"I'm lucky everywhere": A talk with Patrick Macnee By Jonathan Marlow September 19, 2003 - 11:10 AM PDT "We were television stars when we were still living in the YMCA." Feisty and funny as hell, Patrick Macnee, now 82, tells Jonathan Marlow about his favorite partner on The Avengers, his experiences working with Michael Powell and countless other highlights of an amazing, ongoing career. I was looking at your website and I noticed that, by way of the Earl of Huntingdon, you're related distantly to Robin Hood! That's right. Well, not even distantly. It's awfully odd when you put these things together. My great-grandfather, Sir Daniel Macnee, the grandfather of my father still has a picture in Edinburgh, Scotland - it's called The Lady in Grey, one of the most famous portraits ever painted. I have an enormous amount of pride. I say to anyone who goes to Edinburgh, Scotland, "Look in at the National Gallery there." "Oh, well what will we find?" I say, "Well, you will find a picture called The Lady in Grey, which is one of the most beautiful pictures of a woman you've ever seen in your life, and it was painted by a man called Sir Daniel Macnee." "Oh, any relation of yours?" [laughs] "Yes, he's my great-grandfather." "Oh, any relation of yours?" "I said he was my great-grandfather." Because people don't quite believe that people from the last century perpetuated us little people who live in this century. They think we were all dropped by Martians or something. I think that points to our knack for forgetting the past. Yeah, but not with me and you. I guess not, no. Do you remember much about your early life at Rooksnest? I was fascinated by your brief description of your time there. I remember it very well. My father was a little alcoholic. His name was "Shrimp" Macnee [real name: Daniel] and when I was eight years old, my mother [Dorothea Hastings], who was a lesbian, went off... God knows why she married him. She was 22 years younger. Well, I'm glad she did. She met a woman called ["Uncle"] Evelyn Spottswood, who was the heir to Dewars whiskey. Anyway, she fell in love with my mother. They went off about three miles away from my father to an enormous house and they took me, at the age of eight, with them. I was totally educated by, looked after by [them], but visited my father regularly, whom I still loved in that way that one does, for over... well, until I went into the Navy, when I was seventeen. Because the year was 1939, which is a significant year, because for the next five-years, I was killing as many Germans as I could possibly find. Of course. You were visiting your father in India at that time [prior to entering the Navy]? No, not in India. He went to India because he was given a job and he went and did it rather badly. I believe that they fired him. The only thing he was any good at was training racehorses, [with] which he won a lot of races. Quite ordinary races. But he was beautiful. I mean, he'd look at a horse's hocks and know exactly what the horse would be doing in the next few years. He was a genius with a horse but he was not so good with human beings. My mother ran off and became a lesbian but fortunately went with this very rich woman who totally educated me, for which I am eternally grateful. How did your father pick up this particular skill of raising racehorses? Well, it's interesting, because his grandfather was Sir Daniel Macnee who painted this painting, The Lady in Grey, and his father, my father's father, was an engineer in Edinburgh - Macnee and Company (they've still got the sign up there) - and my father decided, God knows how - it's awful that I never asked him - and went down to a place called Lambourn, in Berkshire, where a lot of famous racehorse trainers went, and he trained. He didn't own because he didn't have any money, but he trained. He used to get paid about five pounds a week for looking after about 25 to 30 racehorses. And he won a lot of average-sized races over a good many years. He died quite young, at the age of 72. I'm 80 now. My daughter said the other day, "But you're 81!" I said, "No, I'm 80." "But mother is 81." I said, "She's older than me." "She never told me that. She told me that you were older than her!" [laughs] So a lot of misconceptions arise... Speaking of misconceptions, there was one little tantalizing detail that was mentioned in your biography. I presume that you wrote the brief biography... Let's put it more accurately. I have a PR lady called Jackie Green who is probably the best PR lady and agent and friend in the whole world. Anything that I don't give you she knows. She knows more about me than I do. She mentions in this biography your had budding efforts as a pornographer at Eton College. Where did you get this biography? It's taken from the Patrick Macnee site. Oh, really? Yeah, but, I mean, if you're - how old was I? - about sixteen, seventeen, the last year of school. Yeah, but I did far more important things. Pornography is very primitive and very easy because everybody wants to know what the inside of a vagina looks like. But, if you run a book on racing horses, and your father is a racehorse trainer and wins a lot of races, you become very rich. So I sold pornography "under the table" but, much more importantly, I sold winners "over the table." As a bookie. Yes. Eton was a very distinguished school in England. During the last year that I was at Eton, when I was seventeen (and bear in mind the year, 1939) people say, "What did you do after school?" I said, "Well, I killed a lot of Germans." "No, I mean, what did you really do, as a teenager?" I said, "As a teenager, I left school and then went to Europe and fought the Germans." "Oh, really? What with?" [laughs] You know what I mean? People sort of don't understand what happened in '39. As if, from '39 to '45, all of our life, which could have been teenage living, was spent splitting people's bellies open with a bayonet. People don't like me saying that because they can't believe people do it. But of course that's what is happening on a daily basis now in Iraq. I long for people to listen to me over what they consider very boring which is things, like what I just told you. It's worth thinking about, isn't it? It's definitely worth thinking about. People seem oblivious to the connection between the period between the late 1930s and early 1940s and our present situation. It's almost exactly the same. It's a complete replay, unfortunately. Of course, we just do not notice and we have not noticed and we let it get to this stage. Few actors begin their film careers in a work of the caliber of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. I hasten to add, and I saw The Red Shoes only the night-before-last, oddly enough, and my great friend, Michael Powell, who directed The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - I met him on that because I think he fancied my body. He was a funny old sort of "closet queen." Oddly enough, Colonel Blimp is awfully good. Have you seen it? Yes, while I was living in Berlin. Marvelous movie, really. He made a lot of good ones. We saw The Red Shoes the other night and it's a wonderful movie. You were also a star in a later Powell film - Pursuit of the Graf Spee (aka The Battle of the River Plate). Well, in the Graf Spee, I had a little part. That was Tony Quayle's there, you see. But also I was in The Small Black Room (aka Hour of Glory) and I was in one more movie of his, I forget what it was... a famous movie, about... the Scarlet Pimpernel! That's right. It was called The Elusive Pimpernel and he made a very bad film in France. We all had a lot of fun. I ride horses very well so I was the leader of the Pimpernel's band and I rode the most beautiful skewbald animal. What was your working experience with Michael Powell? Michael was every bit as good as Steven Spielberg and made, if you think of it, The Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death and all his other movies. God knows how many there were. He was of his time. He died in his 80s about ten years ago. Of his time, I suppose the best. I would not disagree. The significance of your work in television cannot be overstated. Did you actively seek a path to the small screen? No, you see, you didn't actively do things in those days because you did things for personal reasons and that's the way it worked out. I had to leave England in 1952 because I couldn't earn enough money to keep my family so I emigrated to Canada - Toronto - which only had radio. So, for about three months, I worked for some very famous people - Chris Plummer, Lorne Greene - we all worked in the late days of radio in Toronto and then, of course, we had television. Whoompf!, with a capitol "T" and we were television stars when we were still living in the YMCA, we were so poor. Really? Oh, yes. We were the first. It was lovely for me. If you ask anyone in Toronto who can remember or who is still alive, those people - Chris Plummer, Lorne Greene, myself and a number of people - started television. Yes, we were the first people on the screen. And people ask, "Why is it that you didn't make more money and you had to live in the YMCA?" I'd say, "I don't know." [laughs] I don't believe anyone made much money in the early days of television. Of course we didn't. People always think that you do make money on television. I mean, I make money now on television. I'm bright enough, thank God, to package my own television series, The New Avengers, in particular because of Joanna Lumley [from Absolutely Fabulous]. I've packaged them in the most beautiful package things and I hope that I'm going to sell, indeed am selling, a lot of them. I'm sure that you will. Do you have any particularly memorable experiences working on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone or The Virginian? Depends on which Hitchcock I did. I did two. I did one with Larry Harvey, I forget what it was called ["Arthur" - filmed in September 1959], but perfectly brilliant it was; I think that it won the "Best" thing that year... Then I did another one with Hitchcock, the name of which I can't remember ["The Crystal Trench" - filmed in October 1959 and written by Stirling Silliphant], in which the old man directed me and I was doing something else at the same time and I forgot to learn the lines. [In the voice of Hitchcock] "You don't know your lines, do you?" "Well, no..." "No good to me, it's too late now, you'll have to get on with it. But, learn your lines!" next >>> Index "We were television stars when we were still living in the YMCA." "I find James Bond repulsive." "I see opportunities around every corner and I grab them." back to past articles

Jonathan Marlow In addition to his persistence in acquiring obscure films for GreenCine, Marlow is a writer, filmmaker, curator and occasional critic. Not necessarily in that order. He is also a dedicated skeptic. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen February 2, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Five - The 1970's by Eddie Muller January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson view past articles