![]() ![]() He lit a fire on stage it was a very outrageous act.” Nicholas joined the band. “I was amazed at, who had really long hair down to his shoulders in 1961, which no one had. When his guitarist joined Screaming Lord Sutch’s band, the Savages, Nicholas went to see them. Nicholas was in bands while still at school, including his own, Paul Dean and the Dreamers, but “we weren’t really going anywhere”. ‘I used to go home and imitate Gene Kelly, tap dance on the lino’ … Nicholas backstage at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel musical in Edinburgh. I used to go home and imitate Gene Kelly, tap dance on the lino.” England in the late 40s and 50s, he says, “seemed to be a very grey place, but colour in my life came through film – and I particularly liked musical films. It was his mother who took him to the cinema and introduced him to performing. Then Oscar bought a house and, later, once his parents had separated, Nicholas and his mother lived in a flat. They moved in with Nicholas’s grandmother on a council estate in north London until Nicholas was seven. Until Oscar, who had started at a law firm as a tea boy at 14, advanced through the ranks and then specialised in showbiz – he brokered contracts for the Beatles and Sean Connery, among others – the family wasn’t well off. His mother, Peggy, worked at Bletchley Park, and he likes to say she cracked the Enigma code “but she wasn’t a codebreaker, though she wasn’t bad at crosswords”. It sounds very energetic, and I wouldn’t have been that energetic.”ĭuring the second world war, Nicholas’s father apparently worked for MI6 “because he could speak Flemish, so he was quite useful”. “I think I was overdramatising the tongue. “Did I say that? Please forgive me,” he says with a laugh, but also looking aghast. Recounting a sex scene in one film, he writes that he gives his co-star – who happens to be the wife of the director – a “tongue sandwich”. His wife, Linzi, to whom he has been married for more than 50 years, is always telling him off, he says. ![]() On at least two occasions, Nicholas describes female co-stars, of similar vintage to him (he is 78), as “still an attractive lady”, as if it’s surprising at their advanced age. His book is so un-PC that it’s almost quaint. Overall, it’s good that people are more careful about how they speak about others, but there is a willingness among some people to be offended.”Ĭult hit … Nicholas (right) in 1975’s Tommy. “Having grown up in the 60s, and having that freedom to say what you want, now we’ve regressed a little bit. ![]() ![]() I have to be careful, but I still find myself making mistakes, I’m afraid.” Later, he asks me if I “detect an old dinosaur”. With a father like that, says Nicholas, “you could either go the other way and become a priest or you could find yourself expressing yourself with a similar kind of humour at times, which of course is deeply inappropriate. “I reckon my cock has cost me £100,000 per inch.” On being asked to invest in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical: “Now, I had saved a bit, but not enough that I wanted to blow it on a show about cats.” His inclusion of a Private Eye report on his father, the flamboyant showbiz lawyer Oscar Beuselinck, made me laugh out loud: “Never marry,” warned Oscar, who had divorced three times. But sometimes it’s just his turn of phrase, almost Partridgean at times. It made me laugh, often intentionally – going to dinner in Paris with Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in the 60s, 24-year-old Nicholas is taken to a restaurant where they serve only flowers and he asks for chips with them. Over a video call from a low-cost hotel room, he seems fun and lacking in self-importance, as does his book. Pussy galore … Finola Hughes, Paul Nicholas and Sarah Brightman in Cats in 1981. ![]()
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