Sixty-five years after his first rave reviews, the star of I, Claudius and Last Tango in Halifax is still drowning in work – and self-doubt. Can a man who won Ian McKellen’s heart really see himself as ‘bland and uninteresting’?
Derek Jacobi is having a bad hair day. “Oh, he butchered it,” wails the actor in mock despair. “It’s the worst haircut I’ve ever had.” Considering he is about to turn 84, there must be a fair few haircuts to choose from. The photographer and I reassure him that his snowy locks are rather dapper, and he seems instantly placated. “Do you think so? Oh, I take it all back then.” His voice is as soft and warm as butter melting on a crumpet, his manner sparkly and self-deprecating. When he is politely asked not to let his arm droop over the side of the chair while his picture is taken, he raises a hand in horror: “Was I being limp-wristed? We don’t want any of that!”
We are in the living room of the London home that Jacobi shares with his husband, the actor-director Richard Clifford, who has been his partner since the late 1970s. The paintings on the walls would make the house feel like a minor wing of the National Gallery were it not for the couple’s russet-coloured Irish terrier, Daisy, padding around the place. Jacobi, who is wearing a grey wool waistcoat, white shirt, blue jeans and navy running shoes, got back a few days earlier from his second home near Toulouse. “We watched the Queen’s funeral there,” he says. He still remembers his parents buying their first television specially for the coronation. He was 14. “We sat there with the curtains drawn, watching it in the dark.” It was only three years ago that he played the dying Duke of Windsor in The Crown. Art colliding with life, the past flooding in: no wonder the funeral hit him hard. “I cried the whole time. It was all done so well. Not a foot wrong, nothing out of place. Immaculate.” He could almost be reviewing a first night.
