(Photo: Patrick McMullan)

The Broadway legend, opening in Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit, her eleventh show, spoke to Katie Charles about her
London childhood, including nude models and Greek tunics.


Your mother was an actress and your father a politician. How did you
end up in one field and not the other?
Culturally, I was split. I
remember being taken to the theater to see my mother as a young child. It
bothered me terribly. I didn’t like her being put down—of gentlemen shouting at
her. I had to be taken screaming out of the theater. I didn’t understand that it
was make-believe. I soon got over that. My mother had an eclectic group of
friends—artists, writers, poets—and one of them would draw friends of hers,
nude, in our living room. Which was interesting because my mother came from a
rigidly Victorian family. One model, Molly Wilson, who had wonderful
Titian-red hair, would tastefully drape fabric between her legs.


And politics?
My grandfather was George Lansbury, the leader of the
Labour Party, and a great pacifist. While I was growing up, my father wrote a
book about him, and some fellows from Scotland Yard came to the front door.
Apparently my father had revealed some state secret that had to do with the
Russian crown jewels. We all thought Daddy was going to jail. It was like a Noël
Coward comedy.


Given that you’re playing a medium in Blithe Spirit, did you
have any exposure to magic or séances as a child?
My mother was
terribly upset by the death of her father when I was 5. She reacted badly to the
whole thing—she tried to reach him through séances. Talk to me about
spiritualism, and I tend to go ugh! I know how people get sucked
in.


Do you remember the first film you ever saw?
King Kong, in the little town
of Mill Hill where I lived. I was dazzled.


Was there a genre you were particularly into as a child?
Oh, yes! Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers. And I was mad about Errol Flynn. I wasn’t really interested
in actresses. But strong women I always found interesting—Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. And
I saw quite a lot of British movies: Celia Johnson and that wonderful Noël
Coward movie Brief
Encounter.


Was that your first exposure to Coward?
I knew his voice
on the radio and on records as a child—he was part of the fabric of British
life.


Were you much of a reader growing up?
I certainly was.
Nancy Drew, girl detective—I read
them voraciously. And those took me into Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery.
Did you read her autobiography? Fascinating! I’ll never forget she wrote that
when she was young, she’d drink a pint of cream every morning. A pint! Of
cream!


When did you start singing?
I sang around the house like
a blooming lark. I had a very high voice—I could have been coloratura. I just
opened my mouth and sang, and that’s the way I’ve always performed. A song has
to be incorporated into a character. It would be much too simple to stand up and
sing. And I took some lessons from a woman down in the Village—where I lived in
the early days—learning to project, which we don’t need to do anymore in the
theater, unfortunately. Actually, I think we’re going to work without
microphones in Blithe Spirit. At least I hope so.


What kind of songs were you singing?
There was a famous
musical lady, Gracie Fields. If
you Google her, she has an enormous following. She was the working girl’s
heroine. She sang a song called “Sally”—we all used to scream around
the house, my girlfriends and I, “Sally, Sally, / Pride of our alley / You’re
more than the whole world to me.”


I just learned that you were in an Elvis movie! Did you pick up any
musical tips from him?
Not really. He was a very nice guy then—he
always was a terrific guy.


You were also trained as a dancer.
Slightly. When I was
about 6, my mother would take my sister and me to a thing called the League of Health and Beauty. You’d
gather in Regent’s Park and do movement and Greek dancing. We wore little
tunics. We would walk around with this kind of doughnut on our heads to improve
our posture. You know, it was actually useful for Blithe Spirit—I was
able to implement some of the movements with things I remember from that
class.