There is one argument that says that an actor doesn’t need to have had a hard time in order to portray someone who has. And there is another that says that all experiences, including adversity, should be used to enrich the performer’s range. Coming face to face with Timothy Spall, you also come face to face with this continuing debate. For Spall is portraying Terry Cannings, husband of Angela Cannings, who was wrongly jailed for killing two of their young children.
During the couple’s prolonged agony, which began with the death of their baby daughter in 1989, Spall very nearly lost his own life to leukaemia, and spent his darkest moments projecting himself into the bereavement of his three children, then in their teens and early twenties. You could say that this in itself was an instance of both techniques in play, a straight mix of imaginative pretence and sympathetic suffering. “That was the only unbearable part of it all,” says Spall. “How they and my wife would feel if I didn’t make it.”
As with many cancer sufferers, Spall felt the cure to be crueller than the illness. While his first dose of chemotherapy put him into remission almost at once, it also allowed a chest infection to sneak in through his weakened immune system. “I had this fungus thing in my chest and I was getting pretty close to being in intensive care,” he says. “They give you massive quantities of antibiotics. You just feel shit. But you also stop worrying. That’s how you die, I suppose. You don’t know who you are, and it’s not as if you want to. I was just thinking, ‘God, they’re really taking the piss out of me.’”
Spall, who will be 48 this month, is now well past the crucial five-year remission, but remains understandably reluctant to talk about his recovery.
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Less still does he want to be cast in the public perception as “That Actor Who Nearly Snuffed It”. We meet in the heroic old sleaze of the Colony Room in Soho. It is weird and empty in the middle of the morning, and it makes Spall, for all his good health, look like a lugubrious revenant. You can see the lure that this wounded hippo face holds for directors, and in particular for his long-standing champion, Mike Leigh. The camera has only to rest on these technically coarse but actually vulnerable features, as it did for huge periods in All Or Nothing (the one before Vera Drake), for Leigh to mine more working-class articulacy than words can match.
Hollywood has taken to him in a modest way; he has had parts in four US movies in as many years, including Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise and the recent Lemony Snicket. But none has made the same professional or emotional demands on him as his role as Terry Cannings in Cherished, a drama about that family’s ordeal. For a start, it’s the first time Spall has portrayed a living subject. Moreover it’s a story, as much documentary as drama, about tragedy of an order that is hard to comprehend.
Terry and Angela Cannings were the couple who lost three of their young children over a period of ten years: first Gemma, aged three months, in 1989, then seven-week-old Jason two years later, and finally Matthew, at four months, in 1999. The cause of the first had been recorded as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or cot death. But immediately after the third tragedy, the couple’s surviving daughter, Jade, then three, was placed on the “at risk” register. Angela Cannings, who says she lived in constant fear of losing Jade as well, was given the choice by social services of remaining at home while Jade was fostered elsewhere, or leaving the family home herself. She took the second option, and was allowed to see Jade for six hours a week, always under supervision. In 2002, she was convicted of murdering her two sons, sentenced to life, and sent to Durham jail, where inmates included Rosemary West and Marie-Therese Kouao, murderer of Victoria Climbie.
After Angela had served 18 months, her conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal. This was the last of three cases to receive enormous attention because of the prosecution’s reliance on two principal experts, one of whom was the controversial paediatrician Sir Roy Meadows, author of the so-called “Meadows Law”, holding that one cot death is a tragedy, two suspicious and three murder.
It is appropriate that Cherished should be a collaboration between the BBC’s drama and current affairs departments, since a programme in the latter’s Real Life series had an important bearing on the outcome of the Cannings’ terrible story: an extensive search through Irish birth and death records of the past 100 years revealed a number of other cot deaths in Angela’s extended family and raised the likelihood that there had been a genetic cause for the deaths of her own children. The programme was shown in November 2003, shortly before Angela’s appeal was heard. After it had gone out there was yet another drama. Among the viewers was a half-sister of Angela’s whose children, when young, had suffered similar but non-fatal attacks. She contacted Angela’s solicitor at once and the appeal was delayed for two weeks while this extra evidence was submitted.
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As with Spall himself, there are aspects of the Cannings’ story that give it the appearance of coming from a past England. There is the torment of a woman, blameless and bereaved, subjected to the moral contempt and cries of “child-killer” from women in a Victorian jail. And there is the figure of the supposedly infallible professional, Meadows, with his pronouncement that two cot deaths in a family have a probability of one in 73 million, while the odds of three such deaths are incalculable. Yet these are only the external truths of the Cannings’ story. The inner ones concern, not very surprisingly, acute depression, job loss, alcohol abuse, suicidal thoughts and breakdown. This was Terry’s lot in the months of his wife’s incarceration.
Spall says that what most struck him when he read Gwyneth Hughes’s carefully researched script for Cherished was that it was a sequence of events that might have overtaken anybody. “I realised that it was a tragedy about the way in which people can be crushed by that which is meant to help them. That really hit me. And I sort of understood it. You can think about these things, but you wouldn’t want to go there. I mean, the absolute of horror of losing all these children and then being punished as if you were killers.”
He met the Cannings and says he was apprehensive about it, not just because of playing a living person but also because of the sheer enormity of what had happened to them, and so recently. From the Cannings’ own accounts, they were still - are still - in the thick of the consequences, with their eight-year-old daughter screaming when she goes to school for fear her mother will not be there when she gets back.
“Terry was very articulate about what had happened,” says Spall. “I thought, ‘What an immense responsibility, to convey that’, because, towards the end of the film, he’s not always shown in the greatest of lights. And there’s nothing in it that says that what happened to them makes them better or stronger people. When he was talking to me, he certainly didn’t hold back. But there’s a point where you have to make the character your own and use your imagination rather than the reality of what happened. The Cannings’ pain was far, far more acute and unjust than mine. Theirs wasn’t just the result of fate - the State was an active culprit.”
No one could dispute Spall’s evaluation of the two ordeals, yet there is an ironic kind of linkage in his own lack of outsideness. If he had not still felt his presence so strongly at the centre of the family’s anxiety in the worst days of his illness, he would not have found himself conjuring up the images of grieving sons. But then, by the same token, he might have died.
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“I can clearly remember thinking that if I needed to die, and if I’d been on my own, I could have,” he says.
When he was getting better, he kept going down to the Thames at Greenwich from his Forest Hill home, looking out along the reach. The picture instantly summons his beloved Dickens, the Dickens of bargemen and drowned bodies, with the river running through his stories like a central character. Like fate, indeed. Spall, indistinguishable from Mr Venus in Our Mutual Friend, standing there with a face as totally London as the actor Ray Winstone’s or the Chelsea footballer John Terry’s.
Spall grew up in Battersea, as had the previous generations of his family throughout the 20th century. He was one of four brothers in a close family. When, during his illness, it looked as though he might require a bone-marrow transplant, the others declared their availability at once. Their father died of stomach cancer at 55. Their mother, who is still alive, ran a hairdressing salon at their home. Spall left Battersea County school, which no longer exists, at 17 with an A level in art. By that time, he had read The Lord of the Rings, was thrilled by it, and wanted to be part of that imaginative world.
He had already been encouraged towards acting by a teacher who had seen him play the cowardly lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz. He nearly went into the Army but, in a last-minute change of heart, took up the offer of a place at RADA. He first worked with Mike Leigh on the TV drama Home Sweet Home in 1981, and later in the director’s stage play Smelling a Rat. Then there was Life Is Sweet in 1990, with Spall giving an agonising performance as a useless restaurateur, and the much admired Secrets and Lies, in which he was Maurice, the kindly photographer with too much family knowledge for his own comfort. There’s been much besides, for Stephen Poliakoff, Ken Russell, Bernardo Bertolucci and Kenneth Branagh. He also appeared at Buckingham Palace on New Year’s Eve 1999. Opposite him was the Queen with his OBE.
One of Spall’s greatest passions is the 19th-century novel. We talk Vic lit for a while, and agree that Dickens’s best were probably Bleak House and Mutual Friend. Spall says he seldom reads anything but fiction, but this was fiction that was the documentary form of its day. It altered attitudes, assisted change. It brings us back to Cherished and the all-too-contemporary case of the Cannings. The research into cot death records by the Real Life programme became an important element in Angela’s appeal. This in turn led to a change in the law which meant that a defendant could no longer be convicted solely on the evidence of an expert witness. After the Cannings’ case, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, ordered a review of a further 258 cases from the previous ten years where a parent was convicted of killing a child of two or under. Twenty-eight such cases were identified, six of which were considered worthy of examination by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
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When a programme like Cherished goes out, the number of people who learn the particular story behind this progress increases dramatically. Spall says he is just acting, but he might be selling himself and his trade a little short - particularly when he has his own vivid example of one thing leading to another.
Cherished will be broadcast on BBC One on Tuesday
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