Richard Johnson was earning serious money in Hollywood 35 years ago. "It comes as a curious shock to me now to realise that I was making around £1m a year in today's money. And I managed to spend it all having a hell of a good time," he says, a bright grin emerging from his grey beard and illuminating the hitherto rather tired and crumpled features of the ageing matinee idol.
After flying in from a short winter break in Sweden, he has spent a long day grappling with Chekhov in the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room, next door to a drive-thru Burger King on south London's Clapham High Street. It's now early evening and we are across the road in a bar offering a vast range of Belgian brews. Johnson asks for red wine instead and carries it to a little cubicle where his actor's voice has no trouble competing with the background music.
Yes, he's looking forward to going back to Stratford, where it all began for him. "It's a bit like revisiting an old lover," he says. "Back in 1957, I was in love both with Shakespeare and with the idea of a company of top actors bringing his works to life in a small town. When I arrived there, Charles Laughton was playing Lear and Paul Robeson was doing Othello. Soon I was Orlando to Peggy Ashcroft's Rosalind. It was a wonderful experience."
Exactly 40 years ago, Johnson was one of the happy few selected by Peter Hall to be an associate artist when the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre became the RSC. He's been returning at roughly 10-year intervals ever since. "It would have been nice to be able to afford to go back more often," he says, the grin playing around the beard again. "Unfortunately, what my agent used to call the 'shit factor' comes into play - the better quality the work, the less the money."
The RSC was still in its infancy when Johnson's name used to appear in the programme "by permission of MGM". He had been spotted as one of the "roaring boys" of British theatre, along with Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole and Robert Stephens. And, like them, he evidently felt impelled to live up to the tag. "I knew it wasn't going to last for ever, but I also knew I had to enjoy it while the time was right." So there were the latest Aston Martins, the rented villa in St Tropez and the marriage to Kim Novak, closely followed by the expensive divorce. And there were the best hotel suites and the late-night parties with Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. Not to mention Frank Sinatra, who called him Dicky Boy. "The whole world stopped for Sinatra," he recalls. "He had the most astounding personality and energy."
But the West End stage beckoning with John Mortimer's The Wrong Side of the Park. "My Hollywood agent said, 'What do you want to go back to London for? Nobody will hear of you if you stay there.' But I've always liked the idea of mixing it with the screen work. I've always loved the stage."
It's no exaggeration to describe stage-acting as one of the three passions of Johnson's life. The other two are women - decorously referred to as "the ladies" - and food. "I picked up cooking during the intervals between being married," he says. "I was always being told I should open a restaurant. I suppose it went to my head." Enough for Johnson and his current partner, fashion designer Lynne Gurney, to invest a small fortune in a country- house hotel near Marlborough. And then lose it.
The bank's withdrawal of his overdraft during the recession coincided with another expensive divorce settlement, this time from his third wife, Swedish model Marie-Louise Norlund. "So now I'm constantly worried where the next job is coming from. At least at my age the opposition gets less and less because they keep dying," he chuckles. Johnson himself is over 70. "And no," he says, "it doesn't get any easier. When I was a young man, I could learn my lines on the bus taking me to the theatre. Now I have to sweat over them."
So why does he put himself through it? Why not stick to film and television work, which he reckons is easy by comparison? "Because it's a thrilling thing to know that people have paid to see you. The moment you walk on the stage, you can feel their expectations sucking a performance out of you. There's nothing like it."
Right now, he's relishing the prospect of his latest Stratford comeback as Dorn in The Seagull, seeing the old doctor as having the voice of Chekhov himself. "It's the view of the realist," he says, "wry and humorous, slightly cynical without being unkind." Dorn is also, I point out, a man with a past. Johnson happily concurs. "The ladies have been good to him," he says, "but what can he do about it? Seems a realistic attitude to me." And does it strike a few chords, Dicky Boy? "Mmmm," he mutters.
Previews of The Seagull begin at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (01789 403403), on Wednesday.
