26 September 2003
One afternoon in the mid-1960s, Tamasin and Daniel Day-Lewis came haring
down from their playroom to tell their mother about something they'd just seen
on television. It was Nicholas Nickleby, a picaresque melodrama with
atmospheric chiaroscuro cinematography, a ripe cast of British heavyweights,
and an ingénue making a memorable debut in the role of Madeleine Bray, the
young woman determined to save her ailing father by consenting to be married
alive to the monstrous patriarch Ralph Nickleby. It was also the only Dickens
adaptation produced by Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios. "They couldn't
believe," reflects Jill Balcon, 57 years after her first exposure to the
klieg lights, "that I'd ever been so young."
In her long career as an actress, Balcon has been most consistently
celebrated for her finely modulated voice. I can attest that even when on the
phone to the council to complain about its inability to collect her rubbish,
her voice sounds like a solo on the cor anglais. On the stage, she survived the
experience of playing Zenocrate to Donald Wolfit's Tamburlaine in Christopher
Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, despite his habit of bashing her head
about during the death scene. On the screen, she relished a vicious dormitory
scrap with Jean Kent in Good Time Girl (1949), and the honorific roles
that Derek Jarman bestowed upon her in Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein
(1993). She also modelled for Jacob Epstein, who importuned her in the Caprice
restaurant and asked if he might immortalise her head. (The finished work is
now lost, but if you have a piece of Jill Balcon in your conservatory, she
wants to hear from you: "If I'm still on this earth, let me know.")
She lives in the kind of Hampshire cottage customarily featured on
thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. A self-portrait by Daniel, stark and moody and
angular, hangs in the hallway, a Christmas present during one of the family's
impecunious periods. (The frame, of course, is also her son's work.) There's a
fish pool in the garden, by which her friend and neighbour Alec Guinness would
sit, in order to be on the safe margins of social gatherings. (At dinner
parties, she remembers, he would always insist on sitting nearest the door.)
Her kettle is on the blink, so as we sit down in the music-room to discuss her
career, she consoles herself with a cup of last night's cold coffee.
"I didn't want to be in it at first," she says, recalling her
debut in Nicholas Nickleby, "because I was just getting started and
the last thing I wanted to be was the boss's daughter. I thought it would be
awkward being around Ealing in a professional capacity. It's difficult to be
taken seriously if you come out of that sort of stable." Jill Balcon bears
a strong resemblance to her father - she could be nobody else's daughter - but
her relationship with him was frequently explosive: "I was very frightened
of him at times. I wasn't beaten or anything, but I was frightened of his
wrath. He was a formidable figure in the home."
Their points of difference were legion. Her father was dismayed by her
choice of a career, and though he paid her drama-school fees, she has no
recollection of him ever praising any of her performances: "I remember
when I went to work at the Bristol Old Vic. He said: 'Couldn't you find a job
in London?'" He disapproved more deeply of her choice of a husband: Cecil
Day-Lewis, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a married man, and the lover of the
novelist Rosamond Lehmann. When Balcon read a front-page story in London's
Evening Standard, naming his daughter as co-respondent in Day-Lewis's
divorce case, the portcullis crashed down. He refused to attend the wedding
ceremony, or the reception at the Ivy. Charles Tennyson, the grandson of the
Victorian poet laureate, gave the bride away, and Jill Balcon's cleaning lady,
Mrs Pizzey, was a witness.
I ask her about her war experiences. She recalls how she exchanged a few hot
words in a train compartment with the captured German airman, Franz von Werra,
whose cross-country flight became the subject of Roy Ward Baker's film, The
One that Got Away (1957). (Her father went to great lengths to ensure that
this detail of the fugitive's story did not appear in the press reports of Von
Werra's apprehension.)
She recalls her nights in the basement of her parents' apartment block,
trying to sleep under a blue electric light, with the bombs exploding overhead.
"I can remember going out to the Hungaria restaurant and spending the
night under a table in one of the worst air raids of the war. We came out
alive. But where Swan and Edgar's was, where Tower Records is now in Piccadilly
Circus, there were sheets of glass covering the pavement, and water mains
bursting everywhere."
She breaks off, slightly surprised that I'm interested in this part of her
life. "I don't think my children have ever asked me about it," she
notes. "Maybe they've seen so many movies, or they think it's
boring..."
It hasn't stopped other people pumping her for her reminiscences. "It's
very chastening," she observes, "to be a footnote in so many people's
lives." More than a footnote, perhaps, but rarely the heroine. In
Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoirs, she appears as the best friend with whose
husband the author pursues a guilt-wracked affair. In a recent biography of
Rosamond Lehmann, she figures as the depressingly young and vivacious new
mistress who displaces the subject in the affections of her lover. In Sean
Day-Lewis's Cecil Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life, she is the Other
Woman who takes Cecil away from Sean's mother, Mary Day-Lewis. ("Jill
Balcon comes into the picture," wrote Mary Day-Lewis in her diary.
"Everything has the feeling of a nightmare.")
This is the book that has given her the most discomfort. "I encouraged
him to write it because I felt it would be a good way of dealing with his
grief," she contends. "I'm a great one for the truth, and there are
18 inaccuracies in the chapter on Cecil's death alone, and nobody was prepared
to alter them." It concerns her that readers will assume - as many of her
friends did at the time of publication - that her presence in the acknowledgments
suggests that the book represents her own views of her late husband. "I
had made a plea for one or two things to be cut for decency's sake," she
says, "but they weren't."
I point out that her stepson's preface concedes that a Freudian analyst
reading the book would probably conclude that it was the product of the son's
desire to slay his father. "I haven't had Freudian analysis," she
ventures, "but I did tell him to be careful that, in not wishing to
smother [Cecil] with praise, he didn't condemn him. And that's exactly what
happened. Cecil emerged as simply awful." It is the undignified details
that stick in the mind: Cecil hiding in the lavatory to peruse adulterous
correspondence; Jill Balcon's discovery of a note from a later lover, which
fluttered from his pocket on a family holiday; the alliance that Rosamond
Lehmann and Mary Day-Lewis formed against the man who done them wrong. "We
both felt," Lehmann told Sean Day-Lewis, "we were nothing but
obstacles in the way of his desires and determination. No kindness, no
courtesy, sympathy or (apparently) conscience."
The poet laureate's widow views this with a psychoanalytical eye: "I
think that, in a way, a son who has not made it as his father did, has to
assassinate him. I don't think that Cecil was without fault. That would be
ridiculous. But it's how you do it." Daniel Day-Lewis's dynastic marriage
to Rebecca Miller, the daughter of Arthur Miller and the late Inge Morath, has
guaranteed Jill Balcon a place in the index of many more biographies to come.
Perhaps she should be grateful that her daughter Tamasin did no more than step
out with Martin Amis.
We move into the kitchen. My hostess has decided that before she runs me
back to the station, she will make me lunch. Alec Guinness, she says, maintained
that an omelette should be cooked for 55 seconds, exactly the same time it
takes to recite a Shakespearean sonnet. I sit down at the dining-table which, I
learn, was crafted by Daniel at woodwork lessons at Bedales. Compared to the
two-tier triangular egg-rack that I brought proudly home to my parents, this is
a Grinling Gibbons. When Daniel Day-Lewis decided to become an actor, it was a
terrible loss to the world of marquetry. Everything you've read about his
cobbling skills is also true, according to his mother's description of the
exquisite pair of shoes that he made for his mother-in-law, Inge Morath, during
her final illness.
I had thought that Jill Balcon might be reticent about discussing her
children. They are, however, her favourite subject. She tells me how, during
their childhood in Greenwich, Daniel sang at a local church for two bob a time;
how Tamasin went roller-skating at the Woolwich Road baths and came home highly
decorated. "She used to go off with her little case of sandwiches every
Saturday morning. She was the champ..." Mementos of her family are visible
all over the cottage. In the kitchen, I notice a saved piled of Tamasin's
cookery columns; Daniel's face staring from a magazine rack; a poster for Stars
and Bars tacked to the back of a kitchen unit. She admits that she sees her
children and grandchildren - particularly Cashel and Ronan, Daniel's sons with
Rebecca Miller - less often than she'd like. Though Daniel phones every
weekend, he manages meetings only a couple of times a year. In the time
between, she keeps tabs on him via newspaper profiles. "Some of these
journalists are very clever. They have insights into him that I would never
think of."
October, however, offers a double pleasure. Her next acting role will be in
a Radio 4 play entitled Deadheading Roses, to be broadcast around
Christmas, in which Daniel has been persuaded to participate. Will he play her
son? "No," she smiles, "my lover." It is her greatest
regret, she says, that neither her husband nor her father lived to see Daniel's
success; that they knew him only as a rather troubled teenage boy. Her wish
conjures up a mental image of Cecil Day-Lewis and Michael Balcon, walking down
the red carpet to the premiere of Gangs of New York, their differences
forgotten in admiration of their heir.
"They would have been so proud of him," she reflects. "If
only they could have known." Or, if only, perhaps, they had rushed
downstairs to tell her that her son was on the television, looking impossibly
young.