Sir Derek Jacobi has revealed that the secret of his success in playing parts such as King Lear and the Roman emperor Claudius is his working class East End upbringing.
The renowned 75-year-old actor said his humble origins had helped him to “play the man inside the king” when confronted with some of the most challenging Shakespearean roles.
Sir Derek joked that he used to tell his friends he lived on the edge of Epping Forest because it “sounded posher” when he was growing up in Leytonstone, east London.
The son of a tobacconist and a drapery store assistant, he was educated at a grammar school and won a scholarship to read history at Cambridge.
He told the Radio Times: “I think my upbringing helped me enormously, because I was a very ordinary, upper-working-class or lower-middle-class, east London kid.
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09 Sep 2013“And my career has been mainly classically based. That upbringing, that absorbing of the perfectly ordinary, has informed the way I react to a classical character.
“If you’re playing a king, you play the man inside the king. If you’re playing a man, you play the king inside the man.”
As a young man, Sir Derek was talent-spotted by Sir Laurence Olivier, who gave him a job at the new National Theatre. His big break came when he appeared in the title role of the BBC series I, Claudius in 1976.
In a long and varied career on stage, film and television, the veteran actor has also played parts ranging from the crime-solving medieval monk Brother Cadfael to Adolf Hitler.
Sir Derek, who recently finished filming the second series of BBC1’s Last Tango in Halifax, which starts next week, said coping with the pressures of being a distinguished actor could be a strain.
“That can be the hardest, because the expectation is so much bigger. There was little expectation in the beginning. And you’ve been around a long time so the ability to surprise is blunted,” he said.
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