Terence Rigby as Pozzo, with Richard Dormer as Lucky, in Peter Hall's 'near-definitive' production of Waiting for Godot. Photograph: Anna Arthur
I had a small walk-on part in the life of the actor, Terence Rigby, whose death, sadly, was announced yesterday.
Back in the 1990s Rigby, who had built up a seductive practice in British theatre and television, suddenly decided to relocate to New York. But his initial application for the green card required by American Equity was turned down because he was too close to his referees: people like Peter Hall and John Gielgud. So, out of the blue, Rigby wrote to myself and Bernard Levin asking us to endorse his application. Whatever we said must have done the trick, since Rigby spent his last decade happily commuting between the US and the UK where the work offers still came in.
Why did Rigby suddenly decide to go west? Meeting him five years ago, when he was rehearsing Pinter's Davies in The Caretaker for Bristol Old Vic, I deduced it had a lot to do with his background. Rigby came from the Birmingham suburb of Erdington where his dad ran a two-man firm making hydraulic packings. I had a great-aunt who also came from Erdington and, from my childhood memories, it was a place you'd want to get out of. And you can see how a Brummagem boy, with a love of acting, would have entertained fantasies of the bright lights of Broadway.
In reality, Broadway is a bit more like a grotty Birmingham suburb than we care to admit. And Rigby was honest enough to confess that his early years in New York were a struggle. He lived for a while in the apartment of a partying Puerto Rican family with a fire station underneath and a night-club next door. Eventually Rigby got his own tiny New York studio but, even when off-Broadway work came in, life was still tough: he told me that he earned a meagre $286 a week playing in Mike Leigh's Smelling a Rat. But Rigby was sustained by occasional movie work, the loyalty of old mates such as Hall and Pinter, and by his own immigrant version of the American dream.
What Rigby's curious career conceals is that he had a vital quality as an actor: physical and emotional weight. It was this that enabled him to play the thuggish Briggs in Pinter's No Man's Land, Stalin in Robert Bolt's State of Revolution, and the bullying Pozzo in Peter Hall's most recent, and near-definitive, Waiting for Godot. "Weight" is a hard quality to define: Timothy West has it, as did the late Leo McKern. But what is fascinating about Rigby is that he possessed it from the start, which is why he was a natural for TV cops in series like Z-Cars and Softly Softly, and why he was so brilliant as the boxer, Joey, in Pinter's The Homecoming.
I suspect that kind of weight is becoming increasingly rare for a simple reason: because of the abolition of mandatory student grants, fewer working or lower middle class actors can afford to go to drama school. What chance would a young Albert Finney, son of a Salford bookie, have today? Or indeed a young Rigby with his small-businessman background?
Obviously there are a lot of good young actors about; but I know, from the begging letters I receive, that many are prevented from pursuing a theatrical career by lack of parental income. So we should celebrate Terence Rigby not only as a fine actor, but as an example of a fast-disappearing breed.
