Dame Judi Dench was crossing Shaftesbury Ave on her way to rehearsal and was almost run down by a speeding taxi, the taxi driver shouted to her out of the window, 'You stupid c**t!". Dame Judi's fast reply- ''That's Dame C**t to you!''

RALPH RICHARDSON achieved fame through sheer perseverance, PATRICK GARLAND remembers a celebrated and much-loved legend of stage and film.

I always like to aim a little wide of the mark,’ said Sir Ralph Richardson. He called me ‘The Poet’ as he did all directors, although in my opinion, directors are peculiarly unpoetic people.

Ralph was known for his benevolence and Sir John Gielgud once complained about his total inability to fathom the character of corruption when he was directing him as Macbeth — ‘like several of his other tragic Shakespearean roles, a complete catastrophe.’ At one of the rehearsals, a desperate Gielgud called out from the stalls: ‘Oh Ralph, for goodness sake, can’t you be a little bit more beastly?’ Richardson tottered down to the edge of the stage and, addressing the shape of Gielgud in the auditorium, replied: ‘Oh Johnny, I don’t want to be beastly to anybody.’

There has never been anyone on the British stage remotely able to replace him and his peculiar brand of poetry, especially when playing rather mundane people, such as doctors or businessmen, and the magic he could bring to roles like Cyrano and Falstaff was legendary. But sometimes his eccentricity, which so endeared him to his fellow actors, was a disguise that concealed his pur¬posefulness, and in certain instances, his selfishness.

When he was a young actor, Ralph Richardson was taken on by an old-fashioned actor-manager by the name of Charles Doran, member of a very distinguished tradi¬tional theatrical family. He reminisced one day about his early life in the theatre. Ralph told me how kind Doran had been to him when he was an absolute be¬ginner and, frankly, not very good. Doran took on Ralph, imperfect and inept as he largely was, almost as a member of his family, staying together in digs not unlike those of Mr and Mrs Vincent Crummles. Time passed and Ralph fought his way steadily forwards with his curious indefinable quality, his personal magic, quite impossible to repeat or imitate, until he found his niche.

I visited Ralph in New York when he was appearing with John Gielgud in a very successful production of Lindsay Anderson’s elliptical play Home, directed by David Storey. It received excellent notices from the critics of the New York Times, but completely baffled a Broadway audience more accustomed to musicals. I asked him how he succeeded in coping with incomprehension on the part of the audience for such a long period of time. Ralph reflected for a mo¬ment: ‘In a way, my old friend Johnny Gielgud and I get on very well with the play, in spite of the audience not under¬standing a word of what we’re talking about, but I must confess that every so often I get a passionate surge of emotion in my body, and I want to break away from the written text, and address my old friend Johnny Gielgud on the other side of the stage, and say to him: “Look here, this is all very well, but where have you hidden the diamonds, Mr Stacey?”

His oddity took many forms. He was cast in the Sixties — rather appropriately, it must be admitted — in a black comedy by Joe Orton called "What the Butler Saw." But when he performed at Brighton, where he was a much-loved celebrity, he was taken aback by the audience’s dislike of that sophisticated and indecent farce.

The play was not a success, and Ralph spent a lot of time in his hotel room, looking out to sea and writing letters of explanation and apology to a mass of reproachful theatre-goers who were demanding their money back. I heard it said with authority that Ralph often used to send back a cheque from his own account for the sum of money demanded when the indignant letter contained torn-off ticket stubs. I was told that one evening in the middle of the performance he stepped forward unexpectedly to the front of the stage. He was playing a conven¬tional doctor who spent much of the farce in a white coat, so he was a somewhat striking figure. Unscripted, he addressed the audience with the well-known cry, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ A voice called out from about the tenth row of the stalls, with hand upraised: ‘Yes, Sir Ralph, I’m a doctor if you want one.’ ‘Oh doctor,’ Ralph replied in mournful tones, ‘Isn’t this a terrible play?

With thanks to The Oldie magazine.

Tosca

"When Stella Roman was playing Tosca in Puccini's opera she was supposed to leap to her death from a prison parapet and land safely off-stage on a mattress. Roman, feeling insecure one night, demanded two extra mattresses. She leaped, and the mattresses bounced her back on stage. She had to kill herself all over again

 Laborious Day

One night, when the director of Peter Pan dismissed the cast after a long and discouraging rehearsal, J. M. Barrie, the play's author, demanded that they all return to the stage. "Impossible!" shouted the exhausted director. "Why?" Barrie asked. "Crocodile under fourteen," the quick-thinking director replied. "Gone home."

[Labour laws, of course, stipulated that children under fourteen could work only a limited number of hours.]

David Schwimmer: Hollywood Grill

After one disastrous early experience, David Schwimmer, a stage actor at heart, vowed never to do another sitcom. Some time later he got a call from his agent, who relayed some good news: He had been offered $50,000 to shoot a pilot and $35,000/week thereafter. When Schwimmer declined, his agent was speechless. Schwimmer's job at the time? He was working as a waiter in a restaurant (the Grill).

[Schwimmer agreed to consider a role on "Friends" only after it was pitched as an ensemble piece. He later turned down a lead role in Men in Black to direct a low-budget feature, Since You've Been Gone.]

David Schwimmer: Competitive

From an early age, David Schwimmer earned a reputation for competitiveness. "When we're on vacation together in our theater group," Mary Zimmerman once remarked, "there's not a moment that he's not organizing some activity which involves a situation where someone can win and someone can lose. "We were on a picnic at the ocean and people started skipping rocks. Before I knew it, Schwimmer had joined and within five minutes there was a point system for how many skips you got, there were rules for how many stones you got, there were elimination rounds..."

["It's very positive energy," she added. "It's the desire to be your best."]

David Schwimmer: Pallbearer

David Schwimmer, famously selective about his roles, was keen to appear in Matt Reeves' comedy The Pallbearer (1996). In a bid to persuade Reeves of his enthusiasm, Schwimmer sent him a note - attached to a miniature coffin.

[Schwimmer got the role.]

David Schwimmer: The Grab

While preparing for their roles in the L.A. production of Turnaround in 2003, David Schwimmer and Jamie Ray Newman found themselves rehearsing a touchy scene in which Newman's character grabs Schwimmer's "package."

"We had been dancing around the actual grab for a couple days," Newman recalled, "and finally Roger Cubble, the director, said, 'You know what, you're going to be doing this five nights a week in front of the audience. Just... just do it."

"So we were already to do the scene," Schwimmer recalled, "and I said, 'Hold on one second, I just want to check something.'"