Tom Conti will for ever be associated with his portrayal of Costas, the soulful-eyed love-’em-and-leave-’em Greek taverna owner who seduces bored Liverpudlian housewife Pauline Collins in the brilliant film Shirley Valentine.
She got an Oscar nomination and won the best actress Bafta . . . he got a reputation as a sex symbol, which sticks to him like a crystal to a chandelier.
Off-screen, he’s seen quite a bit of love action, too. Soon after he married his actress wife, Kara, in a Catholic church in Glasgow 44 years ago, they thought ‘to hell with the rules’ and decided to have an open marriage. It is, he says, what works for both of them.
‘We agreed that if one of us strayed, that would not spoil what we had. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a conversation. All couples should form their own code. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about sex really.
‘People get indoctrinated to think it’s something much bigger than it is. It’s fundamentally a physical act. And people like doing it. What’s important in life is being with someone who you can spend the day with.
‘People can spend the night with countless numbers of people. That’s easy. But who can you spend day after day, month after year after decade with?’
His smouldering sensuality shows no sign of abating, even as his 70th birthday looms — ‘although I’m fortyish in my head’, he insists.
Millions of women must wonder what real life must be like for him and Kara. ‘I fell in love the moment I saw her,’ he says. ‘I just thought: “Oh my God, she’s stunning.” And we’ve been together ever since. There’s been the odd cross word, the occasional grumble, but nothing that’s lasted more than a few seconds, and I’ve never so much as raised my voice to her.’
They met when he was 24 and starting out as an actor. A colleague brought her to see him in a play in their native Scotland. He thought she was the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn and was immediately smitten.
So lust then, not love? ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘It was everything. The first thing was I was just taken with how beautiful she was. Then we all went for a coffee, and by the time our cups were empty I was completely in love with her. I couldn’t wait to see her again.
Unconventional: Soon after he married Kara, in a Catholic church in Glasgow 44 years ago, they thought 'to hell with the rules' and decided to have an open marriage. He says it works
‘I said: “Shall we have supper?” She said: “Yes.” And that was that.’
Indeed. They now have a daughter, Nina 36, and two grandsons — Arthur, seven this month, and newly-born Drummond.
‘Kara and I have never had a screaming match ever in our lives,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen it in the street where two people will be yelling at each other, but I don’t get this thing. We’ve been short with each other, but it’s quickly over.’
His daughter Nina — an actress and a ventriloquist — was the one who gave the game away about her parents’ open marriage in an interview, with a ‘string of affairs’ on both sides.
‘She was the one who went public with it,’ he says, roaring with laughter. ‘She felt awful afterwards, but I said: “Don’t fuss. It doesn’t matter.” The presumed condemnation of the people towards politicians and celebrities is actually misplaced. People don’t care. Why should they?
OUT TAKE
Before his acting success, Tom worked as a bus tour guide and played guitar in a restaurant
‘People can do what they like. As long as they don’t wreck things, then it’s up to them. People have got to be grown-up about their decisions and not read out of books how they should behave.
‘Analyse what you do yourself and do it or don’t do it. But don’t just go along with what’s peddled as moral values. Anyway, people don’t always tell the truth.
‘Supposing people come over to the house to watch something on television and something comes on that’s of a sexual nature. They’ll say: “Oh, that’s terrible.” But they don’t actually care. They just had to say they did.’
I tell him I think people do care — particularly if their partner sleeps with someone else. What about jealousy? ‘Oh it’s got to be freedom for both partners. You can’t have one party jealous and one party not. That’s no good. It’s got to be equal rights,’ he says airily.
This is the way they are around where he lives in trendy, liberal Hampstead in North London. It’s the rest of us who don’t get it. ‘Everybody’s different,’ he says. ‘Some women enjoy having sex without an emotional commitment. They do what they want to do. That’s OK. As long as you don’t bring the house tumbling down — or somebody else’s house tumbling down.’
Just friends: It's something he's never confirmed or denied, but his friendship with Diana is said to have cost him a knighthood
Which brings us to the House of Windsor. Tom was a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales, and when Paul Burrell, her former butler, wrote in his memoirs that she had been involved with an actor, who he did not name — among nine hitherto secret lovers — Tom came in for fevered speculation.
It’s something he’s never confirmed or denied, but their friendship
is said to have cost him a knighthood. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he says.
‘There’s a belief that there was some massive affair, but absolutely
not. We were friends. That was that.
‘I’ve been invited to lunch at the palace since, so I don’t think there is any ill-feeling.’
Given,
though, that Conti has described physical relationships as ‘an
extension of a handshake’ this doesn’t really clear anything up.
Was
it a platonic friendship? ‘That’s not anybody’s business to ask
questions like that’ — which I tell him I take to mean there was a bit
more to it than that. Otherwise why not just say? He gets a bit shirty.
‘I wouldn’t ask you about . . . ’ What he goes on to say is unprintable.
Since acclaimed performances in Reuben Reuben, The Glittering
Prizes and, of course, Shirley Valentine, he has rarely been out of
work.
His mop of greying thick hair and dreamy brown eyes exude
sexuality, but, as we sit in the minimalist white kitchen of his
Hampstead home, he confesses it’s his body that lets him down.
‘Constantly. One does get creaky,’ he says. ‘Although, I’m not bloody 70
yet. Everything that’s happened feels like yesterday. We did Glittering
Prizes in the Seventies but it seems like three years ago.’
He’s not required to be sexy in his latest role, as a pushy producer
in Smash! at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. It’s a comedy by the
late Jack Rosenthal about his own disastrous experience trying to turn
his hit television play, Bar Mitzvah Boy, into a successful stage
musical.
Connections: Tom speaks to Tom Hanks, with Tom Cruise behind, at Princess Diana's funeral in 1997. He denies rumours that he and the late princess had an affair, claiming they were 'just friends'
Nina was just one-year-old and Kara was expecting their
second child when he went to Cambridge to film the television
mini-series The Glittering Prizes.
He says they’d decided soon after their marriage to wait six years before having a child ‘to see if we still liked each other’.
The
rulebook had, by this time, long since been chucked away. I wonder what
had persuaded a nice Catholic boy from Paisley to cock a snook at
convention quite in the way he has.
‘I think it was when we got
married,’ he says. ‘I said I wanted a wedding in a Catholic church as a
result of indoctrination. That’s the awful thing about religion, they
start filling a child’s mind with stuff like “you’re not married if you
don’t get married in a Catholic church” as soon as you arrive at school.
Happy family: Tom with Kara and daughter Nina. He says Nina is the centre of their world
‘Kara should have been married, like the rest of her family, in the Glasgow University chapel, but I dragged her off to this bloody stupid church. It was the wrong thing to do. Because she’s a nice girl, she didn’t make a fuss. That made me feel even worse.
‘When I realised what I’d done, that put the kibosh on the whole thing’ — he means formal religion.
‘Why did I do it? I decided: “To hell with rules.” I lead a decent Christian life, but I’m not a Christian. I’m not an anything, but I have an extremely strong moral code.
‘People are denied doing it [we’re back to swinging] because society has developed along certain lines dictated by Christianity, so a lot of blokes who were probably sexually inadequate or didn’t fancy girls wrote down a whole lot of rules and these rules developed.
‘It’s a way of controlling women and everyone is now tainted with this screwy way of thinking.’
Except, of course, in this house. Tom, you see, likes to think of himself as a ‘new man’ decades before the phrase was coined. He says he’d have been delighted to be a ‘house daddy’ if Kara’s career had taken off rather than his, but things just didn’t work out like that. Which takes us back to Cambridge, The Glittering Prizes and Kara’s second pregnancy.
‘Before I started on the morning of the first read through of the
first episode, I got a message to call her,’ he says. ‘She said:
“There’s a problem. I have to go to hospital. I might lose the baby.”
‘I
was terrified. I went straight to the producer and told him. He said:
“We’d obviously prefer you were with us, but do what you need to do.”
‘Kara
told me there was nothing I could do. She said I should continue with
the filming but I’d have to have Nina. Fortunately, my mother-in-law
said she’d come down and help us, so between us we got through that
week. When we finished, I went to Kara. It was impossible. They said she
might have to lie on a bed for the rest of the pregnancy. What does
that do to the child you’ve got?
Close: Tom with Nina in 1996. He says he'd have been delighted to be a 'house daddy' if wife Kara's career had taken off rather than his
‘However, that decision was
taken out of our hands. The process started. These things are always
affecting, bloody hell yes. But worst to lose a child.’
Indeed, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Nina is the centre of Tom and Kara’s world.
He
says that when she was born, in a forceps delivery, ‘I looked at this
little creature and it was really odd — as if somewhere in the universe a
big switch was thrown to love. From that moment, that child became the
centre of the universe. It was instant. After Kara lost the second baby,
we decided not to have another child because of the possibility of her
having to go to bed for nine months. What would that do to Nina to have
bedridden mummy at that age?
‘It would have been bad, so we decided not to.’
As HE reaches his seventh decade, I wonder if he’s proud of the unconventional life he’s led. ‘Because Nina is a well-balanced, emotionally stable human being making a good living with her talent, I am,’ he says.
‘What better production could you have? The most important thing is you make your children happy and they make their children happy. My grandson Arthur is a lovely, happy boy. The teacher at school said: “That boy is so loved it shines out of him.” If only we could give every child that. The thing is, you don’t shout at children. You’re all equal. You have to be equal in a house.’
He’s right, of course, but I can’t help feeling this life of equality is Hampstead speak for having your cake and eating it. Still, what do I know?
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