If you have a bad
day, you just come
in and take it out
on the company
or the audience .
Jackie McGlonestrips the make-up from the many faces of actress Jan
Wilson.
NO REST for the wicked, sighs the evil witch Carabosse, lashing
poisonous green glitter on to her eyelids and painting an evil,
incarnadined smile on her face. Here we are in the witch's den --
actually a pokey wee dressing-room at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh,
with Dralon drapes and wall-to-wall brown polyester shagpile -- and the
lady has just dined. Not on eye of toad or slivers of bat and newt, but
on Cuppasoup and a cheese and chutney sandwich.
Ah, says Jan Wilson wryly, for it is she, the glamour of showbiz!
The Wicked Witch of the East smokes the first of several cigarettes
and puts on the full slap, all the while conducting a conversation with
The Herald and coping with a stream of callers, delivering everything
from her microphone pouch to greetings and news that she has made the
front page of that evening's paper after her visit to the Sick
Children's Hospital. We would, she says philosophically, have had more
privacy for this interview had we done it on Waverley Station, or on the
Edinburgh-Glasgow shuttle, from which she has just disembarked after one
of those truly embarrassing experiences that are always happening to
her.
''Coming home today, the train was absolutely packed to the gunnels
and there was this girl sitting beside me, chat, chat, chatting away,
and there was this boy, who knew the girl, standing a few feet away, and
he was trying to tell her who she was sitting next to . . . I felt my
face kind of blushing. I'm sure it didn't, but I thought, 'oh dear, the
train's packed and everyone's looking'. Anyway, eventually, she asked
me, 'are you Willie's ma?' ''
The shy Jan Wilson, when she is not being ''bad'' in pantomime --
something she has been doing annually since 1984 -- will be forever
remembered in Scotland as Willie Melvin's poor old mammy, Doris, in City
Lights, a series that ended three years ago but which is still much
loved and much missed, thinks Wilson, because it was something the whole
family, mother, father, kids, and grandparents, could sit down and watch
without being assailed by vulgarity. Mrs Melvin was, of course, your
stereotypical ma -- a woman in a pinny with an assembly line of ironing.
(Willie, aka Gerard Kelly, is also in Sleeping Beauty, playing the Dame,
Queen Kylie.)
Today's shuttle experience is something that is forever happening to
her. She has that kind of face and she is dead famous. ''I don't drive,
so I'm always on buses and trains and I'm forever getting these souls
who come up and say 'excuse me . . . ', then they sit down beside you
even though you are trying to do your crossword or study a script and,
well, you can't be rude to people. They are always desperate to know all
about Gerard or Andy Gray. Of course, I don't tell them anything, but by
the end of the journey I know all about their lives and their families
and their problems, and they know less about me than they did when they
sat down.''
It is the power of television, Wilson says, and it never ceases to
amaze her. The things people believe! She remembers being in the TV
soap, Garnock Way, years ago and an actor who played a wife-beater was
actually taken down an alley in Glasgow and beaten up because his
attackers sincerely believed he was htting his ''wife''. Well, the worst
that could have happened to ''Mrs Melvin'', we muse, is someone handing
her a pile of ironing. That's what mammies and neighbours are for.
But then, says Jan Wilson, has she not made something of a career of
being your archetypal Glasgow next-door neighbour? It all started in the
sixties when Jimmy Logan cast her as somebody's neighbour and since then
she has lost count of the number of neighbours she has played. The
sixties, my goodness, hasn't she been around a long time? Twenty-nine
years in the business. Twenty-nine years of neighbours, ladies of
ill-repute, and wicked witches. ''Nothing very glamorous really,'' she
says, ''but then I don't have that kind of face, you know. It's easier
for people to look at me and to believe I am bad.''
''Bad'' she may sometimes be, but she is also a smashing actress, tall
and angular with a wonderfully sweet and mobile face. This last couple
of years alone she has lit up the Scottish stage in everything from The
Guid Sisters at the Tron to starring, hilariously, opposite Andy Gray in
Kenny Ireland's summer season of farces at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in
Edinburgh. She has been lucky, she says modestly, it all started when
she left drama school one Friday and was employed by the late Victor
Carin on the Monday, starting off as an assistant stage manager, and,
for a season, played small roles in anything that came along, from
Agatha Christie to Shakespeare. The following season she worked with
Jimmy Logan in the Sam Cree farce, Wedding Fever, in which she played so
many times she eventually had four different parts, first the
bridesmaid, then the bride, and a couple of more mature parts.
''In 29 years I have had only about two months here and there out of
work. I have been so very, very lucky,'' she says. Perhaps, I suggest,
talent also has had something to with it? Well, she supposes, if you can
do your job well . . . Wilson was also at Harrogate Rep for three years
before joining Bill Bryden's Scottish Theatre Company at the Royal
Lyceum in the seventies. For Bryden, she also appeared (''in a pinny'')
in The Ship in Glasgow during 1990 and next year she'll be in his next
epic, The Picnic, also in Glasgow. ''Yes, she's a neighbour, a wifie,
and I think this one knits.'' In London in the seventies, she also
appeared in The Bevellers, by the late Roddy McMillan, and was in John
Byrne's The Slab Boys at the Royal Court.
On television she has been in everything from Bergerac to Taggart and
Lovejoy, in which she played the English gentry's soor-faced
housekeeper. And this year she has made two films, Charlie and Louise,
for the German company, Luna Films, and The Priest and the Pirate, for
VIP, which is set in Edinburgh and therefore there were lots of
freezing-cold night shoots. ''It's set in places like West Granton and
Pilton, Charlie Kearney and lots of other local 'faces' are in it, but I
can't tell you too much about it, apart from the fact that it's about a
priest who comes from abroad and who falls for a young lady. If I tell
you anymore, I'll get told off,'' Wilson apologises.
She is unfailingly patient and well-mannered with her stream of
visitors and her interviewer. Tell me when you want me to leave, I say.
She will do no such thing, that would be very rude, she says, sounding
quite outraged at the very idea. Spitting venom, being a right bad lot,
putting a curse on Sleeping Beauty, and zapping everything that moves
into a trance six nights and three afternoons (including Sundays) a
week, is a great way to let it all hang out anyway. If you have a bad
day, you just come in and take it out on the company and the audience.
Recently there have been few good days for Jan Wilson. Four weeks ago,
her 79-year-old father died, which meant that she had to pull out of the
first week's rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty -- ''I rehearsed a brand new
panto in six days, so it proves it can be done,'' she says proudly.
''Daddy just fell asleep and didn't wake up. It was such a shock. My
mother died five years ago and he wasn't keen to go out anymore after
that, so I was always worried about him. It was a relief when he died so
suddenly; maybe relief is the wrong word, but I feel he is happier
wherever he may be.'' An only child, Wilson was very close to her
parents and lived with them virtually all of her life.
A Fifer, from Cardenden, she was educated at Cowdenbeath High School.
Her parents ran a fruit and confectionery shop and an ironmonger's in
Cardenden. From school, she went to hairdressing school in Glasgow and
the ironmonger's became Jan's salon. Finally, she went to drama school
in Edinburgh, where she did a teacher's training course. Her parents
sold their shops and bought a hotel in Royal Circus in Edinburgh, where
they always did special rates for thespians ''because Daddy knew how
little actors earn''. When she had her children -- her daughters Joanna
and Sarah are 27 and 23 -- she had her parents to look after them and
was back at work five weeks after Sarah, the younger, was born. ''I
don't suppose you'd be allowed to do that nowadays.''
Married twice, first to actor Maurice Roeves and then to Sutherland's
Law actor Martin Cochrane, she is twice divorced and now has ''a
gentleman friend'', Chris Potter, manager of the King's Theatre in
Edinburgh. ''We are off and on and off and on, but we are very close at
the moment. He has been wonderful, helping me through daddy's passing
away.'' Daughter Sarah, who works in the box-office at the Assembly
Rooms in Edinburgh, is also divorced -- ''following in mother's
footsteps, I keep thinking, although she is so very happy now''.
Her daughters -- Joanna is on the Air UK ground-staff at Edinburgh
Airport -- live next door to her in South Queensferry in a bungalow
built by their late grandfather. ''Although I say it myself, they really
are very nice girls. I sent them to a girls' school in Edinburgh and I
remember the junior headmistress saying to me, 'hopefully in this
school, we teach a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new'
and I thought that's exactly what they are getting at home and I have to
say, they are mine, but they have turned out to be extremely nice,
well-mannered, fun-loving girls. We have our arguments, but they are so
thoughtful, I don't know what I'd have done this past month without them
and Chris helping me through.''
It has also helped, she concedes, having Doctor Theatre on her side.
''To hear people laughing, what a tonic! It's so healthy to have fun. We
laugh a lot in this show, I can tell you. I love laughter, I really do.
There is no sound like it, it's just the best thing in the world.''
* Sleeping Beauty is at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, until January
29.
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