an idiot, and when I was in my forties, we had a big house in Cobham, and two teenage children. I was utterly worn out and so physically ill I had a lot of surgery. I think we probably wanted to keep our men sweet because we were embarrassed at earning more than them. I was.”

Maybe he was inhibited by that, too. “That’s possible, but people must get on with it. It’s like being married to an alcoholic I learnt that after my son Ben went on benders. An unbelievably dear friend, Jean Crowther [the late Leslie Crowther’s wife], advised ‘Al-Anon’ [for families and friends of alcoholics]. I went to meetings and learned Ben’s an adult and I make the parameters, so I said, ‘I don’t care if you sleep in the gutter, but you’re not coming into my house drunk.’ It was terrible, but made a difference. He’s now fine, working in Australia as a delivery boy and squash coach. I mean a lot in his life because he’s adopted and has no other family. He loves his dad but I’m the one steady force in his life. I love my kids desperately but try to mind my own business. I have no grandchildren. I borrow other people’s.”

“I never felt I was with the ‘in’ crowd because I tried to lead two lives”

She and Alan divorced in 1989 when she discovered he had a two-year-old daughter with another woman. “I could have killed him at one time, but now I wouldn’t hurt him. Bitterness is destructive. You grow up. He was a good father and although I haven’t seen him since he walked out of this house, and don’t want to, we talk civilly on the phone. There’s not much doubt I’d have killed myself if I’d stayed married. He’s one of the few people in the world who could make me cry and depress me utterly. There’s only one thing I’m bitter about – if Alan reads this, he’ll laugh – and that’s when I cooked a light supper, he’d

say “if this is the best you can do, I’ll eat out.’ He may not have put money on the table for the gas bill, but the obsession with stuffing his face was extraordinary. I’ll never marry again. I couldn’t bear having a man ask where his socks are, or what’s for lunch. But I wouldn’t mind visiting rights.”

Although self-deprecating about her career, she has made some forceful films, and accepted the part – which few other actresses would in 1961 – as the compassionate wife to Dirk Bogarde struggling with homosexuality in Victim. “That was years before Philadelphia and had a certain effect. I’m still asked if you can be married to a homosexual and not suspect, and I say you have to realise that until the Pill, respectable young women didn’t sleep with a man before marriage so they had no standards. If you hadn’t been made love to by a lot of men, you wouldn’t know if he was any good or not. There’s no question you can love someone very much and find them no good in bed. I adored Alan, but he wasn’t a good lover. Tough on him.”

She also portrayed Margaret Thatcher so realistically on two occasions – BBC2’s Half the Picture, a dramatisation of the Scott enquiry, and ITV’s Thatcher – The Final Days – that the lothario Alan Clark told her they had the same sex appeal. “It’s the eyes. We both have very blue ones. I loathed that woman. She was the opposite of everything I believe, but I tried to get into her personality. Okay, she went power-mad, But she was brought down by suited bastards and didn’t debase herself by pleading with them.”

These days she particularly enjoys touring the country with either Jenny Agutter or Jenny Seagrove in revues she has devised. “I play so many different characters – even poncing around as a disgusting teenager – but we always wear long evening dresses and the guitarist is in a dinner jacket.” She also does a lot of public speaking.”I don’t like mixed dinners and I won’t touch all-male ones. They only want blue stuff.”

As for her part as Marion Riley in At Home with the Braithwaite’s, she enjoys it hugely, “but I don’t know if its any good. Money for old rope, though, and I’ve earned enough for a holiday. I’m noted for being strong minded, but I’m not. I’m frightened.” Of what? “Of not being good enough,” she says, sadly, then she brightens, looks years younger.”Maybe the BBC can give me a job. Duchesses speciality,” she cackles, and goes off to make more tea.