Derek Jacobi is having a bad hair day. “Oh, he killed him,” laments the actor with mock despair. “It’s the worst haircut I’ve ever had.” Considering that she is about to turn 84, there must be quite a few haircuts to choose from. The photographer and I assure her that her snowy locks are quite stylish and she looks instantly flattered. “You think? Oh, I’ll take it all then.” His voice is as smooth and warm as butter melting on a crumpet, his manner bright and self-deprecating. When politely asked not to drop his arm over the side of his chair while his photo is being taken, he raises a hand in horror: “Was that the limp wrist? We don’t want any of that!”
We are in the living room of the London home that Jacobi shares with her husband, the actor-director Richard Clifford, who has been her partner since the late 1970s. The paintings on the walls would make the house feel like a minor wing of the National Gallery if it weren’t for the couple’s ruddy Irish terrier, Daisy, lurking all over the place. Jacobi, wearing a gray wool vest, white shirt, blue jeans and navy blue running shoes, returned a few days ago from his second home near Toulouse. “We saw the Queen’s funeral there,” he says. He still remembers that his parents bought his first television especially for the coronation. I was 14 years old. “We sat there with the curtains drawn, watching it in the dark.” It was just three years ago that he played the dying Duke of Windsor in The Crown. Art collides with life, the past floods in: no wonder the funeral hit him hard. “I cried the whole time. Everything was done so well. Not a foot wrong, nothing out of place. Immaculate.” I could almost be reviewing a first night.
Through the windows behind him is the garden, and beyond that the home studio where he does his voice-over work, such as the audiobook of Captain Sir Tom Moore’s autobiography, which he recorded during lockdown . Another work that emerged during this period was the British film A Bird Flew In, which follows the scattered lives of various creative types whose work is halted by the pandemic. Jacobi plays a veteran performer resting at home in France, which is precisely what he was doing at the time. At first he turned down the role. “I said, ‘No, no, I’m on vacation.’ My agent said, ‘They’re going to see you.’
Jacobi hasn’t seen A Bird Flew In yet, so we move on to Alan Bennett’s film version of Allelujah, in which he plays a patient at a nursing hospital facing closure. Jennifer Saunders is the head nurse and Russell Tovey a management consultant, but it’s Jacobi, as a former teacher, who provides the pathos. “Oh, yes. hallelujah This is the hospital, right? I haven’t seen it either.” Still, he laughs when I remind him of a line from the movie: “Even old people don’t like old people.” That’s very true, he says, even though he has note a quote from Clint Eastwood, for whom Jacobi briefly played in the 2010 drama Hereafter. “They asked him how he deals with age, and he said, ‘I don’t let the old man in.'” Inevitably, things fall or seize. Whenever you have a pain here or a pain there, you think, honey, that’s it.” Jacobi should know, having been through prostate cancer. “But don’t let the old man in.”
Derek Jacobi in Hallelujah. Photograph: Rob Youngson/Pathe UK
Despite this promise, he claims not to have the stamina of his friend Ian McKellen, who took on Hamlet last year when he was 82. “Sooner him than me! Full marks, though.” Of all the parts Jacobi has played, this is the only one he still remembers in full. “I quote it endlessly,” he says. In fact, it was the springboard of his entire career. At the age of 18, he played Hamlet at Leyton School in East London.This production went on to the Edinburgh strip, attracting the attention of theater critic Kenneth Tynan, who noted this “boy sulky-looking and wounded’ and called him ‘a fine recruit … for the modern prose drama’.
Jacobi, left, with John Hurt and George Baker in I, Claudius. Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
Jacobi studied at Cambridge and then joined Birmingham Rep, where he was spotted by Laurence Olivier and recruited to the new National Theatre. (He and Olivier later became the only actors to receive both a British and a Danish knighthood.) On Jacobi’s 25th birthday in 1963, he returned to Hamlet, this time as Laertes, alongside Peter O’Toole. Shirley Bassey sang Happy Birthday to him at the after party. It was a long way from helping out in his father’s sweet shop in Chingford, East London. “Those were the days of rationing. I used to clip coupons. I wasn’t very well. I’d stand behind the counter and as soon as someone came in he’d call, ‘Dad, you’ve got a customer,’ and I’d run out the back.”
When I appeared in Hamlet, my mother said, “That was very nice, but you should smile more on the call.”
His parents had encouraged his performance since his Hamlet in high school. “My mother said, ‘That was very nice, but you should smile more on the call’. Three and a half hours of Shakespeare and that was his only note. I wish all critics were like that!” There was never any expectation that he would continue in the family business. “I was a bit of a freak. I liked dressing up, that sort of thing. As a kid, I ran around the streets in my mother’s wedding veil and caught it in the privet.” His mother thought acting was a phase, which was also his response when he told her at 21 that he was in love with a man. A different man was also in love with Jacobi at the same time: McKellen, his Cambridge classmate, had an unspoken crush. “I had no idea,” he says.
Jacobi with Ian McKellen as grand marshals in the New York Pride march. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters
It is now common to talk about pride in your sexuality; Jacobi and McKellen, who played a sleazy couple in the 2013 retro sitcom Vicious, even served as grand marshals for the New York Pride march in 2015. “There we were, sitting in the car up Fifth Avenue, doing a lot of that,” he says, twirling his hand in a regal wave. But pride wasn’t what I felt growing up. “It was just the card I was dealt. When I was young, I didn’t know what ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ meant. I knew I was attracted to my own sex. It was a concern to begin with: ‘I’m not supposed to I have to be like this.” Nothing to do with legality. It wasn’t really until college that I fell in love with someone.” An upset with that boyfriend prompted him to come out to his mother. “Now I knew, and there was no need to say it again. Life went on.”
I always wanted to be chiseled. I was fluffy and round. Totally bland and uninteresting
He also did the interpretation. It was his performance as the stammering Roman emperor in I, Claudius, a smart, wild and radical breakout hit, that made him a star in 1976. What he remembers now is that it took forever to remove his make-up -se after the old. – Age scenes. “I’d soak in a hot bath and little by little the whole thing would come apart. I had one of those wax faces in my closet for years.” There are entire trunks full of memorabilia and memorabilia in the attic. “One day I will pass it all. My dad saved a lot of newspaper clippings and stuff.” Maybe there are toys from In the Night Garden too; Jacobi provided the melodious and beguiling narration for every episode of that beguilingly surreal CBeebies series, making it sound like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Mention it now and he launches into a call right there in the living room: “Upsy Daisy, Igglepiggle… Oh, that was so nice to do.”
Play Francis Bacon in Love Is the Devil. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy
For an actor not associated with malevolence, it’s surprising how easily and cheaply Jacobi can invoke it. He’s played Hitler and Pinochet, and even came within striking distance of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. (It was for Jacobi, Daniel Day-Lewis and the eventual star, Anthony Hopkins.) She’s never been more insidious, though, as Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s 1998 psychodrama Love Is the Devil. Jacobi had recently played Alan Turing on TV in Breaking the Code, a role that originated on stage in 1986, and the contrast between that and Love Is the Devil is just a testament to his versatility. His Turing is forceful, determined, alive with curiosity. Like Bacon, he is a shark with human skin.
I was hoping we could talk about this performance, but he’s crazy about details. “Remember me,” he says. I mention his co-star, pre-Bond Daniel Craig, and his sadomasochistic bedroom scenes with lit cigarettes. “Danny and I had a lot of fun. But I don’t remember too much. Sorry.” He remembers attending a cabaret show by Anne Reid, his on-screen wife in Sally Wainwright’s cheerful BBC comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax. On stage, Reid referenced her sex scene with Craig in The Mother. Jacobi couldn’t resist shouting: “I also made a film with Daniel Craig. And I’ve slept with him twice!”
I am a shrinking violet. The only ego I have is when I act; then, I have the drive to succeed
She has complained in the past about her appearance, writing in her 2013 autobiography As Luck Would It: “Mine is not a face where you think, ‘Oh, she’s suffered,’ or ‘There’s something violent about it. in him’.” Love is the devil is the exception that proves the rule. “I always wanted to be chiseled,” he says now. “I was fluffy and round. Totally bland and uninteresting.” When did he stop feeling that way? “I didn’t.”
You’d get old waiting for him to sing his own praises. “I think I lost in the…