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By Root 461 0

only was she a great actress, but Jane could also do incredible singing impersonations of stars like Edith Piaf, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Bassey and Judy Garland – very much my era of music – which is all the more incredible because she is a tiny, slender woman whom you wouldn’t think would have the power. The playwright Jim Cartwright heard her doing these impressions as a warm-up before she went onstage in his play Road and then wrote a play around her talent, which he called The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. It was directed by Sam Mendes and it was such a hit in the West End that Harvey bought the movie rights. The story is about a talented but shy ‘little voice’ who is forced to perform by a sleazy agent, with disastrous consequences. I’d known a few sleazy agents in my time (none of them mine, I hasten to add), so I was very pleased to take the part of Ray Say and join a talented cast that included Brenda Blethyn, Jim Broadbent and Ewan McGregor, all of whom were excellent actors. It was a very different experience from the blockbusting Twenty Thousand Leagues and I sensed we were on to something good from the start.

Off we went to Scarborough to film. A seaside town, in the north of England, in the winter – I know I’d said I wanted a film in England, but this was pushing things a bit far . . . But the work and the people were so great I put on an extra jumper or two and settled back into the pleasure of making a really good movie and found myself happier than I had been for some time.

I was a bit taken aback by some of the nightlife in Scarborough, though. I have never thought of myself as someone who is easily shocked, but for the first time in my life I saw hordes of young women drunk out of their minds, stumbling about and spewing up every Saturday night I was there. I wasn’t used to drunken girls. In my day we used to try to ply girls with alcohol so we could have our wicked way with them; here they were doing it for themselves. But as far as I could see none of the men were able to take unfair advantage of the situation: they were so drunk themselves that they wouldn’t have been capable of having their wicked way with anything. I thought it was very sad and very unromantic. I was also astonished at the way, despite it being midwinter and absolutely freezing, none of the girls – drunk or sober – wore a coat. I asked one girl who was more or less upright and coherent why and she said that it was because they couldn’t afford to pay the cloakroom attendants in the clubs. It occurred to me that the girls who didn’t die from alcohol poisoning would probably die from pneumonia. I know public drunkenness is a common sight in towns all over the country now, but I had never seen it before and I was saddened by it.

Drunk or sober, there’s no mistaking the northern sense of humour. On a rare day off, my little team – Jim, my assistant, Colin, my driver and Dave, my motor home driver, decided to drive to Whitby, where we had been told we could buy the best fish and chips anywhere. We found the shop, bought the fish and chips and ate them in the traditional way from their newspaper wrapping while walking around Whitby harbour. We had just rounded a corner – when we stopped, astonished. There, standing on the quayside and staring out into the harbour, was a crowd of about three hundred men dressed as Dracula. They were all shouting in unison, ‘It’s good to talk!’ at a small boat bobbing about with two people in it who seemed to be being filmed from a second boat off to one side. We couldn’t make head nor tail of it and nor could we see who was in the boat, so we went back to the fish and chip shop owner. He explained everything. Whitby was where Bram Stoker, the Victorian novelist and theatre manager, had written his famous story about Dracula. Unbeknownst to us we had come to the town on Stoker’s birthday and encountered a whole bunch of Dracula fans who had come to celebrate. Well, that seemed reasonable enough – but what were they shouting and why? That turned out to be simple, too. The boat had contained my old friend