Bill Nighy looks as if he has lived a couple of lifetimes. His tall, angular frame is hunched, and his eyes carry a seen-it-all, done-it-all expression. His handshake is odd, with a couple of fingers permanently bent because of a genetic disease. “I don’t belong to a secret society,” he says, dryly. He admits to being a little worn because he spent much of his life drinking for England. “I got help,” he explains. But Nighy, at 53, with his unfashionable name and slow crawl of a career, has mellowed like a vintage wine. There is no better time than this to open it and enjoy its contents.
If more evidence were needed, then it overflows in abundance in the forthcoming film Love Actually. Richard Curtis, who directs for the first time, after his screen- writing success with Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary, went for overkill on the big names. He included Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Rowan Atkinson, Martine McCutcheon and Keira Knightley, plus Americans Billy Bob Thornton and Laura Linney. They all have their separate stories, ranging from the unlikely casting of Grant as a bachelor British prime minister who falls in love with tea lady McCutcheon, to a welcome comic turn by Kris Marshall, from the successful television series My Family, as a hapless nerd who is convinced American girls will fall at his feet if he can just get himself over there.
But it is Nighy who uncorks his considerable talent to steal the film from this ensemble cast. He plays a washed-up rock star, Billy Mack, who is conjuring a Christmas hit, with the support of his long-suffering and hard-up manager, Joe (Gregor Fisher). “Wouldn’t it be great,” he asks on Radio Watford, “if No1 this Christmas wasn’t some smug teenager, but an old heroin addict like me, searching for a comeback at any price?” Nighy has reached an age where comebacks are possible, except that he has had nothing to come back from. He is like a freshly minted star whose best years are ahead of him. His career snakes back to the early 1970s, but projects for which he has become famous flicker like beacons rather than burn with a constant flame. They include his serial adulterer in television’s The Men’s Room (1991), his rocker Ray Simms for the film Still Crazy (1998), and his star turn as the newspaper editor Cameron Foster in the BBC series State of Play. Even though the pace has increased of late, with appearances in the classy film I Capture the Castle and the horror film Underworld, this rather languid figure won’t stop the traffic.
For theatre folk, though, he has always belonged in the big time. He kick-started in a succession of plays in the 1980s at the National, and his credits read like a who’s who of top directors. They include Mean Tears (Peter Gill), Arcadia (Trevor Nunn), the revival of Skylight (Richard Eyre), Blue/Orange (Roger Michell) and A Kind of Alaska (Karel Reisz), staged at the Donmar. “Good theatre percolates through, and the effects on a career are rather slow,” he observes.
We first met in 1989 in Budapest, on the film set of Phantom of the Opera, where he was already one of the most senior and established actors, playing Barton. An admiring visitor to the set was the unknown Brad Pitt, then the fiancé of one of the actresses, Jill Schoelen. Compared with people like Pitt, Nighy’s career has trickled along with the pace of treacle poured on grass. But he did himself few favours in those days.
“I used to drink a great deal, to an unhealthy degree,” he reflects. “That could be described as the central fact of my life. Had I continued to drink and to take drugs to help me drink, I do not think we would be having this conversation at all. I am not being melodramatic. But I stopped on May 17, 1992, and have not touched a drop since. It is so fabulous. Every day I thank my lucky stars I do not have to drink.
“I would work and drink, but I would have reached a stage when I would have been unemployable. Whether you are on it or off, it is not a moral issue, of course. If it was, then life would be a breeze. Some of us have a system in which alcohol sets off certain chemicals and gives them a craving over which they have no control. It sounds like science fiction to some people. But not to me,” he says.
He was already enjoying a drink or three 30 years ago when, along with Pete Postlethwaite, Julie Walters and the late Kevin Lloyd, who died, aged 49, after having treatment at a drying-out clinic, he formed part of a raucous theatre group called Van Load. It was a touring offshoot of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, where Alan Bleasdale and Willie Russell were resident writers. They would visit borstals, pubs and the occasional prison to bring theatre to the masses. “They were wild days,” says Nighy. “As Pete says, ‘Those were the days we used to work nights.’ Liverpool was a welcoming, 24-hour city. We could all get into clubs free, because we worked at the theatre. So our days began after each nightly performance. Although I made very little money, I could afford to enjoy myself. There used to be one disc jockey who would play Let’s Get It on, by Marvin Gaye, as I reached the top of the stairs before walking down to the dancefloor. That made me feel as if I was in the movies. But, in reality, I was an average mess of a young man.”
The way Nighy tells it, he was something of a mixed-up kid from Caterham, Surrey. He left his boys’ grammar school at 15, without an O-level to his name. “I had not got a thought in my head,” he recalls. “I ran away with a school friend, because we fancied going to the Gulf. We got as far as the south of France, and I got hungry and skint. I ended up going to the British consulate and was landed with the £25 bill that my dad had to stump up to get me home.
” He graduated to the local employment office. There was all-round dismay when he opted for his choice of job: author. “I had done a lot of random reading and wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, writing the grand novel,” he says. “The bloke we were talking to was very kind, and he got me a job on The Field magazine, as a messenger boy. I thought I was on the right tracks. The magazine was in Stratton Street in London. So it was uptown, with travel in black cabs. There were also exciting edition changes at the Dorchester hotel, where they gave me a cheese roll and a cup of tea. I then ran away again to Paris, this time at 17, to give myself a chance to write the novel.”
Nighy, who has been chatting amicably enough, suddenly looks genuinely pained. “I left a letter to my parents, which I found after my father died,” he says. “It was the most pompous piece of bullshit you’ve ever read in your life. Something about how I could not live under the roof of his repressive regime. Sad to say, I was too embarrassed to keep it — even as an adult. I had to destroy it.” And writing in Paris? “I ended up begging on the streets and did not write a word,” he recalls. “I was offered a job at Madame Cuckoo’s, where it was explained to me that I could make 200 francs if I slept with a woman of a certain age. I used to fantasise about how many women I would have to sleep with to be able to afford a Harley-Davidson, because there were all these cool guys on Harleys with their suits and shades. But I never did it. In my case, I had never done it — and did not know how to do it.”
His love life did not improve much at drama school, apparently. “I finally got around to applying to get in, despite the fact I had only been to a theatre twice in my life,” he says. “By this time, I was back either working on petrol pumps — my dad was the works manager of a garage — or at various jobs as a labourer. So the Guildford School of Drama and Dance, which was known locally as the school of murmur and prance, seemed a tempting alternative.
“But I am the only person you will meet who went to drama school in the late 1960s and did not have a huge sexual adventure. I found out afterwards that they were all at it like knives, apart from me. I was terrified at being exposed as someone who was crap with women.”
It seems typical of Nighy, who has a reputation as a rakish sex symbol, in the wake of some key womanising roles, to be so self-deprecating. And since he has been with the beautiful and intelligent actress Diana Quick (they have a 19-year-old daughter, Mary) since the early 1980s, he must have done something right. They met at the National Theatre while working together on Map of the World.
“The first time I was aware of my wife was on the cover of The Sunday Times Magazine,” he recalls. “The headline was: Is this the most beautiful woman in the world? Inside, the article told me all about Diana. I do not suppose, for a moment, that it was love at first sight for her. I was besotted, of course. We did not marry, but I always call her ‘my wife’. I am not happy with any of the alternative descriptions. I enjoy love stories. And she has been the love story of my life.”
He was hooked, then, on Love Actually. “The script was beautiful, with lots of big, fat jokes,” he says. “With great writing, you can instantly imagine saying it. The jokes are built very particularly, and if you miss out an ‘er’ or a pause, then they do not explode into a punch line.”
But perhaps the biggest kick of all for Nighy was being on the film set, at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex, for the 13-week shoot. “There was a trailer park of stars,” he reports. “There are usually two or three caravans, but this was like a street of them. I would walk down and see people like Liam Neeson having a cup of tea. I felt like I had joined a circus.” It is fitting, then, that Nighy is finally playing the ringmaster.
Love Actually is released on November 21
See the trailer for Love Actually on November’s The Month CD-Rom
