‘You name it, I did it’: Sheila Hancock on comedy, age and anxiety

These last few weeks, Sheila Hancock has surrendered. “I’m addicted, really,” she’s confessing. “I just can’t stop myself. I’m at it every night, without fail.” She halts, shakes her head, looks troubled, momentarily. “And everyone is fucking crying all the time. I can’t understand why for the life of me.” She leans forward, blue eyes piercing. Clocking my confusion, she grins wryly. “I’m talking about that television show, darling. What’s it called? No, don’t tell me. I’ll get there.”

Her old pal Gyles Brandreth, Hancock informs me, always makes her find the word she’s searching for when it escapes her. “He won’t chip in. ‘You must remember it yourself,’ he says, ‘because not doing so makes you forget.’ So I do, when forced.”

“The Traitors. That’s it.” She mimics the players’ blubbering. “Do you think they’re goaded to tears off camera? We love the word ‘emotional’ now,” she says. “Getting married? Long day? Emotional! Everybody feels they have to be since Diana died. We’ve become a nation that lays flowers and performs crying our eyes out. I’d like it more if we girded our loins and actually did something, but it’s bloody good TV. Anyway I’m not late, am I?” she asks, alarmed, briefly.

Keeping up with Hancock, it’s immediately clear, is quite the conversational adventure. Hers is a rapid-fire style of tête-à-tête: inquisitive, playful, sharp; quick-witted and potty-mouthed (“Fucking wankers”; “Bastards, darling!”) She’s chicly dressed in triple denim (wide-leg jeans, cap, jacket replete with floral prints, £28, Oxfam) and white blouse. She flits between nuanced thoughts on politics, technology and contemporary culture, and then protesting that as she approaches 92, the modern world is baffling. “It’s absolutely incomprehensible, often,” she says. “The difference between when I was young and now; even when I was 80 and today, is a chasm. Take artificial intelligence…” A waitress is hovering. “Oh, flat white oat milk decaf, thank you.”

“I’ve been having a terrible time these last few days,” she explains. “A friend is about to have a mega operation, so my heartbeat is already a little fast. Caffeine makes it worse. But it’s a good time for a coffee, being here with you.” Why? “When you get to my age, it should only be consumed where there’s a toilet nearby. Otherwise, disaster strikes. And the loos here are lovely.”

We’ve only just been shown to a table at the Chiswick outpost of a private member’s club – her pick. Among the media-types and laptop-tappers, all decades her junior, Hancock is at home. Living nearby, she’s a regular, barely looking at the menu. “I’ll have the butternut squash soup and broccoli salad…” A glance my way. “They do a lunchtime deal, but do have a steak, if you like. Although I’d rather you didn’t, actually. I’m not a vegetarian, but I do think we should stop eating beef.” Soup for two, please.

It’s early January when we meet, Hancock fresh from a Christmas with friends. After one festive evening she spent lamenting the state of the world, again, one companion had a word. “You’re being incredibly tedious,” she was told. “Which I was, certainly. He suggested I try looking for the small things in life that give you strength to go out and take on the big, ugly world and stop only moaning.”

It got her thinking of friendships. “I’ve such a scope of relationships,” she’s realised, “which I take for granted. I live on my own and so many people are desperately lonely, but I have this whole network, different and fascinating.” It’s expansive. There are the Quakers she attends weekly meetings alongside; actors she’s shared the stage with. Hancock is close to her three daughters and eight grandchildren. She befriended a crow while self-isolating during Covid. A mouse, too. “I was chatting to the dustmen this morning, all with incredible hobbies. I’m so swamped by the awfulness of what’s going on in the world sometimes, I forget to take notice.”

Hancock doesn’t often bother with resolutions. This year, however, she’s contemplating change. “I’m always desperately worried about being late,” she explains, “obsessive even. I’ll arrive so early that I sit for an hour in the car waiting, rather than risk being tardy or stuck in traffic.” She parked her car around the corner this morning. “It’s absurd. Everybody is late now; nobody is on time. Why am I the only person worrying?” Last week, she booked a cab to take her into town. It didn’t appear. “I called: ‘Where the hell are you?’ He’d missed my turning. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll come to you.’ I powered along the street, in the freezing cold. Things dropped from my bag. I locked myself out of the house in my rush. After all that, I arrived 10 minutes early! It’s madness.” Perpetual panic has long been a presence. “I’d like to spend the last few years of my life being less anxious, if I could. That would be a gift.” So she’s decided, “to sign up for an anti-anxiety course. You can get it on the National Health. It’s practical. None of this ‘Did you have an unhappy childhood?’ rubbish. More, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”

Hancock hasn’t, she hastens to add, been medically diagnosed. “It’s silly now, gotten out of hand,” she believes. “My anxiety is not an illness, just fear, for all sorts of reasons. I’m bored of normal emotions being categorised as sickness, honestly. Especially in children, put on pills. I find it disturbing.” She sees it firsthand while leading workshops in schools and prisons. “If a child is naughty they’re being diagnosed with all sorts immediately. Rather, they need a good talking to, or to be listened to.”

She sees herself in the kids she encounters. “Oh, absolutely darling. I was off the scale mad. I was a wartime child and lived through the Blitz, evacuated aged eight to people who couldn’t handle me. I had a terrible twitch. I got bullied and I fought and joined a gang and shoplifted… You name it, I did it. We lived such unnatural, awful lives. We lived in fear. No wonder I’m anxious now. But I am not ill.”

If she was a child today, she says, “I would have had everything thrown at me… I’d have been in an offenders institute, therefore in prison for the rest of my life. Once you’re there, you’re set on a path.” Some people, she concedes, require medical intervention. “But having been myself the sort of person who nowadays would be counted as troubled – very troubled – I know I wasn’t ill. I was reacting to the situations I was placed in. And look at what children are facing now: crisis after crisis; violence and war. Injustice and hatred is everywhere. Did you see what Musk said this morning?”

When Hancock turns 92 later this month, given the choice, she won’t be doing much to mark the occasion. “My daughters will probably force something on me,” she suspects, her appreciation clear, if unspoken. “After my award thing,” (Hancock was made a Dame in 2021), “I was going to go home, but they’d organised a big do. I’ve never marked things very much. We didn’t do birthdays when I was a child. Evacuated. War. Mummy and Daddy working. I don’t remember any parties. Maybe a blancmange once…”

Her 90th seemed significant. To others, if not Hancock herself. “Everyone started treating me like a very old person,” she says. “I noticed a change overnight. Suddenly, I was being helped up the stairs.” She feigns concern. “Oh, do you still drive? Do you live on your own? Careful you don’t fall, dear. Nobody had said it before.” She shrugs. “Just like that, it was everywhere.”

She appears fighting fit – is it irritating, all the fussing? An eyebrow raise. “Curious, mostly. They do mean well…” Her tone is unconvincing. Alongside this presumed frailty, Hancock finds, comes another expectation: wisdom. She’s regularly turned to for sage insights and life advice. “Which is crazy,” she exclaims. What do I know? I change my mind constantly. No doubt I’ll say things today, read them back, baffled and think the total opposite.” Counsel she rarely offers up. An ear, however, is always available. “I’m very good at listening. That’s what the grandchildren come to me for. Nothing they tell me gets back to their parents.”

This new secret-keeper role, she’s sure, has helped smooth what – at times – has felt a difficult generational transition. “The most important thing as you get older is learning to let go. You’re no longer in charge. When my daughter got really bad cancer, I had to take a back seat. Ideally, I’d have been phoning up all the best specialists, getting wigs…” But Hancock felt her place had shifted. “She has her husband, her children; the immediate family. I’m no longer there to make suggestions, but to support.”

This change felt more pronounced after her second husband, actor John Thaw, died in 2002 after nearly 30 years of marriage. Her first husband, Alec Ross, also an actor, died in the early 1970s. She has a daughter from both marriages and a stepdaughter. “Both times I had an urge to wed,” she says. An urge? She smiles, conspiratorially. “Well, darling. I’m a working-class girl of the past. You didn’t have sex, you got married. And I’ve been very lucky,” she says of those relationships. “I think you’re incredibly lucky if you have one person in your life who is worth loving. I’ve had two. And they were so worth loving. Only it’s different, ageing without that someone there.”

Born in 1933 on the Isle of Wight, Hancock and her family soon moved to London and she spent her early years above a pub in Kings Cross that her parents ran, before the family settled south of the Thames, interrupted by wartime evacuation. Evidently bright, she landed a grammar school scholarship. “I wouldn’t have gone without one,” she says, “I started before the Education Act – and we couldn’t have afforded to pay.” The same was true for drama school. “I arrived at Rada,” she says, with a hammy eye roll. “It was awful. Most of them just paid to be there: a finishing school. I turned up with my working-class London accent and they spent the whole time trying to get me to speak proper.” Her tutors succeeded. She graduated in 1952. “I came out a few years later speaking slightly more like them.”

Talented and ambitious, Hancock set her sights high. “Quickly, I realised the working-class revolution hadn’t yet happened in the theatre: it was all beautiful, glamorous, posh, perfectly spoken people. I was thought of as a maid.” She auditioned for weighty parts: the West End; BBC television. Nothing.

Relatively recently, Hancock was told about a report from an early audition found in the BBC archives “In the notes, it said: ‘Could pass as educated.’ I got high praise for my acting, then it concluded: ‘Might be useful for juvenile character parts.’ Never did it occur to anyone that I could play leads; lovely parts played by lovely girls. I’ve never been seen that way. I was ordinary: blonde floozy; tits and arse.”

Determined, she wrote to Beeb execs. “I pleaded for someone to see me. Eventually, I wrote: ‘I think you’re very rude, not replying to my letters.’” She looked elsewhere. “I did weekly rep and tatty tours for years. Still, the establishment institutions wouldn’t cast me.”

“Then Joan [Littlewood] happened.” The pioneering director revolutionised British theatre in the late 1950s, bringing working-class stories – and performers – to hallowed London stages. “It changed everything; suddenly all those posh people were out of fashion.” Hancock was rarely out of work thereafter.

Over the decades that followed, she’s been a regular on stage, radio and the small screen. Films, occasionally. She won an Olivier Award; a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut. She starred in Cabaret, Gypsy and Sister Act, Jacobean tragedy, Chekhov and Shakespeare. The credit list is sprawling. Her more recent turns in BBC crime drama The Sixth Commandment alongside Timothy Spall and ITV’s Unforgotten; were both remarkable.

Instinctively unsentimental, she does, some times, reflect on her career. “To my mind,” she says, “I haven’t had a terrific range of parts. Although, if someone reels off what I’ve done, it does surprise me. Still, it’s a working actress’s career.” Not that of a traditional leading lady. It irks her. “Yes, I’d have liked to have played those roles; have opportunities others were afforded.” Early perceptions, she feels, were hard to shake. At points, that bothered her. “Now in my old age,” she says, “I am pleased to have made people laugh. My deep regret is not having played the classic roles. But there’s a bit of me that thinks, aha, on certain nights, audiences were crying with laughter at my performance. Maybe they were going through something in their lives and needed that joy, however fleeting. For me, that relief is the best an actor can offer.”

Some of her contemporaries, she’s aware, bristle when labelled icons and legends; trailblazing pioneers. As if it’s synonymous with ancient. Hancock has no such problem. “I think it does fit for me,” she believes, “although I don’t often get it. I was the first woman to direct in all sorts of places.” The RSC touring company, in the Olivier at the National Theatre… There was her telly work, too. Take The Rag Trade: an early 1960s BBC sitcom set on a clothing- factory floor in which Hancock starred.

“We had working-class women in leading roles,” she says, “with the whole country using our catchphrases. Yet it’s never mentioned. Because it was ‘light’ comedy. In fact, it showed and said something very important about women, under all the silliness: class, politics and gender.”

Other work, she continues, has also been lost to time. “I did a show called But Seriously, It’s Sheila Hancock,” she says, “the result of a row I had with the BBC.” A Christmas party fight with a BBC boss led to her being offered an hour of telly time to do with what she felt fit.

“I would interview someone and do sketches and poems to illustrate it. They wanted me to fail, but a whole series was commissioned. It was revolutionary. Nobody ever mentions it when they talk about women in comedy. But so be it. I’m not bitter.” She waves her spoon in my direction. “Seriously, who the fuck cares?”

Two actresses were all the rage when Hancock was a child: Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft. I look at her, blankly. “See, you’ve not a clue. Why would you? The world moves on. So why be concerned about all that legacy lark?

Hancock has noticed her own memories fade. The other night she couldn’t sleep, “Which happens a lot, so I was listening to this old play on Radio 4.” She heard the entire broadcast. “It wasn’t bad at all. At the end, the continuity announcer chimed in: that was whatever play, with Judith played by Sheila Hancock. I’d had no idea, through the whole bloody thing!” Of both rehearsal and recording, she has no recollection. “And yet, I think I had an accent in it. At the time, I’d have worked so hard… It’s not dementia or anything,” she assures me, “just I’ve done thousands of shows. There are millions of words in this scalp. My mind has said: ‘You’ve got to drop some of this.’ If I can’t even remember what I’ve done,” she asks, “how on earth can I expect anyone else to once I’m a goner?”

Jobs don’t come as thick and fast these days. Not because of any inkling towards retirement. “I miss the companionship,” she says, “of my fellow actors. Being part of a company. There aren’t many parts when you get to my age.” Productions struggle to secure insurance, she thinks, for actors in their 90s. And she understands her body’s limits. She was offered a role in a major touring musical six months back. “They would collect me in a car, hotel stays, eight shows a week… I had to decline, even just the London dates. I don’t want to waste all those days left of my life worrying about doing a performance and conserving my energy, even though I need the money.”

Instead, she’d like small TV or film gigs. “A character that’s compact and complex who says something of significance.” She went up for one such film role recently; an ex-actor character. “So I made myself glam, got all dressed up.” The audition was a thumping success. “My agent phoned a few days later: ‘You’re not going to believe this. They said you look too young!’” She snorts. “‘I’m fucking 92!’ I replied. ‘Please, what have I got to do?’ All my life it’s been something!”

I pop to the bar and pay the bill. Returning to the table, I see my phone – laid in front of us to record – in Hancock’s hand, a look of bemusement plastered on her face. “Sorry, I thought it was mine – they look so similar.” I check our conversation hasn’t been deleted; she cracks a smile. “Not to worry, darling, you could just make it up anyway. I doubt I’ll recall any of the nonsense I’ve said.” And with that, Hancock winks, then shoots off to those lovely loos before I’ve had a chance to say goodbye.

Dame Sheila Hancock is a regular columnist in Prospect Magazine. Her latest book, Old Rage, is on sale now. Buy it for £8.99 at guardianbookshop.com