Forget Halloween! Real scares can happen to actors any night of the year. Big name actors, including Zachary Hart and Harmony Rose-Bremner, recall their worst moments – and how they overcame their fears
D
erek Jacobi had a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
