BRIAN BLESSED by josh sims

He is a big man. His voice is big. His presence is big. His beard is big. It is certainly hard to ignore Brian Blessed: his movements are outsize, his words boom, echoing around the room. With such characteristics lending themselves so forcefully to the dramatic, to exaggerated pronouncements and extra-large gestures, it is as though Blessed has been genetically-engineered to appear on the stage. You wouldn’t want him kissing you though – not with that mug rug.

Indeed, his size has been something of a forte. He lives as big as the roles he is best known for. He is one of Britain’s best loved and respected TV, film and theatre actors, with, at sixty-five, a CV as varied as any actor who has avoided “resting” for forty years. But it is always the imposing men he is associated with: his New York Critics Prize-winning Augustus Caesar in I Claudius, Porthos in The Three Musketeers, Old Deuteronomy in Lloyd-Webber’s Cats (for which he was able to put his Wagnerian opera-quality voice to good use), Hastings in Richard II, Exeter I in Henry V, Claudius in Hamlet, all for the RSC. On the big screen – all the better to fit him in – he has been Vultan in Flash Gordon, Long John Silver in Return to Treasure Island, Boss Nass in Star Wars The Phantom Menace. Now he is about to play The Baron in the first staging of Ian Fleming’s musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He has, in short, made something of a specialism for playing Mr Big, the character with the reverberating laugh and the rage you do not tempt.

But they have all been big in the wings. Apart from his lead in a feature film version of King Lear – which was also his directorial debut, so why not pick your own role – Blessed has always been a cog in the machine, never the on-switch. Yet it is hard not to conclude that it suits him this way. For such a capital-P personality, he is remarkably un-luvvie. He can turn it on: “easyJet: it’s a maaarrrvellous company with a maarrrvelous service,” he exclaims at one point, with seeming utter sincerity. He slips in and out of accents without thinking and drops highbrow quotes like other stars drop names. But Blessed is quick to flee the canapé fanfare.

“I have played very quiet characters, but, yes, the ones that tend to stick in people’s minds tend to be those that are larger than life, and that’s fine,” he says, from behind that beard, still dark with just the tops whitening, like snow on mountain peaks. “Why do I get those roles? I think because most actors can’t play them. They don’t have the energy levels. I find a lot of the legitimate theatre quite dull. I find myself getting very bored. Ballet, grand opera, great films, I need things that are larger than life, that take you out of yourself. But I think I’m at my best being quiet. I mean, I can’t stand showbusiness. It’s completely unreal, it’s crap, it’s s**t, it’s meaningless, it’s a waste of space. Acting is a noble art. For me it has been a must. But anything to do with showbusiness, all those first night parties, I’m not there. I’d rather go home to my dogs and have them all around me. Showbusiness? It’s the only thing in my life I f*****g hate. But I’m brilliant at avoiding it. I’m past the doorman, across the field and I’m home.”

For many actors to even consider looking at a field, let alone walk across one without getting paid for it, would be unthinkable. For Blessed it is natural: out of the limelight, he is either under lamplight – he has a busy career as a best-selling author of five books, among them The Dynamite Kid and Nothing’s Impossible – or where he most likes to be: in natural light, half way up an ice-face, putting his not inconsiderable arse on the line, the stuntmen tucked under their duvets.

Blessed takes it very seriously too: he has been on three expeditions to Mount Everest, once for the award-winning film Galahad of Everest, another time for a documentary in which his pain and disappointment were too real for the pretend world in which he spends so much of his life. In 1993 he climbed Everest’s south side, reaching 28,000ft, the highest a man of his age has reached without oxygen. He is going back there for eleven weeks after his Chitty Chitty Bang Bang contract ends next March. He is also the oldest man to trek to the North Pole. The son of a South Yorkshire miner, he has always been a man more of action than words. As a child it was Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan who best caught his imagination. He climbed Mont Blanc at seventeen. He is a third-dan judo black-belt. He was Yorkshire Schoolboys Boxing Champ, boxing being a subject about which he can speak with encyclopedic knowledge and passion. “The only real sports in the world are mountaineering, motor racing and boxing,” he suggests. “The rest are just games.”

It is a telling comment – not least that the wild man characters he plays suddenly seem to have an element of the real man beneath them. His Surrey home – which he shares with his wife, actress Hildegard Neil – is not overloaded with chintz, scripts and theatre memoirs, but dogs, ponies and assorted wildfowl: actual living things. His love of the outdoors has become his point of difference in the acting world; he has recently been made president of the National Parks and, far from being a nominal role, has enthusiastic plans to revitalise what in many cases are woefully neglected areas. His exploring has given his wife the need for great patience and an ability to control her worry. But it has given him a life philosophy that puts his trade’s empty glamour in perspective.

“Oh yes, the acting world love all the exploration stuff,” he says. “ ‘It’s just wonderful Brian, just wonderful!’ It seems to inspire people. I get thousands of letters asking whether it’s dangerous. But it’s not adventure unless it’s tinged with danger. The adventure is in coping with it and the great danger is not taking the adventure. Besides, look how dangerous the world is. Acting at its best is holding a mirror up to life, as Hamlet said. But climbing Mount Everest is life. Certainly the idea of being an armchair philosopher – do you believe in God etc. – doesn’t apply on a mountain. Because when an avalanche comes at you at 200mph, then you call for God pretty quickly. In the death zone, above 28,000ft, it’s called the lifting of the veil: you do start to see things in terms of life or death. But you don’t go there to die. You go there to live. And certainly what is absolutely positive to me is that life is the last word and death is not. ‘Death, thou shalt die’, as John Donne said.”

Indeed, for Blessed, adventure has become something of a driving force, such that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang could well be his last acting assignment. That may shock those in a business used to death-bed scenes but for which bowing out usually means the show goes on until the real thing. It will not surprise those who know Blessed, a man whose infectious passion for life gives his name a doubly descriptive quality. He is a man whose experiences, combined with an ability to express himself, have genuinely imbued him with an aura of inspiration that he liberally sprinkles on passers-by. But coming home after his travels to “how complicated and astonishingly complex we seem to have made life” means that the more he is away, the more he needs to be. There is a sadness in his realisation of how stilted city life can be, how we too typically become cogs in larger machines, but also a joyousness in his example of the possibilities of escaping it – perhaps in a fine four-fendered friend that also floats and flies.

“Adventure makes me incredibly happy, whereas theatre rarely, spasmodically, makes me happy, so I think my days in acting are numbered,” he admits. “The experiences of exploring have been huge and there are very few acting jobs that can match it. Seeing for hundreds of miles off these mountains opens cavities in your brain. And you yearn for them and yearn for them. Then you go into a theatre and you find the black hole of the auditorium claustrophobic. In the theatre world now I do get the feeling of being an impostor. It feels like I’m denying someone else a job. I feel I must stop soon and go and do my first love. I have got to that stage where I just desperately want to commit the rest of my life to adventures. At the end of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang next March I’ll be going off for months and maybe that will be farewell to acting.”

He won’t be disappearing completely, into a snowstorm of his own making. He plans to record an album, singing coal-miners’ songs and, showing off, both baritone and tenor parts of “The Pearlfishers”, among other pieces. He will continue writing and making documentaries, the latter both about exploration. These, it seems, are his true legacy, his manifesto to younger generations to stop watching TV – even something with him in it – and go and do something more interesting instead. It is a suitably big statement. “I think the key to living in the new millennium is adventure, everywhere: in your garden, riding that horse before you die, seeing that uncle you’ve hated for years when you know you’ve got to say hello and put your arm around him,” he concludes. “We’re all adventurers. The education system really concerns me. Where are the dreams? They get buried. It’s all straight on to this, straight on to that. ‘Stop dreaming’ is the worst thing any teacher can say. Play, adventure, fresh air, wilderness, stimulus, travel in the end are the great educators. I can’t stand this society’s concept of success and its material needs. It’s all crap. The older I get the more all I want in life is a rucksack and a tent. And the most important thing of all is to have a go.”

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opens at the London Palladium thismonth. Brian Blessed stars alongside Michael Ball, Anton Rogers and Richard O’Brian. It’s a faithful stage production of IanFleming’s original, which was turned into the hugely popular1968 movie, starring Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes.Performances Mon-Sat 7.30pm, mats Wed and Sat 2.30pm.Box Office +44 (0) 20 74945020 or T+44 (0) 870 890 1108.