by Sharon Mail - Freelance Writer

Ian Richardson - cold, frightening, aloof, devious like Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards series? Think again.
Throughout his long distinguished career, he has played prime ministers, earls, kings, and generals. He has the most wonderfully distinctive, mesmerising but totally theatrical voice that can seem intimidating. So, it is understandable that people tend to assume that Ian Richardson the man must be a rather scary, unapproachable, egotistical person, who probably had a privileged upbringing, with a theatrical background, and considers himself a breed apart. Nothing could be further from the truth, as I discovered when I visited him in his beautiful remote Devon home, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.
The first thing to clear up, is the misconception about his origins. “We were a working class family, living in this perfectly ordinary new housing estate in Edinburgh that was built just before the Second World War. I went to the local State School. It was really a school where boys and girls were prepared either for offices or workshops, which was not the kind of thing for me at all.”
When he became a household name through House of Cards, a Scottish journalist unearthed his humble roots and they were splashed across a newspaper. One of his sisters told him about it. She thought he would be deeply upset and perhaps ashamed, but he told her “Ashamed! I’m proud to think that I should have begun my life in a tenement, and ended up playing an eye-catching prime minister on television.”
There was absolutely no theatrical background in the Richardson family. When it was discovered that he might have a flair for acting, his mother organised elocution lessons and got him into an amateur dramatic society in Edinburgh. After helping out backstage he eventually got his chance to perform, aged fifteen, playing the lead in a Christmas play, and he was hooked. Following National Service in Libya where he was a Forces broadcaster, he managed to get into what was then Glasgow College of Dramatic Art, now the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and did a drama teaching degree in tandem with his acting course.
As he had little money behind him things were hard, until his choice of career got his father’s approval. “My father didn’t want me to be an actor, so he didn’t really finance me. He came to see the only performance the students were allowed to give at that time, which was at the end of the first year. It was Lady Windermere’s Fan, and I was playing possibly the most boring part ever written which was Lord Windermere, but I managed to make it sort of interesting. My father was driving me back to Edinburgh and half the way there he said to me, ‘Well, I think maybe you are going to be an actor, so I’ll finance you for the rest of your time.’ Which he did, very generously, and remained my greatest fan thereafter.”
In 1958 he won the top award, the James Bridie Gold Medal, and immediately got a contract with the Birmingham Rep where he stayed until being signed up by the Royal Shakespeare Company under director Peter Hall in 1959.
“I didn’t expect the RSC to happen so quickly. My father was still rather protective of me, and he decided to drive me down from Edinburgh to Birmingham and help me look for digs. We set off at about six o’clock, and the way my father drove and with no speed cameras or anything like that, we were in Birmingham by about nine-thirty. He said, ‘You know son, just down the road from here is the famous Stratford-Upon-Avon Theatre. Shall we not go down there and have some breakfast?’ We drove to Stratford and went into this hotel just by the side of the river. I could see the theatre from the window at the table we were eating at. I remember saying to my father, ‘I promise you Dad, I will play in that theatre before my time is up,’ and he said ‘Oh, I’m sure you will son.’ I just thought it was going to be my Mecca – where I was aiming for. Eighteen months later I was there.
In Stratford, he very soon met a young woman who was to play an immeasurable part in his career and life. During a read through for The Merchant of Venice, in which the lead roles were to be played by Peter O’Toole, Dorothy Tutin and Denholm Elliott, he was asked to imitate the voice of the Queen, something he couldn’t do. The director, Michael Langham, asked the actresses who were walking on at the time, (they included Diana Rigg, and Margaret Drabble), if any of them could. A young actress called Maroussia Frank stepped forward, “And this Kensington accent said ‘Well, actually, I can imitate the Queen quite well.’ This beatnik, wearing filthy jeans, with long hair, unkempt and everything, sort of stood there and I looked at her and I thought ‘what have I been saddled with?’”
He very soon realised that her accent was genuine, and that she wasn’t a beatnik, and fell in love with her. They were married in February 1961, and it has been one of the most enduring and closest marriages in the business. Throughout his career, Maroussia has given him immense support, and since their two sons Jeremy, and Miles who is also an actor, grew up, has always been by his side.
Last year, whilst he was performing in a recital programme in Winchester with Judi Dench and Bill Nighy, Maroussia was in London taking part in a rare appearance of her own, a reading with Timothy West and Prunella Scales. It was the first time she hadn’t been with him for many years. When she arrived at the Winchester theatre for a post performance gathering, he rushed up and clasped her to him as if they had been parted for months rather than hours.
As well as her domestic chores and own interests, she is also his secretary, dresser, and adviser. He is very quick to acknowledge the crucial role she has played in his life. “She has been singularly responsible not only for my career decisions but practically for the person I am over these forty-three years we have been together, because I was very rough and raw material when we first met.”
They spend as much time as they can in their Devon home, a beautiful converted cider farm, set in acres of tranquil rustic woodland. There is a guest cottage, which is often occupied by family, to whom he is devoted and supportive. He is known to his three granddaughters and two grandsons as ‘Gummy’, and loves to spend as much time with them as possible. “I’m unashamedly doting of them all. The girls are beautiful and let’s face it, for a man to have beautiful granddaughters is an enormously proud-making thing. And, I have to confess that my grandsons, Miles’ sons, are just wonderful. I’m just so proud that they will bear our name.”
He has been fortunate not to know too many lengthy periods of enforced inactivity throughout the years. He spent fifteen years with the RSC, played Henry Higgins in a Broadway revival of My Fair Lady in 1976 and from there went on to play the lead in Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman in Canada before returning to Britain. He’d had his fill of long theatre runs and was looking to break into television. He believes that the late Sir Alec Guinness was responsible for the breakthrough, for within a couple of days of a chance meeting with him, the script for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy arrived on his doorstep. “That was the launch of my career as a television actor.” He hasn’t looked back since.
Despite his great successes on stage and television, he hasn’t really had the opportunities to shine on the large screen. Notwithstanding, he has had the chance to work with some top actors. People like Whoopi Goldberg, Joanne Woodward, Halle Berry and Johnny Depp, to name but a few. And being the man he is, he is generous and sincere when speaking about them. “They were all enchanting. “
“Whoopi is a very intelligent woman, quite brilliant, and can do every accent, including a Glaswegian one, which is staggeringly good, and Halle Berry was so stunningly beautiful, and sweet and intelligent.”
In 1992 he worked with Joanne Woodward and Brian Dennehy on a film called Foreign Affairs. “Joanne Woodward was such a simple gentle person and I remember she said to me on the last day that she was so sorry because her husband – Paul Newman - had been planning to come that day and she’d wanted us to meet. But, she said that he was down with the flu and he’d be so cross not to have met me, and I thought – ‘So cross not to have met me!”
His last film role to date was in From Hell, about Jack the Ripper. He played the Police Commissionaire to Johnny Depp’s detective. “Johnny is the sweetest, gentlest, tiniest person I’ve ever met. I remember he had to attack me, and the director came round after the first camera rehearsal and said to him, ‘It doesn’t look good Johnny, you’ve really got to go for Ian and make it look as though you are trying to kill him.’ I turned to Johnny and said ‘Come on, just go for it. I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare plays with swords and battle-axes. I’m used to being beaten about the place’. So Johnny said ‘Okay’. They went for the take and Johnny went for my throat and I could feel him strangling me and I was thinking ‘When are they going to say cut!’ and when they did, Johnny looked at me, and this beautiful young man put his arms around this elderly gentleman and said ‘Oh God, have I hurt you, have I hurt you, are you all right?’ And I thought ‘Well now, that’s really something.’”
One of his most recent duties has been to provide commentary for the House of Cards trilogy DVD, which is at last being released in the UK. He has mixed feelings about the role that brought him several awards and meant that for the first time he had to don heavy disguises to venture out in public. On the one hand, his stunning performance brought him great acclaim – something he is quick to acknowledge was in large part due to the quality of the script. “Andrew Davies is a writer par excellence. He is brilliant.”
On the other hand, his portrayal of Francis Urquhart had a very marked effect on women. For a man with a very strict Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, that was something that made him extremely uncomfortable. His silky smooth performance, together with the aphrodisiac of power, got him some unwelcome attention from the ladies.
When a woman given the job of looking after him for an interview suggested that they get together afterwards, he was affronted. Fortunately Maroussia wasn’t fazed by the sudden outbreak of female attention. “We’ve been together for 43 years and there’s no question that she knows that I wouldn’t allow anything like that. I married the woman that I loved and still love and I wouldn’t be affected by all that. It was amusing, but acutely embarrassing for me.”
So, when the DVD hits the streets, no doubt there will be one man who hopes that it sells well, but that people will remember not to confuse the Machiavellian monster Urquhart with the self-effacing kindly grandfather and loving husband who just happened to portray him so convincingly.

photographs ©Sharon Mail