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When I started to write the first book about the story of my life, which took me up to the age of eighteen, it was with motives which were, I suppose, rather muddled. One, certainly, was to try to discover whether or not I had any ability for writing as such, another was to occupy myself when the weather was too bad for me to work my few acres, and somewhere, buried in the midst of it, was the idea that I might be able to say something about the whole process of becoming an actor-the kind of natural instincts given one and the manner in which they were gradually developed both by myself and by the people I met along the way, so that they were ultimately fused by experience into something usable in a profession which I desperately wanted to follow. I imagined that what I had to say about myself might offer some clues to a new generation of would-be actors and actresses, or even to parents, who so often oppose the longing to enter a profession which is insecure, and by some people still denigrated.

One of the things which I have learned is that for a good ninety per cent of the people who want to become actors it is a mistake, and leads to poverty and unhappiness. For the other ten per cent it can be, as it has been in my case, in varying degrees, rewarding and enriching, and because I have had quite a few letters from young people as a result of the first book asking me how one docs it, I have been encouraged to write most of the rest of what is inevitably something of an ego trip. Well, ego, for better or for worse, is very much involved in this business of being an actor, because we are creatures who are obliged to use our own beings as our instrument, and we tend to have to keep reassuring ourselves-and looking for reassurance – as to how good that instrument is. It tends to make us very boring as people unless we are on constant guard against a total self-preoccupation. And it has the more dangerous hazard of cutting us off from what I think to be the mainspring of all good acting, which is the minute observation of one’s fellow creatures, who are really the fuel which feeds our attempts to create a living character.

So this book, the continuation of my ego trip, is also an endeavour to portray just a few of the people who have helped…