It was the clown in the star spangled suit that dazzled me when my family just took me to see the circus. I must have been five years old. I had never seen such magic- everything bathed in a spotlight; I wanted to be in it.
It was to be the same story, the same shiver of excitement on early visits to the cinema and the theatre.
I appeared in all of the school plays – but then real life got in the way and I settled for a “proper job”.
Freelance journalism took me on a journey where I observed and wrote about other peoples dramas, working in press TV. But always I was on the outside looking in.
Finally on a wet summer’s afternoon I picked up a copy of ‘The Stage’ at Waterloo Station. A photograph of Lawrence Olivier dressed as Hamlet caught my eye and inside the page fell conveniently open on an advertisement for mature actors to audition for the Actors Company.
Sixteen months later I appeared at a West-End theatre in ‘A Patriot for Me’, by John Osborne. The dream lives on…..