As she prepares to lead the cast of Hello, Dolly! at the Open Air theatre, Samantha Spiro tells Caroline Bishop about the advantages of getting older.
Samantha Spiro is, by her own admission, “quite meddlesome”. So it seems entirely appropriate that the actress should be taking on the famous matchmaker Dolly Levi in the Open Air’s revival of Jerry Herman musical Hello, Dolly! Though Spiro, too, enjoys a spot of matchmaking – “I don’t think I’ve ever been very successful” – she has applied her meddlesome ways to casting with better success.
“Gorgeous Allan Corduner, who is playing Horace, wasn’t originally cast because he was doing a film,” she tells me when we meet up during rehearsals for Hello, Dolly! We are sitting in a cavernous, empty room which seems filled by Spiro’s tiny, yet vivacious presence as she relates the story. “When I first got the job I thought he’d be wonderful, but I knew he was busy being very successful.” Director Timothy Sheader continued his search for a Horace, Dolly’s love interest, before Spiro bumped into Corduner at a wedding, who told her the film in question had been cancelled. “Brilliant!” was Spiro’s not altogether regretful reaction to her friend’s sudden unemployment. “I literally on the way home phoned Tim and said ‘Allan Corduner is free’. He got him in the next day… and offered the job to him on the spot. So that was a nice bit of fortuitous meddling!”
Being ear-marked by Spiro to star alongside her can only be a good thing. The actress is currently on a roll; after receiving rave reviews for playing another of Streisand’s famous roles, Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, in Chichester last year, she spent the winter playing Maria to Derek Jacobi’s Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Wyndham’s theatre and comes to Hello, Dolly! following a much-praised performance as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing earlier in the Open Air season. “Its main weapon,” Lyn Gardner wrote of that production in The Guardian, “is a blistering performance from Samantha Spiro as a fiercely intelligent Beatrice full of late-blooming brio.”
Those words seem to sum Spiro up. Not that she hasn’t bloomed before – she made her name playing Barbara Windsor in hit comedy Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle And Dick at the National Theatre back in 1998 and won a Laurence Olivier Award in 2001 for Merrily We Roll Along – but the 41-year-old’s career currently seems to be blooming as much, if not more, than earlier in her life. It is a refreshing contrast to regular complaints that work often dries up for actresses over 40. “When I was at drama school, I think I always looked forward, funnily enough, to being this age,” Spiro says brightly. “Late 30s, 40, seemed to be the time when the good roles start for actresses like me who are not necessarily the young, pretty, light ones. I always wanted to play alcoholics, or people who had been left… and the funnier roles as well, that require something of the energy that I’ve got, are starting to happen now, so I always had an inkling that that would be, or a hope that it would be.”
That two of those roles should come along in a double-whammy this summer is particularly propitious. “Hello, Dolly! happened first. I got offered that, amazingly, and was thrilled to bits, and then the next day they called up and said would you like to play Beatrice in Much Ado? This job’s just getting better and better!”
“I still do feel that a little bit in my head, that each time one comes up I think how odd that I can actually sing it,” “
They are an apt pairing; both forthright, independent women whose philosophy on life gets changed during the course of their story. Beatrice uses wit as a shield after reaching relative middle age without finding love; the widowed Dolly feels love is behind her after losing her beloved husband: both are surprised when it bowls them over.
Unlike the women she plays, Spiro met her husband, actor Mark Leadbetter, at drama school and the couple now have two daughters, aged two and five. “It’s [love] been there for me for a while thankfully,” Spiro smiles.
It is appropriate that the actress has been given such a juicy double to play at the theatre that has already had so much significance in her life. It was a school trip to the Regent’s Park venue when she was 10 that inspired Spiro to be an actress; and it was here, after graduating from the Webber Douglas Academy, that she secured her first job, 18 years ago, returning the following year for another season. Spiro’s career started in style; she was directed that first year by Judi Dench in The Boys From Syracuse. “I really remember being offered the job and I just couldn’t believe it, couldn’t wait to tell people ‘I’ve got a job, and guess who’s directing me? Judi Dench!’ It was just amazing,” Spiro recalls. “And she was so lovely and taught me so much about everything in that very first job; just looking at her thinking you are a genuinely lovely human being. I just thought, I never want to lose that.”
She says it feels quite different, nearly two decades later, to return to the venue, partly because the world has changed – mobile phones were yet to impose their intrusive presence last time she was here – and partly because Spiro’s life has changed. For starters, she has children, which she feels has matured her as an actress – “You’ve never loved as much as you’ve loved, you’ve never cried as much as you’ve cried, and those things are more at the tip of your fingers than ever before as a younger actress” – and whereas last time she played a witch, a fairy and other minor characters, Spiro now bears the responsibility of playing two iconic leading ladies. “It feels lovely that I’ve come back after a 17 year break to play two of the most wonderful parts that an actress could be playing,” says Spiro. “It’s so magical and I’m appreciating it in a very different way to last time because I didn’t have other theatres and other jobs to compare it with last time. I just knew I was very happy. Now I’m appreciating not only the lovely parts and the great plays, but the magic of the place itself. It’s completely unique. The relationship that you have with an audience and the journey that you go on with an audience through the evening is unlike anywhere else.”
“I always wanted to play alcoholics, or people who had been left”
It is, she says, event-theatre with a unique atmosphere, on a balmy evening at dusk, that draws audiences in. “By the end of Much Ado they seemed to be more abandoned in their enjoyment than you would [be] sitting in a dark theatre for some reason.” Even the British weather cannot dampen Spiro’s enthusiasm for the place. “There were nights where it was drizzling and you could see the umbrellas going up and people’s cagoules being put on and you are starting to look a bit like a wet rat, but funnily enough that even helps and adds to this relationship thing,” she smiles. Rain, she says, even added a certain dramatic atmosphere to some of the more serious scenes in Much Ado About Nothing, though she admits it may prove a little incongruous during the tap dancing routines of Hello, Dolly!
It is appropriate, also, that she is braving the elements this year in the name of both drama and musical theatre. Spiro has managed, since she was last in the park, to fashion a career that has encapsulated both, and yet, I discover, this enviable position has been obtained by luck rather than design. Though she won a Laurence Olivier Award for her first musical role – Mary Flynn in Merrily We Roll Along at the Donmar Warehouse – it was not until taking on the nine solo songs of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl last year that Spiro actually acknowledged the fact that she was a musical theatre actress. “I never started out thinking that I would do musicals at all. And each one has taken me by surprise,” she explains. “Up until that point [doing Funny Girl] I’d always gone into musicals, the four or five that I’d done, and really gone in saying, you know, ‘I’m not a singer and I’m certainly not a dancer but this is a lovely part [and] I can open my mouth and some sort of noise will happen’.” Even now, having wowed the critics with what Charles Spencer in Daily Telegraph said was “what I suspect may prove a career-transforming performance” as Fanny, Spiro still feels something of an impostor. “I still do feel that a little bit in my head, that each time one comes up I think how odd that I can actually sing it,” she says. “I never feel as though it’s my thing, I always feel as though I’m encroaching on somebody else’s territory a little bit, I feel lucky to land the jobs when I do.”
But working with musical directors who have encouraged her and building her skills with each production, Spiro has finally allowed herself to feel it is her territory too. “It’s totally crept up on me, totally taken me by surprise, but now I’m thinking mm yes, I’d quite like to do Gypsy, I’d quite like to be Mrs Lovett [in Sweeney Todd]. So I think there are ones out there now that I’m allowing the thought in.”
“The journey that you go on with an audience through the evening is unlike anywhere else”
If her past history is anything to go by, however, this thriving period will prove more personally satisfying than, as Spencer suggests, career-transforming. Even starring in hit play Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle And Dick did not change her career as, at the time, she may have liked. “I feel as though everything’s a real slow burner with me, always is, it doesn’t ever feel as though one thing goes bam, you know, it’s here I am after 18 years and I feel I’m playing lovely parts but it’s gone drip, drip, drip as opposed to anything that’s done it in one fell swoop,” she says, before adding: “I wouldn’t change anything now. At the time you go oh come on, can’t I be seen for this or how about getting offered that or whatever, but now I think it’s worked in a way in my favour.”
It certainly seems that way. While some more traditionally starry actresses her age and older may find the roles drying up, Spiro’s slow-burning career seems to have stoked a steady heat and she has plenty of ideas for how to keep it burning. “I think there are lots of really meaty roles for women in this age group now. It is exciting,” she says, citing Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Sarah in Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley as two roles she would love to play. She read the latter 12 years ago when appearing in the second part of Wesker’s trilogy, Roots, at the National Theatre. “I remember reading Chicken Soup With Barley and thought ‘oh that’s a part when I’m much, much older, when I’m really old, that I would love to play’. And hopefully that’s coming round, a little too soon but…” she laughs. She may not be a spring chicken any more, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
CB