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FP News
Ewan Hooper Actor, director, writer, and theatre entrepreneur Ewan Hooper attended the High School between 1940 and 1952, before going on to study at RADA. The highlights of his career are so numerous it’s difficult to narrow them down, but they undoubtedly include setting up London’s Greenwich Theatre in 1969, and working alongside iconic performers including Anthony Hopkins, Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and John Lennon during his time on stage and screen. You might recognise him from roles in The Avengers, Hi-de-Hi, or, more recently, the feature film Kinky Boots. Caroline Howitt caught up with Ewan in London, nearby his old theatre in Greenwich.
Hello Ewan, thanks very much for joining us. Would you like to begin by telling us a little about your memories from your time at the School? When I started it was wartime, I was four or five, and I remember there were no uniforms due to shortages. My favourite subject was English, and though I wasn’t particularly fond of Classics at the time, I’ve since translated a number of Greek plays. I used to attend the Rep every fortnight, which was situated on Nichol Street in those days. At School I was in the cadets of course, and I played rugby – I’m still trying to recover from the bruises! Did you do a lot of Drama at the School?
What advice do you have for aspiring young actors? Don’t do it! No, I’m joking. Get experience. Take all the opportunities that you can; go to a good Drama school, and get really good training. So I suppose if I was trying to give anyone advice, it would be to go to one of the best Drama schools, like Bristol, and get a really good training: now the training is longer, it’s three years rather than two, and they even give you a degree at the end of it! You clearly believe in the merits of a Dramatic education then? Because some people are in the school of thought that if you’ve got talent then you’ve just got it, that’s it…
There was an opera every second year and apart from that there was very little in the way of Drama apart from what was produced by the eccentric Classics teachers. I would have been so delighted if in my day the school had had an Arts centre of the type you’re trying to build!
No, that’s absolutely not true.
Well thank you for your support! So after School you went to RADA didn’t you?
What else makes a good actor?
Yes, for a year, and then I went into the army. People at the time either got the deferment for national service until they got their degrees or sometimes they went before they went to university. I started off in basic training and was sent off to Libya in the Reserves stationed there. At this time it was quiet and we had quite a lot of fun; I was there for about 18 months, and used to direct Rattigan plays in the tank hangar. It was extraordinary. I survived quite well I suppose. And then you returned to RADA for another year. What was that like? Voice training, voice movement, singing. We had some old actors that were brought in. There was a marvellous old actor called Ernest Martin who had worked with Ellen Terry. He was very old by this time and he was exactly what you’d expect a man of that age to be like. He was supposed to have chased a bus down Tottenham Court Road saying “Stop, Stop! You’re leaving a Junius behind!” Like the classicists at the High School, it was lots of eccentric people.
So it’s a skill like other things, it needs to be worked on, built up and respected? Yes, that’s absolutely right.
There was always a divide between people who were very handsome and attractive, who tended to play people very much like themselves. I always thought that was unfair. I was a character actor all my life, although I got to play lots of leading parts. If you’re not going to rely on attractiveness, you’ve got to do a lot of work on researching things, researching your character. Are you of the method acting school then? We always thought that’s what we should be doing, but in fact, I think the method is too self-centred, and, particularly in the rehearsal, you’ve got to be able to discover your character. To be honest, when you’re actually doing it, there are so many things you need to think about. We used to think that you could follow Stanislavski, and live your part and all that. But in truth there are so many distractions. I mean, you have an audience just sitting there: you can see them, you can hear them very well… Very true. On that note, were there any shows where you went on and everything just went wrong?
