A Very Public Figure

MARK FISHER caught up with Victor Spinetti ahead of the Inverness launch of his national tour

VICTOR SPINETTI is not one for holding things in. Ever since he made his name in the London of the swinging 60s with roles in Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War! and a string of films with The Beatles, he has capitalised on his experiences by working as a professional raconteur.

But even though he is frank, funny and candid about his private life, he never pigeon-holes himself with words such as gay or bisexual. It’s partly because he’s never been part of a gay scene (“I’ve never even worn a pair of jeans,” he says), but more because he has always been open to sexual expression in whatever form it takes.

His autobiography, Victor Spinetti Up Front, is an anecdotal romp from his formative years growing up in a Welsh mining village to stories of the sexual advances of the soldiers in a military hospital, his male “life companion” Graham Curnow and his steamy affair with his room-mate’s girlfriend.

Audiences in Inverness will be treated to similar material when Spinetti launches a UK tour of A Very Private Diary – Revisited in September. What they won’t hear, however, is the raconteur defining himself as anything more than a man who’s made the most of a fascinating life.

“It never occurred to me to be straight or gay,” says the 74-year-old. “If there are people you really like and enjoy, you can lie in bed and there’s always something you can do, even if you just hold each other or lie with each other. I can’t bear labels.”

He is, however, a supporter of Gay Pride and has had suffered more than his fare share of persecution for his lifestyle choices. “In the 60s we were persecuted as much as anybody for living together,” he says recalling his years with the late Graham Curnow.

“We were advised by our lawyers to tear up all the correspondence we’d ever written. Finishing a letter with ‘all my love, Graham’ was enough for a court case. I grew up without knowing about it [homosexuality]. I found out about it, luckily, through somebody who became my ‘significant other’.”

He has been known to perform an “uncut” version of A Very Private Diary – Revisited, featuring a more racy seam of anecdotes, but Eden Court audiences will be spared the more outrageous details in favour of comic tales and expert imitations of Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sir John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and John Lennon. It’s an off-the-cuff show he first tried out on the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 80s and recently returned to at London’s Donmar Warehouse to much acclaim.

His only problem is how to get so many stories into a single show. Will he, for example, have time to tell the one about being denounced by the Pope for directing a production of the hippy musical Hair in Italy?
“I arrived in Rome wearing a suit and tie, cufflinks, a hat, a brolly and a briefcase,” says this man who is never lost for words. “All these kids were sitting in the Sistina Theatre waiting to audition for Hair and they’d expected a hippy. There was a table with the producers and their girlfriends, sitting like a tribunal. I came in and said good morning. Then in my Italian that I had only just learned, I said, ‘You have read in your papers that there is a scene in Hair which is the nude scene.’

“As I was speaking I was gradually taking off my clothes. When I was finished, I was absolutely naked and I said, ‘Ecco la scena nude. It’s the easiest scene in the show to do.’ Some people got up and left in disgust, so they would have been useless anyway, the others applauded and the producers fled because they were with their girlfriends. Twenty minutes later Franco Zeffirelli phoned and said, ‘Victor, I hear you’re showing your cock at the Sistina Theatre.’ I said, ‘The only thing that travels in Rome is gossip.'”

(Victor Spinetti – A Very Private Diary Revisited is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 9–10 September. A paperback edition of Victor Spinetti’s biography, Up Front, wil be issued this autumn)

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• Eden Court Theatre