Last updated at 10:48, Saturday, 12 May 2012

They just can’t be trusted, actors. They’re an unreliable, unpredictable lot. They’re in a world of their own and operate to a different time zone.

Peter Macqueen

Peter Macqueen arrives half an hour late after two frantic phone calls checking his whereabouts.

We’ve arranged to meet at the Theatre By The Lake – his home from home in recent years.

Since 2007 he has appeared in three summer seasons and a hit Christmas production at the Keswick theatre.

The weather is wild, wet and windy – a typical May morning in Cumbria – and he finally flaps in, full of apologies and offers to buy tea or coffee.

What with the cooker at his new home in Braithwaite blowing up, he kind of forgot about our arrangement.

He moved into the cottage with partner Jax and their daughter Millie in November after selling their home in south east London and finally making the move to relocate 300 miles north.

“When I moved to London in 1987 I said I’d give it five years,” he grins ruefully.

“I’ve always wanted to move out, I just didn’t know where.

“There was always that thought ‘oooh I can’t be too far from London’, but then I realised that was nonsense and when I started to come up here I started to fall in love with the place.

“I’m a nature boy at heart and this allowed me to get back to nature.”

He first came up in 2003 for a four-week run as part of a joint production.

He was asked to join the cast for a summer season (which stretches from Easter to Bonfire Night) but felt seven months was too long a stint.

In 2007 he was asked again and the prospect of playing George in the classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was too much to resist.

He reappeared as Scrooge in the 2008 Christmas production of A Christmas Carol, returned for the 2009 summer season and was back again for another seven months last year.

“At the end of 2009 we said we should move up here and at the end of last year’s season, I stayed up here and did all the buying and selling stuff,” he says.

Without make-up, wig, a beard or doublet and hose, he’s a lithe figure with a sharp-nosed, expressive face under his bushy eyebrows and looks younger than his 54 years.

His quick smile matches his wit and he doesn’t have an act–or’s voice.

But after a while you notice there’s a richness and roundness to it, the pronunciation is correct without sounding posh or like a newsreader’s and there is a quiet power to it.

As well as the acting, he also picks fights for a living – it’s up to you whether it is bare knuckle, swords, or a plant pot over the head.

He’s always combined work as a fight director with his acting and at one point he was somehow managing to do all three at the same time.

He doesn’t name drop and you only discover his connections with celebrity with a bit of gentle digging.

He grew up in the countryside of Leicestershire and went to Uppingham School – isn’t that the public school that Stephen Fry didn’t enjoy very much?

“Yeees,” he says slowly.

“He was older than me, but he was in my year, they didn’t think he was very bright, believe it or not, so they held him back.

“We were both members of the debating society and I would beat him in debates.

“I would do silly things like turn up in orange pyjamas and look as though I wasn’t really part of it all and I would get a friend to climb in through the window, as part of my debating.”

He left there for a drama course at Manchester University – isn’t that where Ade Edmondson, Rik Mayall and Ben Elton met?

“Yeah, they were in the same year. We went to Edinburgh Fringe and did a few things together.

“Rik was Rik, what you saw was what you got but Ade was actually very quiet, I always thought he was a good actor.”

And was their student flat in those days really the basis for the squalid one in their breakthrough comedy series The Young Ones?

“Well, I went to a few parties there,” he smiles.

“The actor Paul Bradley, who stars in Casualty, is a friend of mine and for a year he lived in a cupboard in their flat.

“The cupboard under the stairs was just big enough for a mattress for him to sleep on.”

After Manchester, Peter went off to the Bristol Old Vic to further his acting and earn an equity card, while the other three concentrated on comedy.

But he was reunited with them and with Stephen Fry for an episode of the 1985 series Happy Families written by Ben Elton.

His gardening skills were honed following his move to London in 1987. “I was struck dumb with panic over how I would pay the mortgage and would do anything anywhere – pack jeans in a warehouse, wait on tables, walk dogs...

“A friend said he had such a lot of gardening work to do that he couldn’t cope with, so I started doing lots of maintenance and got onto a garden design course.

“I designed a trade stand for a friend at the Chelsea Flower Show more than once.

“One year I was also going to Stafford Castle doing fight direction for a production of Macbeth and was learning lines for a play elsewhere!”

His wit, off-kilter sense of humour and tour de force performance as Scrooge in the theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol four years ago, have earned him something of a reputation as a comedy performer.

But he perhaps won his best reviews for his searing portrait of a man accused of being a paedophile in a studio production of Blackbird.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf drew me to Keswick because I knew the play, but I had no idea how to do the part and that is what always attracts me.

“Blackbird was another where I thought ‘I really don’t know what I’m going to be doing here’ and I love that sort of challenge.”

So would he allow Millie, aged two-and-a-half and born in Penrith, to take up acting?

“I would say: ‘just keep doing the solicitor’s exams, you need to pay for my next zimmer frame!’” he grins.

“I’d say: ‘go back and study those law books, I want an electric wheelchair...’

“I always remember that, when I said I wanted to do drama after leaving school, my mum did not stand in my way. She said: ‘If that is what you really want to do, then you should do it’.

“But it is incredibly difficult to do and it is not as you see it on telly, you don’t take it up to be famous, if you do, you’ll be disappointed.

“It is unfair and short-sighted that actors are thought of as bad risks for mortgages.

“They will always find work, no matter what, because they are prepared to do anything.

“They, more than anyone, will make sure they pay their mortgage because they have more initiative than others.”

“No one has a job for life any more, we all have to do two or three different things.”

And with that, the actor and fight arranger headed out into the weather to visit some nurseries for his gardening business.

First published at 08:58, Saturday, 12 May 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk