Cold War Memoirs

I won the Order of Lenin. Well nearly. Let me explain. During the eighties, working actors were divided into two camps. Half were in India making lavish films about the Empire, and the other half were wandering around Europe making slightly cheaper TV films and series about the Cold War. I fell into the latter group. Starting with the now forgotten "Enigma" starring Martin Sheen and Sam Neill I soon progressed to starring in a three parter as a retired SAS man sent deep under cover to rescue a Physicist from the East. We shot in Duisberg and Berlin in the summer of '86 and it was here that I suffered one of the hairier moments of an eventful career. Visiting East Berlin as I loved to do during my breaks I was returning via Alexander Platz station when I saw the Trans Siberian Express steaming up to start it's journey to... well Siberia I guess. This famous, exotic train in the impressive architecture of the old Wehrmach era station seemed a photo opportunity too ripe to miss. Sadly I was forgetting the travellers Golden Rule when in hostile territory, that it is unwise to photograph anything you can bomb and within seconds of taking the picture I was hauled off to an interrogation hut by three uniformed Stazi to have the film ripped from my camera and after a nerve-wracking twenty minutes was sent on my way a wiser and slightly more right-wing man. To this day I feel my photo of the Brandenburg Gate could have been an award winner.

Which all reminds me of the highly amusing time that me and my mate Bernard were filming in Israel and hired a Jeep. We got lost in the hills above Eilat and were stopped by a soldier in a shiny silver hat carrying a sub machine gun. He asked us where we thought we were, which seemed a tad patronising until he informed us we had wandered into Egypt without the required stop at border control. Worse still the particular part of Egypt we had wandered into was an Air Force base and off limits even to Egyptians. Luckily he took the broad view and gave us three minutes to turn around the way we had come before he started firing.

But all this is digression. The point I am trying to make is that in 1989 I was offered a role in a TV movie on the life of Stalin. Robert Duvall was to play the eponymous role and I was to bring to life the character of Kirov. He of ballet fame and, in the nineteen twenties, the communist party's blue-eyed pin-up boy till he was shot in the back of the head by one of Stalin's henchmen.

We were due to start filming in August when Boris Yeltsin occupied the Parliament building in Moscow and Michael Gorbachov was under virtual house arrest in his Dachau on the Black Sea. This Coup d'Etat made for a politically volatile situation and filming was postponed.

A year later the dust had settled. The Wall was down and the Evil Empire was no more. Half of equity was soon to be out of work or forced to find jobs in posh films on the Indian subcontinent. It was while I was filming the murder of Kirov in the bowels of the Kremlin that the Russian actor playing my assassin dealt the devastating blow. He commiserated with me on the delay we had suffered starting filming. It seemed that had we made the film the previous year, I, like all actors playing a Hero of the Union would have been brought to the Kremlin in great pomp and awarded the Order of Lenin. I was devastated. I had, in my opinion, been overlooked by London's theatre establishment for years in the gong department and now a cruel twist of fate had robbed me of the Soviet Union's greatest prize.

I returned home numb.

In retrospect I must have banged on a little about this tragedy over the years because finally in 2006 my good friend Beth bought the medal online and gave it to me. It now takes pride of place, by my bed, along with my Cycling Proficiency Certificate (1966) My RADA Gold Medal ('75) my Blue Peter Badge ('07) and a National Socialist Party Member Pin from one of my Nazi films.

So things didn't turn out too badly.