Milo O'Shea has a story or two to tell about John Gielgud, Jane Fonda and the woman who thought he was dead, writes Donald Clarke.
Nobody twinkles like Milo O'Shea. It's an indefinable quality this twinkliness, but you know it you when you see it. He smiles a cheeky smile, leans forward, and a magical light with no apparent source glints in his eye. This happens most often when he has just remembered a particularly juicy anecdote and, as a result, it happens rather a lot. Milo has plenty of stories and he tells them well.
"Oh, wait till I tell you," he says excitedly. "We went out for lunch when I was last here with my son to this place in Wexford. And there was this couple in front of me when I went up to the bar. So, the husband turns to his wife and says: 'That's Milo O'Shea.' And she says: 'Don't be ridiculous, Milo O'Shea's dead!'" His shoulders heave as he remembers his outrage. "'Wait a minute. I'm not dead,' I says. And she was so apologetic. She was thinking of Richard Harris."
Richard Harris? The gnarled old boozer is not the first person one might expect to be confused with O'Shea. Though they are of a similar generation, Milo has always had a more mellow energy than the Limerickman.
Since the age of 12, when he appeared in a production of Caesar and Cleopatra for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, he has been available to radiate irreverence and clever good-humour. He is still at it in his new film, Mystics, a harmless piece of paddywhackery, which sees him reunited with his old chum David Kelly.
"Oh, I've been working with David since forever," he says. "Revues, comedy, straight plays, Shakespeare: you name it, we've done it. It's a joy working with him. It's like playing tennis with a pro; you always know the ball is going to come back in the right place."
Kelly and O'Shea first bumped into each other when working in well-remembered Dublin venues such as the Pike Theatre. O'Shea remembers those days as being furiously busy. With two or three shows a day "and maybe a late night gig" there was no time for galavanting.
Following his time as a child actor, he had told his father that he wanted to take up the profession seriously. The older Mr O'Shea, who sounds like a decent sort, allowed Milo to go an a tour with Louis D'Alton's famous company, fully expecting that he would quickly tire of the unsociable hours and the modest pay.
"After the tour was over, he said to me: 'Well, let that be a lesson to you.' And I said: 'No, I still want to be an actor.'"
He hardly seems to have been out of work in 50 years. At the same time as he was exercising his comedic chops in Dublin revues, he was cultivating a stage and film career across the Irish Sea. He quickly found himself working with some of the most terrifying theatrical luminaries of the day. I wonder whom he was most excited to meet.
"Oh, Johhny Gielgud, I suppose," he says. "I can remember we were on a tour with the Gate and I was in my dressing-room when there was this knock on the door: 'Hello, it's Johnny Gielgud.' And I said: 'Oh sure. And I'm Larry Olivier.'" I detect a twinkle coming on. He flexes those famously bushy eyebrows and leans forward.
The play for which Gielgud had talent-spotted O'Shea was Treasure Hunt, a forgotten potboiler involving jewel theft. The young actor found himself playing a pantry boy opposite (or, more properly, beneath) the great theatrical warhorse, Sybil Thorndike, who tried to reassure the cast when Queen Mary, a figure even more fearsome than Dame Sybil herself, came backstage at the interval.
"'Don't worry, she never talks to anybody,' Dame Sybil said. So she was introducing everybody and finally came to me: 'This is Milo, he plays the pantry boy.' The queen stopped and said: 'So, young man, where are the jewels hidden?' I didn't know what to say. Should I give plot away? Quick as a flash Dame Sybil said: 'Don't tell her Milo, or she won't come back after the interval.'"
By the early 1960s, O'Shea had established a reputation as a skilled comedian and character actor. It is an interesting and peculiar irony that now, at the age of 77, he is finding himself playing leads in films such as Mystics, whereas in the past he was always the supporting player.
"Well, my reputation was different in different places," he says. "In New York I had a serious reputation as a Broadway actor. I did plays like Staircase [by Charles Dyer] with Eli Wallach and the musical Dear World with Angela Landsbury. I always had that serious reputation there."
For people of a certain age, O'Shea will forever be associated with two projects from the 1960s: Hugh Leonard's jolly BBC sitcom, Me Mammy, and Roger Vadim's outrageously camp movie, Barbarella, in which he played a mad scientist named - and we will come back to this - Durand Durand. A magnificent piece of science fiction nonsense, which begins with Jane Fonda stripping in zero gravity, Barbarella must have been a hoot to make.
"Well, I wanted to do Father Lawrence in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet," he explains. "And they said that was OK, but could I do this space thing called Barbarella opposite Jane Fonda. So, I said fine. But what they didn't tell me was that I would have to do them both at the same time. So, the Italians being what they were, I kept finding myself in the wrong set on the wrong day. But Jane Fonda was very sweet, a very nice lady. Vadim was a bit crazy however." (So crazy that he persuaded Paramount to buy out three full houses of the Biltmore Theatre, where O'Shea was appearing in Staircase, to enable the actor to reshoot a few brief scenes.) I wonder what O'Shea thought about his character being the inspiration for one of the 1980s biggest pop groups.
"Oh God, yeah, Duran Duran. Well, Simon LeBon came to see me when I was doing a play called Corpse in London. And I had never heard of them. I had no idea how famous they were. He was a very nice fellow though, and they asked me to be in one of their videos. Oh, what was the song called?" Arena? "That's right." A pause. "Simon LeBon - he wanted to be an actor." And he smiles in what I unkindly take to be a satirical manner.
In 1976, O'Shea settled in Manhattan with his second wife, actress Kitty Sullivan, having decided that being equidistant from Hollywood and London suited his peripatetic work habits. He does, however, come home often to visit his children and manages to negotiate a job here most years. Recently, he and David Kelly appeared at The Gate in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys; he had a role in the as yet unreleased film of Spike Milligan's Puckoon and he appeared in Rough for Theatre I for the Beckett on Film series.
Mystics, in which O'Shea and Kelly play a pair of fake clairvoyants who surprise themselves by actually contacting the dead, offered him another chance to revisit the city of his birth. "People ask me if I'd like to come back to Dublin to live, but I wouldn't. It's changed too much. I'd like to come back to how it was then."
The main draw of Mystics was a script by Wesley Burrowes, who O'Shea remembered from the old days. "Oh, David and Wesley and I go back to the 1960s," he says. "He wrote it for us. I reckoned if it was written by him it would be good, and it is."
A hectic romp that rather loses its way in its final third, Mystics brings O'Shea his first film lead role in many years. But he is rarely off the television. He has had guest roles in a staggering number of hit shows over the years, including Cheers, The Golden Girls, Spin City and St Elsewhere. He even won an Emmy nomination for a role in Frasier.
Has he worked out what the TV boys value in him? "I think they believe that I represent some sort of sanity," he says. "They always say: 'Oh, we are honoured to have you.' They do regard being in the theatre as something serious, while all the rest of it is craziness."
He has just finished recording an episode of the West Wing and attributes his decision to take the role to a comment his wife made after that lady in Wexford wrote his premature obituary.
"I went back to the table and told my wife what had happened," he says. "So she laughed and said: 'Well, you'd better get out there and do another sitcom.' So, that's why I did the West Wing."
There is something of a pause and he slumps back into his seat. Then suddenly he perks up and, apropos of nothing, says: "Wait till I tell you" And - twinkle fully restored - he begins a fabulous story about Harold Pinter, which I will keep to myself.
Mystics opens next Friday