"If I'd had more courage, my life would have been totally different"

Andrew Duncan, RadioTimes, 7-13 May 1994

A late-flowering star, Nigel Hawthorne has built his career despite past parental disapproval - all good experience for his latest role as John Betjeman

The repressed English romantic gentleman of late middle age - ah, what fantasies are spun about such fellows. And here is one of our greatest, late-flowering actors, a bachelor with an interesting past, weaving an elegiac, musical romp through an exquisite country house in the company of sturdily sexy boys and girls to illustrate the finer voyeuristic (and socially obserbant) points of the late John Betjeman's poems.

For Nigel Hawthorne, who devised the BBC2 programme Late Flowering Lust, it is a labour of love and some identification. "I never met Betjeman, but we had similarities as young men - like him, I was a lonely boy, self-concious. I thought the world was against me and I wouldn't be successful. My father was disappointed in me."

He is sitting, unobtrusively merging into the background, as only great actors can, in the conservatory of his 16th century farmhouse near Baldock, off the A1(M) in Hertfordshire, a rural idyll where he has lived for 11 years, now 250 yeards from the threat of a motorway service station he has spent thousands opposing.

He is shy, laconic, amused by the vicissitudes of a professions which, after many wilderness years ("Back to Bromley, Mr Hawthorne," he was told, sneeringly, after yet another unsuccessful audition) has desposited him at 65 on its peak. He insists, although it would be presumptuous to believe he is genuine, "I don't want the big time, to crack it on Broadway or in Hollywood. I just want to do good work, which is fairly boring of me."

Late Flowering Lust was planned originally for the stage, but works better on tv, he believes, because he can read the poems in a passionate way, yet play the main character, "Cousin John" ("an amalgam of Betjeman, myself and my father"), as a harmless voyeur. "Betjeman was a lonely, delicate boy bullied at school because he wasn't interested in games, who matured later in life. A lot of his poems are to do with failure, ogling and worshipping athletic girls from behind bushes because he didn't think he'd get to first base. He realised he wasn't sexy or dynamic and saw himself as a pear-shaped teddy bear.

"I didn't lust in the same way. I assumed I wouldn't be a success anyway - I'm the worst person in the world for imagining the most catastrophic disaster and always assume I'm going to be hopeless and awful - so I just sat there. Betjeman was more adventurous than I."

One poignant, and perhaps decisive similarity, is that their fathers were both strong men who wanted their sons to emulate them - Betjeman's as a cabinet-maker, Hawthorne's as a doctor. "They felt we didn't conform to what normal boys do. Neither of us got under cars to mend them. His father was appalled when he said he wanted to be a poet - in the same way Dad was angry about my acting - he never went to the theatre except under protest. They were "cissy-ish" professions. I was a well mannered child, but I had a need to rebel. Besides, it would have been disastrous if I'd been a doctor, both for me and the patients. I fainted at the sight of blood."

Hawthorne's family emigrated to South Africa from Coventry in 1932 and his father's brooding presence is palpable even today. He was a rude, autocratic freemason, married to a woman 20 years younger. "He always seemed more like my grandfather, and was a Victorian man in every sense. We weren't allowed to speak until spoken to, and were very much kept in our place. He always wore a Panama hat, black jacket, striped trousers, stiff collar and black tie in memory of his mother who died just after he married. The only variation was when he played bowls in a bright blazer and white trousers, but always black socks and shoes, which seemed odd to me.

"I thought I was similar to my mother, but my older sister says I'm like him, which is a shock. He was very stubborn - and I suppose I am. Although I was at odds with him, I adored him and observed carefully. A lot of things I do are much influenced by what I remember of him."

Home, near the beach at Cape Town in postwar South Africa, with all its simplicities, was a world away from his theatrical ambition. His first job was as a caricaturist for the Johannesburg Star. "My father had all these old copies of Punch - even today I can name every artist of the 20s. I used to cover my books at school with exaggerated likenesses of the teachers, which didn't go down very well. I stopped drawing professionally when I discovered I upset people.

"I've no idea why I wanted to act, except it was a chance not to be me. I thought it would be a relief to hide behind strange characters. Some people act to parade their vanities and others to hide from themselves - that was me. I was a nothing as a young man. Although I had a quirkish instinct for making people laugh, I'm not extrovert enough to be a natural comedian. I used to observe, which meant I could stand right outside life and not exist. In a roomful of people I'd be too shy to reply if someone spoke to me. It wasn't until I was middle-aged I realised that to be good at this job you have to open yourself up and let the audience see what you are.

"If I'd had more courage, my life would have been totally different. I was a slow developer (he didn't drive a car until he was in his 50s), not sure who I was. I thought of marrying and it might easily have happened, but it didn't. I'm very fond of children and it would have been wonderful to see one of mine growing up, but I don't have recriminations or resentment. Occasionally I wish things had been other than they were - like with my father, but we didn't get on all that badly. I'm a total romantic and great believer in family life. That said, I usually run a mile when I go anywhere near mine."

Despite parental disapproval, he worked in rep in South Africa for £3 a week, saving up the fare for London, where he arrived in 1951 with £12 and a burning ambition, extinguished by lack of success. He went home, defeated, six years later, but returned to England in 1960 and struggled until 1973 when he was offered the title role in The Philanthropist. Proudly, he paid for his by then, widowed mother to visit London and made her walk back and forth outside the theatre. "Do you notice anything?" he beseeched to her incomprehension, until he finally explained "It's your son's name up there." "Oh, I see," she said. He adds now, "I'm only sad my father never lived to see me being successful."

Success didn't really happen until he became the oleaginous Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister. "It was difficult - acting always is - because he was so unlike me. But I was able to find a rage verging on panic that was quite near my personality. I'm quite emotional and get angry about injustice and the way we're carving up the country with seemingly unnecessary roads It's totally mad."

He could have had an enjoyable and lucrative semi retirement playing civil servants, but that would have been too easy. "I chose to vary the diet, but it's difficult to find good work. We've all made mistakes, thinking something is good, and then it starts to change. You remain loyal even though the last thing you want on God's earth is to appear in that particular play every night; you'd much rather go home and forget the whole ghastly episode, but you smile, bite the bullet and hope you get away with it again. Deep breaths and on to the next one."

He returned to the stage in the 80s, notably with Tom Stoppard's l988 Hapgood - "Very cerebral, but I wasn't happy. I like Tom enormously and was trying to better myself by being associated with a writer; that gives us actors kudos" - followed by Shadowlands (for which he won a Tony Award on Broadway).

"It was very personal for me - this crumpled academic who had an explosion of love in late middle age. I don't resent [Sir Anthony] Hopkins doing the film, because he was the man for the job, had an Oscar and was able to attract money. I haven't seen it yet - can't bear the popcorn brigade."

He has just finished more than two years in the West End and on tour with Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III - "I often thought I should retire instead of galloping around, but if you've got the energy, you might as well use it" - and hopes to start filming it in July. "I thought they might give the part to Hopkins as well, but it looks as if that's going my way."

He wanted the part so much he took perhaps eccentric steps to ensure it, playing the villain in Sylvester Stallone's Demolition Man. "It seemed that association with a blockbuster might be a good introduction to the big time. I'm not sure it was. The Hollywood scene doesn't suit me. The people were not particularly friendly - Stallone is amicable but self centred - and the atmosphere was very tense because so much money was at stake. I can't bear to see myself in it. Perhaps if I had a private cinema I might get a video and play it secretly."

It is clear he dislikes "celebrity". "There are more important things than self-promotion. I enjoy success and it's nice that people know my name, but it doesn't mean I can state my own terms. I worked so hard for so many years that I was just happy to be accepted."

He wrote two short plays in the 70s, which had lunchtime performances, and started a novel ("My nature is to change horses in mid-stream"), but has now given up literary ambitions.

"I enjoy writing, but I'm no good at it. It's best just to do my own job, switch off, come back to a home I love, and stay out of trouble. It's lovely to be able to cut oneself off. But I'm not a recluse. Nor am I a 'luvvie'."