Tom Courtenay: 'I'd rather be a proper actor than a film star'

They had public-school accents, ramrod-straight hair partings and knew how to fold a pocket square. Then along came a group of “New Wave” directors on a mission to portray more accurately the lives of ordinary people. 

To do that they needed a new breed of actor. Step forward working-class types such as Michael Caine and Albert Finney. And Tom Courtenay. 

It may be hard to believe five decades on but Courtenay, who celebrates his 80th birthday today, was once a bigger star than either of these now much more famous rivals. 

He burst on to the scene with starring roles in The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), winning Baftas for both, and followed up those with big parts in blockbuster Dr Zhivago – alongside Omar Sharif and a promising young actress called Julie Christie – and The Night Of The Generals, costarring Peter O’Toole and Sharif. 

He was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor in Zhivago but being a big-time Hollywood star never appealed to him. 

He was more comfortable in the theatre. “The film business is absurd,” Courtenay once said. “Stars don’t last very long. It’s much more interesting to be a proper actor.” 

And that is exactly what he became. Courtenay formed a long association with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester where he played a string of classic roles, including Hamlet and King Lear. 

He didn’t give up the movie business entirely, playing the title role in The Dresser, a film version of the hit play about a once-famous Shakespearian actor and his wardrobe assistant, for which he got his second Oscar nomination in 1983.

So when Courtenay was knighted in 2001 it was appropriate that it was for services to both the cinema and the theatre. 

His investiture was the culmination of a long journey for the boy born in 1937 near the Fish Dock in Hull, where his father worked as a boat painter and his mother Annie made fishing nets to supplement the family income. 

Hull was a regular target for Luftwaffe attacks during the Second World War. “On their way back from their raids on the Midlands or Liverpool they used to empty their bombs on us before they crossed the North Sea,” he once recalled. 

“Hull people used to think they didn’t get the credit for the bombing they endured.”

Despite the Nazi bombs his childhood was a happy one. A bright boy who was given every encouragement by his parents, he got into Kingston High School after passing his 11-plus and it was there he discovered his love of performing. 

“I had this little knack, which was my own thing. I wasn’t good at football and cricket but when we got to grammar school, in assembly, there was this stage and I just wanted to get up on it and speak.” 

At 18 he went to study English at University College, London. “I really wanted to be at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art just down the street – and that’s where I spent the last two of my five years as a student.” 

After graduating he appeared at the Old Vic and went on to replace Albert Finney – who later became a close friend – in the stage production of Billy Liar. 

Then came that fi lm breakthrough. In The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner he played the rebellious Borstal boy Colin Smith. 

“Do you know what I’d do if I had the whip hand? I’d get all the coppers, governors, posh whores, army officers and Members of Parliament and I’d stick all of them up against this wall and let ’em ave ’it, ’cause that’s what they’d like to do to blokes like us,” Courtenay’s character says. 

His performance earned rave reviews but for Courtenay this early triumph was overshadowed by sadness as, just a week before the film was released, his mother died of breast cancer aged only 48. 

In his next film Billy Liar he played an undertaker’s clerk escaping into fantasy – with Julie Christie as one of his girlfriends. 

Courtenay was now established as one of Britain’s most sought-after actors. Lean, handsome and unmistakably Northern and working-class he embodied the zeitgeist of Britain in the egalitarian Swinging Sixties. In 1965 his fame became international when he starred as the idealistic Russian revolutionary Pasha Antipov in Dr Zhivago. 

But despite his Oscar nomination he didn’t let his meteoric rise go to his head. 

“A friend’s American wife said all the girls at her school had been in love with Pasha, the part I played,” he said. “I thought, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d known that!’ I had no idea.”

Courtenay felt uneasy about being compared to some of the greats of his profession while he was still in his 20s. 

“I remember there was a photograph from Zhivago with all of us sitting in our chairs with our names on the back. I was sitting between Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson and I thought, 

“‘This isn’t right. I don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those two’. Think of all they’ve done. I felt it very strongly – that I hadn’t earned my spurs. I felt desperately I had to return to the boards and learn how to do it.” 

So, just at the time when he could have become an international star earning millions, Courtenay headed back home to the theatre. 

A year after the heady heights of Dr Zhivago, the 1960s heart-throb was appearing in Charley’s Aunt in Manchester. 

He not only rejected lucrative film roles but the chance of playing Jesus of Nazareth in a major TV production, believing the script was not strong enough. 

“I wondered if I ever did meet Jesus, whether He’d ask, ‘Well, what was that supposed to be?’” he explained. 

He married actress Cheryl Kennedy in 1973 but the couple divorced nine years later. In 1988 Courtenay married his second wife Isabel, a stage manager at the Royal Exchange, and the pair remain together. 

In recent years he has been seen more regularly on television, including in the comedy series The Royle Family and as a wheelchair-bound character in the crime drama Unforgotten. 

In 2016 he played Lance-Corporal Jones in the new Dad’s Army film. For all the plaudits that have come his way Courtenay has always acknowledged the debt he owes to his parents. 

In 2000, in the book Dear Tom: Letters From Home, he published the letters his mother wrote to him while he was at university in the 1950s. 

“After her death the cardboard box containing them became my most precious possession,” he admitted. He also remembered how his father would send him the green Saturday evening newspaper, the Sports Mail. 

Courtenay’s passion for football has never left him – he is president of the Hull City supporters’ club to this day. 

The unassuming acting great who turned his back on Hollywood has never forgotten his roots. 

How appropriate then that councillors this year granted Courtenay the freedom of his home city.