Bill Paterson recalls the 'cherished experience' of working with Sir Alec Guinness on ‘Smiley’s People’

It is the middle of the recent May heatwave, and Bill Paterson and I share the same concern— making sure our respective dogs will be comfortable and in the shade while we talk.

Once everyone is settled, we sit down over Zoom to discuss what he described in an email to me as ‘a cherished experience’. Paterson, a prolific stage, film, and television actor for almost sixty years, is familiar to audiences from his recent appearances in series such as Outlander, Fleabag and House of the Dragon. He is also the calm and reassuring voice behind the BBC's The Repair Shop. Bill has kindly found time in a busy schedule to discuss his role as Lauder Strickland in Smiley’s People, and what it was like for him as a young actor to work with Sir Alec Guinness. 

Jonathan Moran (JM): Bill, it’s great to meet you. I know you are very busy filming at the moment, so thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Before we talk about Smiley's People, we have both recently seen Zeb Soanes in Two Halves of Guinness. What did you think?

Bill Paterson (BP): I loved the show. I thought it was fantastic. It was like the reincarnation of Sir Alec in front of your eyes. 

JM: Yes, I felt like I had spent a couple of hours in Guinness’s mischievous company. I’m looking forward to seeing it again at the Salisbury Playhouse later this year. So, let's talk about Smiley's People. Do you remember how you came to be cast as Lauder Strickland, and how you prepared for the role?

BP: Well, in 1981, if I was being immodest, it was a busy time for me. You get on a list - you see that in casting all the time, especially these days. So, I suppose at that time, I was on a list of people. I wouldn't have thought I was immediately Lauder Strickland in character, and I knew that Strickland had previously been played by Frank Moorey in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and he was very different physically and vocally to me. But the offer came, and who would refuse such an offer? I didn't need to audition - I think there was something, possibly, in the fact that his first name was Lauder, that they thought about the Scottish connection. “Let's get that Scottish guy who's doing lots of things these days.”

I remember we went to a church hall in Chiswick, and we rehearsed it like we were rehearsing a play, as if it was going on to the West End stage.

JM: Did you get a lot more rehearsal time than you would with a contemporary production?

BP: Oh, much more, I recall that. Lauder Strickland didn't have a whole lot of dialogue to learn, but some of the stuff that the others had was immense. Possibly there was more dialogue in Smiley's People than in Tinker Tailor - some of the scenes were fantastically complex. Barry Foster had a phenomenal amount of dialogue to learn for that office scene where he runs through the points of the espionage and who was connected to who. I don't recall whether he learned all of it or if some of it was on bits of paper, but we had real, proper rehearsal time. So, I got to sit with Sir Alec and have a cup of tea in a chair at the side of the hall. I was in awe. I think the first time I met him was at a read-through, prior to rehearsal.

JM: What were your first impressions of him?

BP: Basically he was quiet. I mean, he wasn't a ‘grab you around the neck and say, “Hey, great to see you, I love your work” kind of guy’, you know. He wasn't that kind of man. He was very courteous and very quietly gentle. I mean, he was very nearly my parent's generation, so I grew up with that natural respect. 

We had little chats about the usual things you do, what you have done - “I did that”, “I worked with so-and-so”. It was just a very easy conversation. My main memory was really feeling insubordinate, because the character of Lauder Strickland was just so unpleasantly rude to everybody, including Sir Alec. “Shut up, George.” “Don't be stupid, George, for God's sake.” It's all kind of very insubordinate, and I felt terrible doing that to Sir Alec Guinness.

I didn't need to delve very deeply to find the insubordination, but it just felt unbecoming and unseemly to be behaving like this. I remember one of the big set pieces, which I think was the Barry Foster one, where I was turning a video recorder on and occasionally getting whisky for people. Barry was talking at great depth, not only on the script, but in general, about the book, and about the overall arc of the thing, and how much we as actors knew, and others were joining in. I made this observation. I said, “Would you mind me saying this, but us guys have had the privilege of having read the script. We know what happens, so we know that Hamlet dies at the end. But in real life, we don't know so much. We're not as informed. The more we know, the more we kind of signal to the audience that we know something that we really don't. In fact, the less we know, the better.” There was a kind of hushed silence!

Somebody said, ”Maybe he's got a point there, maybe there is too much discussion, just play the scenes”. It was almost the opposite of Stanislavsky, the opposite of method. It was just ‘deal with what the script says - don't delve any deeper’. I think it was after that that I got this message from somebody that Sir Alec had said he thought that was a valid point.

JM: I can imagine him responding well to your observation, as his approach on Tinker Tailor had very much been that less is more.

BP: Well, that was very much my instinct, it was a kind of lazy way of doing it, you know. I just felt we can't get to know too much otherwise you're preempting things. 

JM: Were you familiar with Le Carré’s novels at all, and did you get the chance to talk to him about the character?

BP: Not really. I mean, obviously, I had read Tinker Tailor and I'd seen The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The great advantage that we had when we did the scenes at Hampstead Heath, was that John le Carré, or rather David Cornwell as the producers called him, lived within 200 yards and we went for lunch there. We had little meals in his front room, and it was a lovely house. Alec Guinness, Anthony Bate, Stephen Riddle - we all sat there having lunch with John le Carré, who was very relaxed and approachable.

JM: Guinness had been a leading man for 40 years when he came into Smiley’s People. As a younger actor, were you nervous of working with him? 

BP: Yes, of course! I wouldn't have liked to have been playing a major part with a lot of dialogue. I would have been quite apprehensive of that. I really grew up on Alec Guinness from Kind Hearts and Coronets to Bridge Over the River Kwai. You couldn't have gone into school without saying you’d seen Bridge Over the River Kwai. He was legendary to all of my generation. I'm glad to say that we got on extremely well. Being in a similar position myself, working with younger actors nowadays, although I’m not comparing myself to Sir Alec, nobody treats anybody as anything other than equals, and certainly Alec Guinness treated me as an equal. He did have a slight holiness about him - a sort of ecclesiastical aura surrounded him. I wouldn't say he exploited it in any way, but I think he was quite comfortable with it. 

I had one amusing anecdote, because at the time of Smiley’s People, I had just moved to a flat in Charing Cross Road, above the Phoenix Theatre. It was right opposite St. Martin's School of Art. The BBC set up cameras on the roof of the block because you could see down onto Cambridge Circus. I wasn’t in the scenes but they did a shot over Guinness’s shoulder of the view down onto the Circus. Afterwards everyone, including Sir Alec, came and had a cup of tea in my little flat!

JM: Interesting. I've got a feeling that may be a scene Guinness filmed called Goodbye to the Circus, that didn’t make it into the series. I'll need to do some more research on that! As an actor, what struck you most about his technique?

BP: Well, it was this quiet intensity of listening. It's a terrible cliché to say, but the best part of acting is listening, or looking like you've listened! Of course, that was Smiley down to the ground. The scenes with him and Beryl Reid in Smiley's People, it’s just like a masterclass of acting. Her energised attitude of resignation to corruption and the foibles of life, to his quiet observation of her.  You could put that on in any drama school and just say, “watch these two people”.

JM: It been suggested to me by several people that Guinness was dead letter perfect, whereas Beryl Reid improvised quite a bit from one take to another. Do you think there was a clash of acting styles there?

BP: That would make sense. Improvise is a good word for it. You know, you get a line that says, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” and it gets changed into “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”, someone wants to say, “Well, no, that’s not the line”. Beryl was quite a lively person, so they had different lifestyles and they may have been different politically as well.

JM: In addition to Guinness, you worked with Anthony Bate, Michael Byrne, Stephen Riddle, Barry Foster, and Lucy Fleming. I interviewed Lucy Fleming a little while ago, and she fondly remembers your good humour. Do you have any specific memories about any of them?

BP: All of them great actors. Michael and I got to know each other pretty well after Smiley’s People because his wife, a lovely actress called Carol Nimmons, and I did quite a long run in the West End in Whose Life is it Anyway? That was the play that made Tom Conti and I took over from Tom when he transferred to Broadway. So I got to know Carol because she was playing the main hospital doctor, and I was the patient in the bed wanting to end his life. Michael used to pop in and out of the theatre quite a lot and then later, with Juliet Stevenson, Michael and I did Death and the Maiden together for the best part of a year. That was probably about ten years later. So I kept in touch with Michael - he’s a quiet enigma! If anybody is Smiley, it's Michael.

JM: You were in Nottingham for a couple of ‘Berlin’ scenes - I believe it was just one day of filming you were there for?

BP: Yes, it was. Of course, I read the script and thought, oh, great, a trip to Berlin. I understand they chose the Lady Bay Bridge in Nottingham because the British engineering company that built that bridge built a matching one in Berlin after the war. So, I got an overnight trip to Nottingham instead! I spent a long time in Nottingham doing Auf Wiedersehen Pet, so any memories I have are swamped by that. It doesn't matter how short the stuff is that's on screen though, it still involves getting picked up many, many hours before, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

JM: I know you’ve revisited the series recently, what strikes you about it now? 

BP: The gentle pace of it. The lack of the need to punch things out and, although it's mysterious, it’s not hokum. So many of the things that you watch these days that are mysteries, they're just bananas, really, in terms of the storyline. With le Carré though, everything does join up and makes a type of sense but I think it's essentially the pace that stands out.

Those long scenes that I was in at The Priors— that was days of filming if I remember rightly. We shot during the daytime, but the windows had been blacked out, so it felt like long, long nights in those smoky rooms. Everything unfolds gracefully; it was a much more leisurely period. 

"Who ever heard of Moscow Rules in the middle of bloody Hampstead?"

JM: When you were working on it, did you get the sense that it would endure?

BP: Yes, but frankly, I didn’t think it was as good a series as Tinker Tailor. I didn’t think the story was as good. I think even Sir Alec Guinness felt the same. It was perfectly great; I just don't think it had the kind of muscular feel that Tinker Tailor had. By the time we did Smiley's People, Tinker Tailor had already gone into the pantheon of legendary television, so there was no doubt that the series was going to be seen and appreciated.

JM: What do you think made Guinness's portrayal of Smiley definitive? 

BP: It takes great confidence to be so quiet and steady. Most of us would be working very hard at it. I didn’t read any of the Smiley novels before they started being created in front of us by Sir Alec Guinness, so I don't know how close his Smiley was to John le Carré’s intentions. Maybe he could have been played initially by someone like Denholm Elliott, slightly more ambiguous, and slightly more seedy, you know. But Guinness defined Smiley and made it his own. When I saw the series again recently on BBC4, even the act of Smiley putting on a scarf, he’s very fastidious. That’s how Guinness would be and therefore how George Smiley would be. He stamped himself on the character. Clearly, Guinness and le Carré got on very well, so le Carré must have been comfortable with that. 

Talking of le Carré, I was very privileged to be at the German Embassy in 2020, about a week before the COVID lockdown, to see one of the last interviews that John le Carré ever gave. He spoke about his career and about Smiley - he gave a wonderful talk. Afterwards, we had a lovely chat. He sadly died in the autumn and I think that was his final public audience.

JM: Did you know that Sir Alec Guinness mentioned you in his diaries?

BP: No, I didn’t know that.

JM: I went to the British Library a few years ago and looked through the whole period of the rehearsals and filming for Smiley's People. On the 12th of August 1981, he talks about rehearsing in a church hall. He says he really enjoyed working with Michael Gough and then he writes underneath, ‘Bill Paterson, marvellous’. I thought I'd share that with you.

BP: Oh, thank you! How lovely, and to be mentioned there with Michael Gough. That older generation were pretty special - things are very different today. I'm aware of it because I'm 81 in a week and I'm very lucky to be still working. I get to work with 25-year-olds and I see how they have to operate, and how different it is. You were kind enough to share with me the relevant call sheets for Smiley’s People, a sense of calmness comes off them that does not come off call sheets today. 

Today call sheets can look like the plans for the Normandy Landings! It's so complex and involved, and there is so much protocol, and so many numbers, and information, and contacts, you know. The Smiley’s People call sheets are from another world - one phone number at the top, a list of actors, and tea at six o'clock. It’s all on nice, soft BBC paper that you could use for radio scripts because it didn't make a noise.

Filming days can be brutal for young people now. Long, dark days in the studio, short lunches, and lengthy commutes - it’s not as easygoing as it was even in the 1980s. God knows what it is like compared to the days when Sir Alec Guinness was starring in his films in the 1940s and 50s. Perhaps that's what got him about Star Wars, that he was just part of a big machine with all those special effects, and everything else that was going on around him, and he was just a cog in the wheel.

JM: Guinness was concerned about how he would cope with the pace of filming Tinker Tailor, as he’d never filmed a series before. How do you think he would have found life on a film set today?

BP: The filming process on Smiley’s People in 1981 was essentially the same as Sir Alec would have known from the 40s and 50s. Celluloid film still ran through a camera shutter and had to be reloaded and each shot required very specific lighting set ups. Apart from being a bit more technically compact, nothing much would have changed. 

Today he would find himself on units more like his Star Wars sets. Many of the crew on screens and headphones. The filming being watched on clusters of screens known as Video Village and not being watched live in front of the actors. It’s impossible to know whether he would have enjoyed this more high tech industrial process or not. My hunch is that someone who spent the war delivering landing craft under enemy fire would have taken it in his very composed stride.

JM: Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to look back at your work on Smiley’s People and for sharing your recollections of Sir Alec Guinness with me. Happy birthday for next week!

BP: Thank you, Jonathan

As we were preparing this interview for publication we heard the sad news of the passing of Michael Byrne - our thoughts are with his family and friends.

Title photo courtesy of Bill Paterson

Screen captures from Smiley's People (c) BBC 1982