'I feared I'd fall on my face'

Michael Crawford in his award-winning role
10 April 2012

It is no great surprise when Michael Crawford tells me that his one, unrealised ambition was to play Peter Pan. Even at 62, exuding crinkle-eyed charm in his dressing room at the Palace Theatre, there is something childlike about him.


His voice is a softer version of the feminine gabble of his most famous creation, Frank Spencer, from the Seventies sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, and he even comes out with some of Frank ' s boyish malapropisms.

He has been in showbiz almost 50 years, he's a grandfather and a multimillionaire with homes in London, Kent and California.

But just beneath the grown-up surface you can still see Crawford the illegitimate only child born in wartime, a bit reckless and a bit of a show-off but desperately eager to please.

Last night, he won a Variety Club award for his role as Count Fosco in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White. It is his comeback performance after 18 years in the States, and it has helped lift the West End out of its doldrums and Lloyd Webber's organisation out of its endof-year, £8 million debts.

"It's nice to be back here because it is my home," he says. "I've missed all the corny things: the seasons, walking around the West End, going to Harrods and Selfridges Food Hall. I'm thinking at the moment about whether I want to go to Broadway when this show transfers, or whether I want to do more work here."

He's looking forward to taking his grandchildren to Cameron Mackintosh's production of Mary Poppins, which opens next week. "I must see if Cameron remembers me," he quips, Frank Spencer-ishly, "and see if he'll let me buy some tickets."

When Woman in White opened in October, it was under intense scrutiny and Crawford refused to speak to the media.

Lloyd Webber's two previous musicals had flopped, and Crawford's own last show, Dance of the Vampires, had become Broadway's most expensive disaster, closing after two months in 2003 with losses of £8 million. Now that The Woman in White is booking until September 2005, with an advance of £4 million against its £3.6 million budget, Crawford is breaking his silence, and he seems almost bashful about his previous reticence.

"I was really nervous. Very, very nervous," he says shyly. "I had been away for 18 years. I had come back because this character appealed to me, but I didn't know what I was going to do with him."

Crawford had last been seen in the West End as the deformed but innately romantic Phantom of the Opera. Fosco was different - a comic cameo involving a voluminous fat suit, fright wig, and facial prostheses, as well as bits of comic business with an unreliable menagerie of birds and beasts. It is a show-stealing turn, but Crawford didn't know it at the time.

He even turned down the accolade of a South Bank Show profile: "It would have been very good television to see me building something up in rehearsals, then falling flat on my face on opening night, but I just couldn't do that." And his worst fears seemed to come true on the first night when one of Fosco's pet cagebirds escaped into the auditorium.

"I'm standing there with blood pouring out of my ears, so to speak, because it's opening night," he says. "I'm doing a scene with Maria [ Friedman, his co-star] that has just switched from high comedy to drama, and suddenly I see this budgerigar in my eyeline.

"We're singing, but I know that all eyes are on this bird, not us. All it needed was for it to c**p on me, and I truly believe that would have been the end of my career." He suddenly checks himself. "I mean, for it to have dropped something on me from a great height. That's what I'd better say."

At this point, you can almost hear the whistle and crack of his Irish grandmother's tongue. Edith Kathleen O'Keeffe, known as Nan, was arguably the biggest influence on Michael Crawford's life.

He was born in 1942 in Salisbury, and only discovered years later, researching his 1999 autobiography, that the Spitfire pilot he believed to be his dad was not his father. "My real father had no urge to seek me out," he says now, "and the feeling was reciprocated."

His stepfather, a grocer and former sergeant major called Den, hit him, and Michael cut off all contact with him after his mother, Doris, died when he was 20 (a good Irish Catholic at heart, though, he still thinks "that she can see me").

Nan, however, had been there when he was picked as a teenage chorister by Benjamin Britten to appear in his educational work, Let's Make an Opera. And she was there when he left school at 15, picking up radio and TV work, and parts in plays and films.

She was there when he went to Broadway for the first time in the 1960s, and wangled jobs with two of his idols - Gene Kelly (who directed him in Hello, Dolly) and Buster Keaton (who he starred with in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum).

And she was there when he came back to Britain with his tail between his legs, after his three-picture deal with an American studio fizzled out.

Nan was there for his marriage to Gabrielle Lewis in 1965, the birth of their children Emma and Lucy, and their divorce in 1975 after he admitted to Gabrielle that he had been unfaithful. (He has an illegitimate older daughter, Angelique, whom he adores but with whom he has signed a legal agreement protecting her privacy.)

Even after she went blind, Nan watched over his career. When he appeared in his first big musical role, in Billy at Drury Lane in 1974, and uttered the line "piss off the lot of you", Nan's voice rang out from the Royal Box, reprimanding him for his language.

I ask Michael Crawford if Nan instilled in him the intense self-deprecation that weaves its way through his conversation and his autobiography.

"Oh yes," he says. "She always kept my feet on the ground." He then proceeds to cite his own upbringing - riven as it was by bullying and dishonesty - as a shining ideal compared to that experienced by the youth of today.

"In my generation we were parented, we were disciplined," he says. "I am proud that my two daughters have chosen to give up work and stay at home to raise their children, even though they have made sacrifices to do it."

HE SEEMS t ied to an idealised picture of his childhood on the Isle of Sheppey - climbing cliffs, messing about in boats on the estuary, getting into trouble in go-karts or on his stepfather's delivery bike. He even sees in this the seeds of his future career. "I was an adventurous boy, and that never left me," he says.

Crawford has always chosen roles that are physically challenging. He did his own stunts in Some Mothers, and trained in wire-walking, trapeze, and unicycle at New York's circus school for three months before taking on the lead role in the 1981 hit Barnum.

During his five-year run at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in the 1990s, in the staggeringly expensive $26 million solo spectacle EFX, he suffered two crippling falls and eventually had to have his hip joint replaced.

Asked how the West End has changed, he doesn't recall the 1980s but the Fifties and Sixties, when he was a mod coming "up West from Bexleyheath, wearing flares and with a special haircut for the night", going to jazz clubs that are now branches of McDonald's.

The crowds on Shaftesbury Avenue alarm him a bit now, the drunkenness, the threat of violence. He says it's nice to be back in Britain because America has lurched so far to the Right, then anxiously insists that he's not qualified to talk politics and should shut up.

He's equally coy about romance. In his book he mentioned some passing flings, mostly with dancers or singers. Now he says: "I have friends, I've certainly never been lonely. I like to keep that stuff private."

He and Gabrielle still get on: he recently phoned her to say that he might ask her to come to the Evening Standard Theatre awards next Monday, but that he was worried it might cause gossip that they were getting back together, so he wasn't sure.

"She said, 'That's very nice darling, but are you inviting me or not? Let me know when you decide, bye!' and she hung up."

I smile, and Crawford smiles, too, but his manager Sue Knight is knocking on the door. It's nearly time for him to hit the makeup chair for his two-hour transformation into Fosco. As I depart, I ask him if the break-up of his marriage was a bigger disappointment than not playing Peter Pan.

"No," he says, "because it happened, and I learned to be a different person once we broke up. Sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success, and in some ways it's better to have failure at the beginning of your career, or your life."

He grins his little-boy grin and sweeps his arm around his dressing room and the foam-padded Fosco costume. "It would have been very tough if I had failed doing this."

The Woman in White is booking at the Palace Theatre until September 2005. Information: 0870 8945 5579. The cast recording of the Woman in White, and Movies, Musicals and More - the Very Best of Michael Crawford, are on sale now.

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