Two years ago, when Sheila Hancock was 83, she climbed a mountain. In her new film, Edie, she plays a woman who, when her husband dies, decides to fulfil a lifelong ambition of scaling Suilven, an imposing, 731m peak in the Scottish Highlands. With digital trickery being what it is, it would have been believable to hear that she had done it from the comfort of a studio. “Well, darling, that’s what I thought when they asked me,” she says, mock-aghast. “They said: ‘There’s this mountain, and she climbs this mountain.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, that will be blue screens.’ There was this terrible silence.”
Actually, they wanted her to go the whole hog, so she mucked in, camping with the rest of the cast and crew, hauling herself up the trail. “I thought: ‘That’s why I’ve been asked, because I’m fit for my age. There aren’t many actors who are still around who can leap up and down very much.’” It took plenty of training and even more endurance on the job. “Jesus,” Hancock whistles, remembering the physical demands of the climb. “Terrible snaky things. Scottish froggy things jumping at you. Awful. You fall all the time, you go down a great hole … It was miles of that before we even got to the mountain.”
Hancock has a fear of heights, and one crucial emotional scene was filmed right above a sheer drop. “I was so frightened,” she gasps, but still, she did it. “Honest to God, I don’t know how.” Hancock still gets stage fright, she says, despite working in the theatre fairly constantly since she left Rada in the 1950s, but the sense of achievement after climbing Suilven reminded her of the reason she still performs, in spite of it. She has just finished a run of Harold and Maude in the West End. “And one of the best things in the world is when I come home after the show and I put my feet up and I watch Newsnight, and I can think, I did it. That’s a bit like this.”
Even when she is under the weather, as she is today, Hancock is a born storyteller, warm and affable, armed to the gills with exuberant tales. There are plenty of times she has been able to think “I did it” over her career, so much so that the range of her anecdotes occasionally makes you do a second take. There’s the acting, though she claims not to be much of a film actor. There’s the comedy, the novelty single she released in 1963, the radio, the directing, the charity work, the novel, the bestselling memoirs she wrote about grief and loss after the death of her second husband, John Thaw.
She was raised in pubs that her father ran, mostly in London, and puts her work ethic down to her working-class upbringing. She says she still thinks of herself as working class, even now. “I do. It’s so stupid. They’ll call me champagne socialist and all that shit, but I think you do remain what you were, what you were brought up to be,” she says. It means she is never not working, like her mother, who was always “knitting or sewing or machining. I would love to enjoy leisure, but I find it very difficult to sit down and do nothing.”
When Hancock was doing comedy at the BBC, in the 60s and 70s, “I was a little flighty blonde, it’s hard to believe now. I was this sort of floozy in The Rag Trade, and Mr Digby Darling, and Now, Take My Wife – the titles say it all.” After a while, she grew tired of “nice” roles, and at a party, she remembers, “I got rather drunk. I complained that they kept giving me silly comedy things, and somebody said: ‘Madame’s getting very choosy about what she does..’ I said: ‘That’s because you keep offering me such rubbish.’”
But she had been heard enough to get her own show, 1972’s But Seriously, It’s Sheila Hancock, the writing credits for which are astonishing: Germaine Greer, Roger McGough, John Betjeman, Harold Pinter … When pulling it together, she wanted to do a sketch she’d tried in revue with Kenneth Williams, about a mad landlady. “My director said I couldn’t do it because it was so unattractive. I said: ‘I’m doing it, because I know it works.” It went all the way to the top, and eventually, she got permission to try it in front of an audience. If it tanked in the studio, they’d cut it from broadcast.” It did go well in the studio, she recalls, and it did go out. “And I didn’t work for the BBC for 10 years.” She puts that down to her insisting on that particular sketch. “I do,” she nods. “Years later, somebody told me there was a file that said ‘difficult’.”
In Edie, Hancock plays a curmudgeonly woman who eventually admits, in a gut-wrenching scene, that she regrets almost all of her life, having befriended an aimless young man, played by Kevin Guthrie. Hancock herself seems frequently, quietly furious when talk turns to politics, particularly the idea that there is irreparable animosity between generations. “I think it’s in the interests of government to drive a wedge between the old and the young, and I think that’s tragic because we can get so much from one another.” Why does she think they would want to amplify a divide? “Well, they probably want to justify cutting pensions or something like that. At the moment, they daren’t do that. And if it’s rubbed in that the youngsters are suffering and having a dreadful time, maybe the older people will be more prepared to take a cut? I don’t know. I’m so horribly cynical about these things that I suspect it’s something like that.”
Brexit, particularly, left her desolate. “I have been really depressed about it, because for me, it’s a profound thing. It’s not to do with what will happen to us financially, but it’s to do with the war.” Hancock was six when the second world war broke out, and she was evacuated to Berkshire when she was eight. “Having lived through a vicious, ugly, ghastly war, and thinking, [after it], our enemies are our friends, how wonderful is that? It seemed such a wonderful step forward for humanity. And to see that just come down …” She looks genuinely distraught now.
She says she was furious about the referendum result for a long time, so much so that she couldn’t bear to listen to what the other side had to say. But now, she’s listening, and she is finding her way to hope again. “I think we’ll go through that, and out the other side and a new, more realistic liberalism will come. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m clinging on to. It’s up to all of us, and certainly the politicians, to make that change profound and good. Because something rotten has got to be dug up and something really splendid must flower in its place.”
It’s hard not to spend an hour having tea with Hancock without feeling as if change for the better is inevitable; she has a galvanising, rolled-up-sleeves way about her. “I was chancellor of Portsmouth University,” she recalls, because, well, of course she was, “and I always used to say in my speech: ‘Awful things will happen, life is not a bowl of cherries, but the great thing is, it’s up to you how or if you deal with them. Maybe you won’t, and that’s your choice. But it’s up to you’.”
Hancock knows from experience, from all sides of it, that it isn’t always easy. “But it is the only way to kind of live your life, really. I have gained no wisdom at all in my old age, but that’s the only message I have. It’s down to you, ultimately. It really is.”
• Edie is out on release
