It was Groucho Marx who said: “I never forget a face – but in your case I’m willing to make an exception.” Yet for those in showbiz, not being forgotten is the mark of greatness in a profession where memories are short and anonymity is considered to be nothing short of a heinous crime.
According to showbiz lore there are five stages in the career of every actor. In my case they are: “Who is Michael Simkins?”, “Who is this Michael Simkins?”, “Get me Michael Simkins!”, “Get me a young Michael Simkins!”, and finally, “Who was Michael Simkins?”
The trick is to advance quickly from stage one to stage three and stay there as long as possible. Yet however hard you cling to the greasy pole, you’ll inevitably be toppled by age, infirmity or changing tastes. Coping with life after the music stops is often the hardest job of all.
I found myself pondering the transient nature of fame this week after meeting my friend Sasha, herself an actor, who explained she’s in the process of downsizing from a house to an apartment. Inevitably this has involved packing boxes, wrapping ornaments and having to make difficult decisions about what to throw out and what to keep.
For her, the hardest decision has been what to do with her deceased father’s cabinet full of awards. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of the most respected and highly regarded actors of his generation. He was a fixture of London’s West End and a regular face on TV and in movies. Feted wherever he went, he had it all.
He died some years ago and is remembered only by theatre aficionados and the over-sixties. His stage successes are long forgotten, while his film roles only crop up on cable channels in the early hours of the morning. Indeed, mention his name to anyone under 40 and they would have trouble identifying him.
Sasha still has a trunkful of his awards and all manner of plaques and trophies – these are the emblems of showbiz immortality.
The problem is, they not only take up a lot of space but they also are unspeakably ugly. Fashioned from glass and chrome (as was the fashion of the time), they’re the last thing you’d want to have cluttering up your flat.
So what, Sasha wanted to know, should she do with them? Put them in storage or give them to a charity shop?
She’d naturally prefer the latter course, but who in their right mind wants to purchase other people’s gongs? And there’s no point donating them to a theatre museum, because the UK doesn’t have one.
In the end Sasha has decided on the most unlikely course of all. She has kept one as a keepsake and has taken all the others to the municipal tip and dumped them. Her decision initially took me aback. Did she not have a heart? With hindsight, I suspect, it’s an act her father – who was a bracingly unsentimental individual – would have approved of.
Actors are notoriously suspicious and tend to cling to our triumphs as if they were talismans. We hang on to our good luck cards, our address books, our reviews and in many cases our friendships, for far too long. The walls of our dwellings are often festooned with posters of past shows, almost as if we need a daily reminder of our relevance. I have so many hanging in our living room that my wife complains it resembles a theatrical agent’s office rather than a home.
But Sasha has shown me the light. As she says: “If I want to remember my dad at his greatest, all I need is to play one of his movies on my DVD player.” Quite right too. So from now on I’ve decided my own collection of awards will suffer a similar fate. That is, just as soon as I win any.
As for my own status in the business, I seem to have skipped straight from “Who is this Michael Simkins?” to “Who was Michael Simkins?” without any of the intervening stages.
Never mind, there’s still time. As Woody Allen put it: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins