Janice James meets the actor who played the best friend ...In his new series, Fairly Secret Army for Channel Four, Geoffrey plays an ex-Army officer who finds himself unemployed.
He himself is a former Royal Marine who, after demob flitted thmugh a few jobs before catching the acting bug.
“I was 21 and I thought, 'who needs security?’ Now I sometimes think I’d like a nice, safe job with a pension at the end of it!" Geoffrey told me.
But, surely, he’s one of the most successful actors around? He does comedy and drama, stage and television. “I’ve been doing very well for the last five years” he admits.
I find nothing easy. The part I enjoy most is the one I haven’t got! I’m always nervous when I’m acting.”
Ho started by writing to the many repertory theatres Britain once boasted before landing the inevitable assistant to the Assistant Stage Manager’s assistant kind of job. It was, in fact, about 12 years ago that a stage appearance in a John Osborne play brought him acclaim and attention and sudden success. ‘That’s the actor’s life,” he says modestly. “You need that slice of luck. Talent has nothing to do with it.”
Most actors see London as their Mecca and head for the capital's bright lights and, hopefully, their names in them but London-born and bred Geoffrey did the opposite. For the last 20 years he’s been living in the country in Buckinghamshire.
“When I married, my wife, Sally, who’s a country girl, wanted to live in the country. And now I love it so much, I’d never want to live in town again."
His conversation and insights are intellectual but he looks like a country-man. He has a spare frame, grey-green eyes and a lightly tanned face. He obviously does not enjoy talking about himself but he is courteous and helpful. He’s played many parts but when you meet him face to face, he doesn’t play one. He is himself.
He and Sally, who’s a health education officer, have two children. Harriet is 17 and at school while 18-year-old Charles wants to be an actor.
Geoffrey and Sally enjoy the company of actors. When we first married, she was slightly wary of the profession. She thought they were all dreadful extroverts and, of course, she’s discovered quite the opposite. One nice thing about being an actor and leading this gipsy, hand-to-mouth existence is the equality we share.
“If you’re in an office, you have to face the fact that you might be sitting beside the man on your right for the next thirty years. so you have to try to get on with each other. You’re always with different people when you’re an actor and tomorrow you could be a superstar, or out of work, or dead arid buried. so you're nice because you want to be. There’s no point in being nice because it could advance you.
One can't imagine Geoffrey being anything other than nice When he finally started to get acting parts, he was cast as ‘juve char’. "You know”, he explains, "'juvenile character actor’, the person who doesn’t get the girl but plays the best friend!"
He laments the fact that playing the best friend hasn’t got him many exotic Locations. “Apart from touring the Far East with Derek Nimmo’s company I tend to. end up acting in the studio or outside Pointing's."
He’s a great fan of his screen wife, in Butterflies, Wendy Craig. But is delighted that life doesn’t imitate art. His real wife, Sally, is a great cook, he says. Nor would he like to be a dentist (his on-screen profession).
‘My brother is a dentist,” he explains. “and he told me once about the strains involved. The main one is that everyone’s acting towards you as though you’re Hitler. People are scared of you and nobody wants to see you ..."
A fate which certainly, will never be Mr Palmer’s.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in the July 4, 1984 edition of Woman's Own.