As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi

‘We’d love to have you, but you have to sit an entrance examination to confirm we have made the right decision.’ My other interview was at St John’s with Harry Hinsley, the Master of the College.

      The Master was in appearance a rather grey man, very calm, friendly, very controlled like a schoolmaster, and quite retiring.

      It was Saturday, the day of the Oxford–Cambridge boat race, and during the interview the Master said, ‘Do you mind if we break for a moment and listen to the boat race?’

      ‘No, that’s fine,’ I said, so we duly listened to the boat race. I was nonplussed by this unexpected turn of events. The race began and Harry grew more and more agitated and excited, while I had more or less switched off with all the prepared interview topics clanging around in my head.

      ‘We’ve won!’ the Master finally exclaimed. He was in such an excellent mood that he spun round and said, ‘You’re in!’

      ‘But don’t I have to take an exam?’ I stammered.

      ‘No, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s celebrate!’ and proceeded to open a bottle of champagne.

      It was almost certainly the case that, more than anything else, it was my newly acquired reputation as an actor that got me into Cambridge. The Master – whom I was later to call Harry (as he became a good friend) – clearly knew all about my recent success in the Edinburgh Festival Hamlet. It would not be unfair to say that as a result I arrived at Cambridge already with a certain seal of approval.

      I didn’t even have to do an interview or an audition, for as Alan Bennett has written, ‘Being interviewed for Cambridge was like being auditioned.’ Without the ‘like’, this actually is what my good friend Ian McKellen did a year later when he applied to St Catherine’s. Asked by the tutor Tom Henn for a speech from Henry V, which he had just played at school, he stood on a table and recited the whole of ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’ They gave him a college exhibition.

      So now I could combine my love of school and schooling with my desire to act and become an actor. However, I must add at this point that it was also my good fortune to have been blessed with a near photographic memory, which was to be invaluable not only throughout my acting career, for obvious reasons, but during my time at Cambridge, when academic studies played second fiddle to acting and I was forced to rely on last-minute ‘instant revision’.

      Also I had three years of paid irresponsibility ahead of me, which I was quite looking forward to. My state scholarship gave me over £100 per term, an enormous sum in my eyes. What was now coming out in me, in a more defined and understandable way – although who could ever know what was going to happen in the future? – was that I had only ever dipped my toe into life. Protected as I was, the golden boy, and now with the added protection of a scholarship, I never jumped in and wallowed. And yet when I acted, already I could feel the texture and depth to what I was doing and could dive deep down. But into real life I only ventured up to my ankles.

      This is how my callow, early reasoning went: ‘I can cope with the unreality of the world of the imagination because it was laid out for me what was going to happen, and what I had to do.’ This was probably one of the reasons, later as a professional actor, I have never been much good at improvising – improvising is nearer to the real world when the unexpected happens, and I am not totally relaxed with that. It seems that I have always relegated my responsibilities to someone else in the real world.

      Whenever I did try to improvise later I set out to try to make people laugh – the get-out, an easy way. Many actors do this: you can kid yourself you are doing it properly when you are not. A fun sketch I played later on the American TV comedy show Frasier, when the old ham actor, Jackson Hedley, is making his comeback, provides a good instance of this, with the audience’s ‘smiling faces frozen into a rictus of revenge’ (by now hamming was so second nature that when the episode came out I won an Emmy for it!).

      But up to that point in my life, Hamlet and the twenty other roles I played at school were the be-all and end-all of my experience: ‘The readiness is all.’ I was completely unattached and did my best, as Hamlet did, to avoid being asked to cope.

      I needed a director, as Hamlet found one in the ghost of his father. I needed a life director. I needed, too, an ensemble, a company, because I had always been a part of a wider family – the Jacobis of Leytonstone: Mum, Dad, the aunts and uncles, my cousins and grandparents. I would have to watch out.

      What would happen when I was plunged into the real world?

       AGE III

       SIGHING LIKE FURNACE

       15

       FIRST TERM, FIRST LOVE

      This was the hallowed St John’s College, third on the left down King’s Parade after King’s, Clare’s and Trinity, with its beautiful St John’s Chapel, built by Margaret Beaufort, the founder, daughter of John of Gaunt, its famous choir, its Bridge of Sighs seen from the River Cam on a punt.

      On arrival I felt just like a schoolboy. My parents dropped me off at my digs: in spite of my scholarship, the college had no room for me in my first year. We all cried – it was like being left on the moon. I was 54 miles from home, and to me that was a distance near to infinity. I was an only child from local Leytonstone schools where I had hardly walked more than 200 yards from home to my form room, where I had sprinted to classes with my mates, where we’d race each other along the road to the silver 1930s nude sculpture of a lady which stood in a window in a house nearby to see who could reach the naked lady’s bum first. The winner had the day at his feet.