London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
A life in London time.
Phyllida Law.
Actress. Wife. Mother. Neighbour. Friend.
Phylly.
Phyllida has died, aged 94. The news was announced yesterday.
And we got the news here in Milan.
We’re in Milan because our son Sam is getting married next week. He’s marrying a lovely Italian girl.
And Sam knew Phylly.
Loved Phylly.
Loved her house.
That house was part of his childhood.
Then the telephone rang.
It was Robert Bathurst.
You’ll know Robert Bathurst. Distinguished actor. Cold Feet. Downton Abbey. A huge body of work on stage and screen.
But more than forty years ago Robert was a young actor in the company of Noises Off at the Savoy Theatre.
It was very early in his career.
The other actors called him Boblet.
Mary still calls him Boblet.
And Boblet was ringing Mary to tell her that Phylly had died.
And just like that, more than forty years fell away.
Back to the Savoy.
Back to Noises Off.
Back to Phylly.
And this one is personal.
Because we knew her.
Phyllida Law was born in Glasgow in 1932. She trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
And get this.
Her career spanned eight decades.
Eight decades on stage and screen.
The West End. The National Theatre. Television. Film.
She was in Much Ado About Nothing. Emma. The Winter Guest. Saving Grace. Nanny McPhee. Miss Potter.
She acted with both of her daughters.
And those daughters, of course, are Sophie Thompson and Emma Thompson.
Her husband was Eric Thompson, actor, writer, director and, most famously, the man who took a French children’s television programme, rewrote and narrated it in English and gave generations of British children The Magic Roundabout.
Quite a family.
And quite a house.
Because Eric and Phyllida brought Emma and Sophie up in West Hampstead.
A 1930s house in a very handsome street.
The finest street in West Hampstead.
Architecturally, it doesn’t quite have the firepower of the grandest streets up the hill in Hampstead.
But when it comes to inhabitants…
Good grief.
This is the Beverly Hills of London.
Derek Jacobi.
Imelda Staunton and her husband Jim Carter.
Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson.
Emma Thompson and her husband the actor Greg Wise.
Emma’s sister Sophie.
Jim Broadbent.
And not forgetting Mary’s parents, Charles and Penny Chilton.
Charles Chilton, the great BBC writer and producer. The man behind Journey into Space. The man whose research and songs provided the foundation for Oh, What a Lovely War! A man the Telegraph once described as “the one true genius the BBC ever produced.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We have to go back to the Savoy.
Mary was in Noises Off with Phyllida.
Mary played Poppy Norton-Taylor, the stage manager.
And Poppy is having an affair with the director.
What’s more, she’s pregnant by him.
Everything in Noises Off is going to rack and ruin.
It’s farce.
High farce.
Doors. Mistakes. Misunderstandings. Jealousies. Chaos piling upon chaos.
And at the end of the first act Poppy can’t contain herself any longer.
She confronts the director.
And finally screams the revelation for the whole theatre to hear:
“Because I’m pregnant!”
Curtain.
Now here’s the thing.
Mary wasn’t just acting pregnant.
Mary was pregnant.
With our first, Katy.
So every night Mary would get to the end of Act One and announce to the entire Savoy Theatre:
“Because I’m pregnant!”
And the other actors would whisper:
“We know. You tell us every night.”
Mary and Phylly became really close.
They both lived in West Hampstead, so six nights a week they car-pooled into the Savoy together.
And six nights a week gives you a lot of time to talk.
Especially when one of you is pregnant.
Now, there’s something that happens to a middle-class Englishwoman almost simultaneously with getting pregnant.
She starts worrying about schools.
It’s just a fact of life in this country.
Mary did.
And she mentioned it to Phylly.
Phylly said, “Darling, you’ve got nothing to worry about. That’s all taken care of for you.”
Because Phylly had been in exactly the same position when she was pregnant with Emma.
She’d started worrying about schools.
As one does.
And she’d happened to meet a wonderful old London school inspector.
A woman who’d been on the London schools beat for something like fifty years.
Phylly asked her advice.
And the old inspector said:
“Worry not, Phyllida. Just send the child to the local school. I’ve inspected hundreds of London schools and I’m here to tell you it’s the best school in London.”
And then came the clincher.
“She’ll learn to say fuck, but she’ll get a great education.”
School problem solved.
But something else was happening during that run at the Savoy.
Mary had fallen in love.
Not with another actor.
With Phyllida Law’s house.
Eric had died. Phyllida was downsizing and the family house was for sale.
Mary kept saying to me, “If we could afford any house in London, that’s the house I’d want.”
We couldn’t.
Then one day Mary had a thought.
“I know who can afford Phylly’s house. My parents can afford it.”
Charles and Pen were then living in a fine country house just outside Keston, a tiny village down in Kent.
Mary told her mother about Phylly’s house.
Pen came up to London.
Took a look.
Went back to Keston.
And told Mary’s dad:
“We’re moving to West Hampstead.”
That was that.
But remember, this was Charles Chilton. The one true genius the BBC ever produced. There were no flies on Charles Chilton.
And the pieces were all there on the board. Our house was only about 200 yards away.
Mary was pregnant.
Charles and Pen were about to move into this great family house just up the hill from us.
Charles immediately saw what was coming.
He quipped, “Is this baby going to think that Pen and I are its parents?”
Well.
Sort of.
We had grandmothering on tap.
Our children were devoted to Granny.
And they adored that house.
So I think we can almost get away with saying this:
Our children grew up in the house Emma Thompson grew up in.
And Phylly?
She didn’t go far.
A few doors down.
She moved into a flat.
But there was one thing from the old house she wasn’t leaving behind.
The bathtub.
Phylly took the bathtub with her.
And turned it into a huge flower pot.
It’s still there.
People walk past it.
They glance at it.
Almost nobody has the faintest idea what they’re looking at.
That was the bathtub in the family home of Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson.
The bathtub in the house Emma and Sophie Thompson grew up in.
Think of the family life that went on around that bath.
And now it sits there, full of flowers.
That was Phylly.
But there’s one more story.
Because the school story didn’t end with Phylly telling Mary not to worry.
Years later Mary was on the school’s Board of Governors.
And like pretty much every state school in the country, it was always hard pressed for money.
There’d be a fête.
There’d be fundraising.
And Emma often pitched in.
Needless to say, if you’re holding a school fête and Emma Thompson agrees to come along and open it, you’ve got yourself a draw.
On one occasion Mary asked Emma if she’d do just that.
Come along.
Cut the ribbon.
Open the fête.
Of course she would.
Mary told her it officially opened at twelve.
“I’ll be there from ten. Come any time you like before twelve.”
The morning came.
Mary was at the school early, setting everything up.
Then suddenly:
“Oh no. I’ve left something at home.”
Did she have time to race back and get it?
Yes.
Just.
So off she shot.
Got home.
Key in the door.
And there, on the floor, was an envelope.
Hand-delivered.
Unstamped.
Mary looked at it.
Did she have time to open it?
Just.
She opened it.
Inside was a cheque from Emma.
An extraordinarily generous cheque.
For a new playground for the school.
And then Mary realised what Emma had done.
She’d timed it.
Emma knew Mary would be at the school.
She’d deliberately brought the envelope round when she knew Mary wouldn’t be home.
Because she didn’t want anybody making a fuss.
Emma could perfectly easily have brought the cheque to the fête.
There could have been an announcement.
Applause.
Photographs.
Speeches.
A great public thank-you.
And nobody would have thought the worse of her for a second.
Quite the reverse.
But Emma didn’t want any of that.
So she put the cheque quietly through the letterbox when she thought nobody would be there.
No audience.
No applause.
No fuss.
She just wanted the school to have its playground.
Class act.
But then, we knew her mother.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised.
And now here we are.
All these years later.
In Milan.
Because Sam’s getting married next week.
Sam, who knew Phylly.
Sam, who loved Phylly.
Sam, who knew and loved that extraordinary house.
The little boy grew up.
And next week he gets married.
And Boblet rings Mary.
Phylly’s gone.
Which brings me back to where we started.
She was some kind of woman.
I pinched that.
Or rather, I changed one word.
It’s from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
At the end of the film, Marlene Dietrich’s character is talking about the dead police captain Hank Quinlan, played by Welles.
“He was some kind of man.”
Well.
She was some kind of woman.
Phyllida Law.
And come to think of it, Touch of Evil gives us another way of putting it.
Because Phyllida Law and her offspring…
Goodness.
There wasn’t a touch of it.
There was a vast dollop.
A great ladling of goodness.
And one last thing.
Her name.
Phyllida.
It comes from the Greek. Phyllon. A leaf. Green foliage.
Could there be a lovelier name for her?
Something living. Something green. Something that grows. Something that gives shade.
Phyllida.
Emma.
Sophie.
Some kind of women.
Ave atque vale, Phylly.