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By Root 419 0

during which we supported each other in good times and in bad. In Paul’s case, although he was a willing partner about town in my carefree days, the times were mostly bad. He’d never been healthy – when I first knew him I’d thought I was thin, but Paul was almost emaciated – and he first of all contracted tuberculosis and had to have a lung removed and then, tragically, he developed multiple sclerosis, gradually becoming weaker and weaker. I knew from very early on that he was never going to make it as an actor; but he didn’t have to, because I did. He was my constant and only link to my past in those early years as I was beginning to make it in the movie world, my yesterday’s witness, the only friend who knew me before and after and my anchor in a strange new sea. I am pleased to have been able to make his life as comfortable as possible for him as time went on and I became successful, because he deteriorated very quickly. Paul died over twenty years ago, brave and uncomplaining to the last, and I miss him still. He was always with me then, and he’s still with me now.

As a young actor I made many friends along the way, but few of them were long-lasting. Some of those actors failed and disappeared; two men I knew – Johnny Charlesworth and Peter Myers – took the failure harder and tragically committed suicide. The life of an actor on the way up is tough and many people just walk away, but if you do stay the course you eventually meet a few people whom you get to know, learn to trust and, in some cases, learn to love. I was fortunate enough in my journey to meet a group of friends who fell into this last and most important category. Over the years we have survived the test of friendship and none of us has ever had a row or a falling-out with any of the others; our friendship has been constant. And although our number has been diminished by losses along the way, the survivors remain as tight-knit as ever we were in our younger days.

The group usually meets for lunch or family dinners, or even holidays, whenever we can find time in our busy lives. One day in the early Nineties, we were all having lunch together at Langan’s Brasserie when one of our number, Philip Kingsley, said that it was his mother’s birthday and that she was ninety-eight. We were of an age where we had assumed that none of us had living parents and indeed all of us, with the exception of Philip, were orphans – and so, because we were eating in Mayfair, and because our parents had all gone, we christened ourselves the ‘Mayfair Orphans’ from then on. Philip was made a probationary member until his mother died.

I met most of the Mayfair Orphans in London during the Sixties. Writing this chapter, which charts so many friends loved and lost, reminds me of the era that brought us together and in which we lived life to the full. It was a fantastic time to be young and right at the centre of things and we took full advantage of it. The signs that something really big was happening were there to see in the late Fifties if you knew where to look, but although I could tell something was going on, I was slow to spot what it was. I remember going up to Liverpool in 1959, for instance, with Sam Wanamaker’s theatre company on what, during my leanest period, was a rare job, and having coffee in a bar where a young group was playing, surrounded by teenage girls, all screaming. When I asked the name of the band that was causing so much excitement, someone said they were called ‘The Beatles’. They’re not bad, I thought, downed my coffee and left without a backward glance.

Before the late Fifties there was very little acknowledgement that anyone under twenty-one existed. The pubs were geared for and full of our parents and the restaurants – even if we could have afforded them – insisted on customers wearing suits and ties. But gradually the first dance halls and coffee bars began to emerge and although London was hardly swinging, it was beginning to gyrate slightly. The 2 I’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street in Soho was where a lot of the music stars of the future used to