Bill Bailey

I was born poor and raised in a  rural North Carolina town famous for bricks.  My mother's father was wealthy and owned most of the town, but he remarried a young woman who re-wrote his Will before burying him. I remember the heat and dust, the smell of tobacco and gospel voices ringing in wooden churches. There were plenty of gnats and watermelons and wasps, besides the bricks. So I left.

I began my itinerant life after graduating from university with a degree in philosophy.  It was while I was still in college that I first became involved in the civil rights movement.  Following graduation I was drafted, and, in an act worthy of a southern fried Houdini, extracted myself from the US Army after less than three months, then high-stepped it to Vancouver with a pocket full of money, an old Plymouth and a girlfriend. These were the days when morals were taken even more hypocritically, hence we were refused entry into Canada until we married.  So we married.  Only later, when we were prospecting for gold, did I find out she was already rich.  But meanwhile I served as a prison guard and tried to find a freighter to Japan to study judo.

The gold prospecting failed, and we drove to Texas, where my wife said she had a little ranch. After entering a gate I drove for 30 minutes, passing several houses and lakes.

"Where's the little ranch?" I asked
"We've been on it for half an hour," she replied.

Before separating from my wife I bought a sports car, a couple of motorcycles and a bright red beret.  And somehow I had to find out if I was capable of earning a living. So I got a job at a meat packing house while working on an MA in Anglo-Saxon and organised the first white collar union in the US meat packing industry.  I quickly found myself on the end of a head meatpacker's boot before slithering into a job teaching English and French (which I neither read nor spoke).  It was during this time, joining the protests against Vietnam, that I became an actor. Of sorts.  In order to find out what it was all about I decided to go to England.

On arrival in London I bought a Triumph motorcycle that carried me all over the UK and part of Europe before it was sold with bent forks after a collision in southern Spain with an old lady's handcart - she tried to race me across a major highway and lost. I married again to gain imigrant status. My new wife was a wonderfully skilled actress who taught me my craft, and bore a daughter which we sentimentally named Carolina.  My new acting technique was almost immediately exposed as I became the first full-frontal male nude on the British stage. After a few years of thrashing around on the fringe in London, I finally appeared in a West End theatre with Vanessa Redgrave. A year later I was invited to join the National Theatre for an Australian tour of The Front Page and a couple of other plays when I returned to the Old Vic. Radio and television appearances followed, then feature films. Principally as a character actor or spit-'n'-cough specialist, I appeared in The New Avengers, Masters of the Game, Philip Marlow Private Eye, Yes, Prime Minister, Around the World in 80 Days, the US TV series The Nightmare Years and lately as crazed Texan billionaires in Eureka Street and Frightmares for Warner Bros.  Feature film credits include The Omen, Superman II, Yanks, Haunted Honeymoon, Ishtar and - my latest appearance - as a medieval French nobleman in Disney's The Visitors (not yet released). Meanwhile my stage career spluttered along in the background with a return to the National Theatre for a revival of Arthur Miller's The Fall, Bus Stop with Jerry Hall at the Lyric Theatre and Conversations With My Father with Judd Hirsch at the Old Vic.

Unless you are a star or hard-working or lucky, art is never enough. So I managed to squeeze in a few more professions when the trade winds were not blowing.  I have been - in no particular order - a bouncer, a legal typist, playwright, male model, judo teacher, a technical writer of medical handbooks, gym instructor, philosophy instructor and wheat cutter.  I only accept cash for these jobs.

One of my plays - Strike! - was written in ten days to be rehearsed and then toured during the Great British Miners' Strike of 1984-85.  It was a strike which could have become a civil war during the years when Thatcher was prime minister. The play was toured around the coal fields in an attempt to raise morale, and the actors and I joined the picket lines and dodged police boots on frosty mornings. Partly because of my activities in this strike, I was, during a tour of Moscow and Leningrad, invited by Gennady Pyatakov, a member of the Soviet Presidium, to attend plays and meet with Russian actors and directors to discuss the differences in artistic approaches between West and East.  It was the best of times and the worst of times.  Shortly afterwards, as I sought to re-establish contact with my first wife, Sandra, I discovered she had been burned to death in Texas.

Split Infinities is one of my novels which introduces a full house of colourful characters on a swiftly moving landscape which draws the reader into thought-provoking human and political revelations. It is partly set in North London, where I have lived for many years. I have recently completed a short and very accessible work on political philosophy called The Ghost Society, my ninth book.  A publication date for The Ghost Society has not yet been agreed.

After the divorce of my second wife, I have resisted any temptations to remarry. I live happily in a small flat with my African grey parrot, Dizzy. Dizzy has an astonishing vocal range which includes telephone calls and answerphone, intruders, girl friends, alarm clocks and a dazzling gutter vocabulary. I live alone otherwise, but have developed a long-term, unexpected, completely baffling, totally uncharacteristic love affair with a lady who lives across the road from me, and...

Well, that's another story.  Maybe later.