British Library Theatre Archive Project:  Interview with Derek Smith

[Webmistress's Note:  The following quotation from actor Derek Smith was excerpted from a longer interview by Kate Harris for the British Library Theatre Archive Project.  To read the article in its entirety, please go to http://www.bl.uk/projects/theatrearchive/smithd3.html.--db]

..I was an actor, a character actor I suppose, you see there used to be categories, you used to have the leading actor, you used to have the leading actress and then you used to have the leading character actor and leading character actress, then the juvenile character actor and actress and that sort of categorisation seemed to cover so many, many plays, and they brought people in from time to time for what were called special weeks in weekly rep and I did one of those years later at York and I met an actor James Booth who went on to do Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood’s, and actually became very well known and actually years later went to Hollywood and was in some of the episodes of that - what was it called Twin Peaks? or whatever it was - and he had been to the RADA, he’d come out of the army, got a scholarship, he’d come from Southend for some curious reason and he said yes he’d got the scholarship and so why couldn’t I, slaving away in weekly repertory, I thought it would be a good idea, I’d get to London and I’d be seen in the finals of the RADA productions and I sat there and then in those digs on that deal table and wrote to get an application form from the RADA and so I filled it up and I got an audition towards the end of the year, that’s right yes, so I did a whole season at Ilfracombe weekly rep, very enjoyable, very hard work and then wait a minute oh I did this special week in York, that’s right, you see James Booth, he died fairly recently and he was a remarkable actor, a fantastic actor but he was very much like the wide spear, the spiv sort of chap like this and this play was The Scarlet Pimpernel, a version of The Scarlet Pimpernel and he played a French viscount, now the casting, Vincent Shaw, once again was quite wrong because he was the least convincing aristocrat I’ve ever seen in my life and he said he’d got a scholarship and grant to go to the RADA and I thought, well god I you can get there surely I can do that, so that’s what happened about the RADA...