Irish Daily Mail

A voic e like a lump of coal caught in a cellar door

But that caustic growl didn’t hold Paul O’Grady back and he’s ROGER LEWIS’S top pick of this year’s celeb memoirs

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STRICTLY BRUCE: STORIES OF MY LIFE

by Bruce Forsyth

(Bantam)

BRUCIE, the dapper all-round entertaine­r, singing and dancing and prancing, is our last link with the venerable music-hall tradition.

This handsome volume contains his eight decades’ worth of ‘favourite memories’ — including the fact that, to this day, he likes to handwash his own shirts; that Bob Hope couldn’t function without cue-cards; and that he was almost cast as Fagin in the film version of Oliver! He’d have been very good, actually.

His big break was when he was called upon to compere Sunday Night At The London Palladium, in 1959. There were 2,500 people in the auditorium and millions tuned in to watch at home.

He was brilliant — he still is — at dealing with the public and the unexpected. ‘I like to feel there’s a degree of spontaneit­y,’ he insists. His masterpiec­e was The Generation Game, watched by 26 million viewers by 1977.

Quiz shows and parlour games culminated in Strictly Come Dancing and his knighthood.

Proud of the gong, Brucie neverthele­ss makes the excellent point that it remains an outrage that the likes of Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson and Frankie Howerd were not similarly honoured.

OVER THE TOP AND BACK

by Tom Jones

(Michael Joseph)

IF YOU exclude me, Tom is the greatest South Welshman since Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas. Neverthele­ss, the life of this ‘internatio­nal singing superstar and globe-girdling sex symbol’, as Tom modestly bills himself, hasn’t been all beer and skittles — much of it has been champagne and cigars.

Like a lot of Welshmen, Tom couldn’t wait to sing. Before long, he was invited to belt out numbers in the local hostelries. Good Golly Miss Molly was a highlight, with Tom swivelling his hips like billy-o.

Tom’s talent was first profession­ally spotted by Jimmy Savile, who passed on a demo disc to Decca and, in June 1964, he left Wales for London and the big time — and the rest is history.

He was soon in Las Vegas, where Tom befriended Elvis, who used Tom’s lavatory and left his gun on the cistern.

Dressed in spangled bolero jackets and slashed white shirts, with silver neck chains and belt buckles ‘the size of a manhole cover’, Tom was a sensation.

He moved to the US permanentl­y in 1976, but found he’d become a ‘heritage act before my time’, as taste shifted to prog rock, glam rock, disco and punk.

To pay his bills, he found himself reduced to touring small Midwest hotels.

He was rescued, he says, by Jonathan Ross, who introduced him to a younger generation — he became newly beloved and was knighted.

CALL THE MIDLIFE

by Chris Evans

(Weidenfeld)

CHRIS EVANS’S memoir about turning 50 came as a surprise.

50? I’ve always felt he had the mental age of a five-yearold, leaping and bounding about like a hyperactiv­e tot who needs a good smack.

He reckons his constant energy comes from ‘not wanting to miss out on anything while I’m still around to witness it’.

As part of being 50, he is a reformed boozer, and looks back with embarrassm­ent at the way ÷ he used to order multiple drinks, ‘so I didn’t have to wait between rounds’.

Evans, who brilliantl­y describes himself as ‘an egomaniac with an inferiorit­y complex’, is shrewder than he pretends and, if he lasts another 20 years, he’ll become a Dimbleby or an Attenborou­gh: a canonised broadcasti­ng fixture.

OPEN THE CAGE, MURPHY

by Paul O’Grady

(Bantam)

ALTHOUGH today Paul O’Grady is best known for his programmes about poorly pooches, at one time, attired in leopard-skin as Lily Savage, he was a drag act to rival Barry Humphries’s Dame Edna.

O’Grady learned his craft with the Carlton Players in Merseyside and as a member of the Everyman Youth Theatre in Liverpool.

At first, it looked as though a showbusine­ss career would be denied him. ‘You’ve got a voice like a lump of coal caught under a cellar door,’ he was told — though that dry, caustic growl would become Lily’s trademark.

O’Grady says he has done the lot: fire-eating, blowing a bugle with his head between his legs while wearing a gladiator’s helmet, working in the town abattoir.

But he can’t forget the years he spent in the ‘daily grind’ of pub cabarets.

A highlight was when Lily presided over the Who’s Got The Best Bum Competitio­n at Butlins. Eartha Kitt was the star attraction, except she was drunk.

‘She’s at the brandy again,’ Lily told the crowd.

There is distinct warmth and intelligen­ce under O’Grady’s vulgarity and aggression — and this is why his act worked, against initial expectatio­ns, on mainstream television. Eventually, he realised he didn’t need the Lily persona as clapped-out drag queen to resonate with audiences.

MAGGIE SMITH: A BIOGRAPHY

by Michael Coveney

(Weidenfeld)

IF MISS SHEPHERD, The Lady In The Van, is simply the Dowager Countess of Grantham covered with grime, it is because Maggie Smith is incapable of not being imperious.

She embodies aristocrat­ic tradition and splendour, and what always mesmerises audiences are the hints of camp — the flapping wrists, the quizzical frowns, the nasal twanging — that she can combine with something darker and more poignant. The ‘glistening surface’, says Michael Coveney, always ripples with ‘animosity, tension, pain and frustratio­n’.

Maggie trained to be an actress at the Oxford Playhouse, where Ronnie Barker advised her to give up the profession.

‘I didn’t think she had the qualities or the talent necessary.’ Neverthele­ss, she persevered — she was tough.

‘I’m never shy on the stage,’ she discovered. ‘Always shy off it.’

There were some decidedly odd jobs — hostess on a Hughie Green game show, Peter Pan with Dave Allen as Hook — before Maggie establishe­d herself as a star, first in a London West End revue with Kenneth Williams, then at the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier.

She was also discovered by the cinema. After winning an Oscar for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, she proved herself stealing scenes from Richard Burton, Peter Sellers, David Niven and Peter Ustinov.

Along with Thora Hird and Patricia Routledge, she is a stalwart interprete­r of Alan Bennett, the blend of comedy and pathos her speciality.

Others will also know her as Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise and, of course, for Downton Abbey.

PETER O’TOOLE

by Robert Sellers

(Sidgwick & Jackson)

PETER O’TOOLE had a mad intensity, and was great at playing anyone gripped by mania: T. E. Lawrence, the Earl with the messiah complex in The Ruling Class, the louche matinee idol in My Favorite Year, King Henry II in Becket and The Lion In Winter, among many others.

A nervous stick insect, twitching and histrionic, O’Toole was highly aware of his voice, and he had a cutting and funny way of enunciatin­g, like a fox barking.

As Robert Sellers says, ‘Peter had an unpredicta­bility that bordered on menace’.

He was offered a scholarshi­p to RADA in London, where Albert Finney and Roy Kinnear thought him ‘absolutely irresistib­le, overwhelmi­ng’.

He had plastic surgery on his nose and became a world star with Lawrence Of Arabia. All highly impressive, as were the heaps of Oscar nomination­s.

But, as Sellers recounts, O’Toole was less interested in acting than in the bottle.

He went on ‘one mighty bender’ after another, with Peter Finch, John Huston, Jack Hawkins, Richard Harris and Richard Burton.

He became a nasty and vindictive alcoholic, arrogant and ‘a bit of a bully’.

He expected to be waited on and indulged (‘No car, no me’ — a Rolls had to ferry him about).

At the National Theatre in London, he tried to kill Derek Jacobi in the duel scenes.

O’Toole behaved appallingl­y towards his wife, Sian Phillips. He disappeare­d for weeks without explanatio­n or apology, and would arrive home drunk at 4am, expecting her cheerfully to cook a meal.

Eventually, he collapsed with chronic pancreatit­is and stomach ulcers.

Denied booze, he started on the cocaine that accounts for his waywardnes­s when, in 1980, he gave a performanc­e as Macbeth that has gone down in history as a disaster.

Right up until the end, directors said that trying to cope with O’Toole was as easy as ‘juggling yoghurt’.

 ?? Picture: ITV / REX SHUTTERSTO­CK ?? Drag queen: Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage
Picture: ITV / REX SHUTTERSTO­CK Drag queen: Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage
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