In all the years I have spent in England, the month of June 2015 has been the unkindest to me. It is cold; the rays of the sun are cloaked in freezing winds. Perhaps it is not so bad for some for I see people walking about without their overcoats and some are brave enough to roam about in their T-shirts. There might have been other Junes which were just as bad but I cannot recall them.

Memory is a peculiar phenomenon and, as I recline in my ever-friendly wing chair, events of the past sometimes pass in stately view before my mind’s eye; at other times in a haze with figures blurred, names forgotten and sequences jumbled up.

No haze about a June when I was ensconced in my spacious dressing room at the Comedy Theatre where I sat nightly at the end of the play receiving people and giving them drinks and listening to praise. So much praise. At times it became embarrassing because I did not have words to react to it. No amount of protesting on my part that I wasn’t worthy of their unbounded admiration helped. Gushing praise from strangers is always hard to swallow. Some would just sit nodding at me; others would come out with inane comments like, "How do you remember all those lines?"

I arranged with Lionel, my dresser, a code signal by which means we contrived to get rid of visitors when the delight of their presence was wearing thin. He would vanish and reappear again with urgent telephone messages requiring my presence at ‘The White Elephant’, a restaurant I used to dine in most of the nights. On one such occasion when he did so, the guests who we thought would take the hint, rose to say, "Oh then we shall see you there, that’s where we are heading for."

It is not that I was being blasé or that I was lacking in proper gratitude towards all those kind people who said so many charming things to me. I loved it, but I had learned from experience that dressing room compliments are actually worth little beyond the amiable impulse that prompts them. When fellow actors or directors came backstage it was quite different. It is very gratifying to be praised by one’s peers, to know that the little bit of business of wiping my left shoe with my right sock Act I was not only noticed but appreciated and remembered. I do not wish to imply that appreciation from laymen, however mechanical, was unwelcome. It is just that many people do not realise that after the performance of a strenuous part, an actor may feel a little tired, a little hungry and a little anxious to have his dinner.

Nobody but an actor knows the vitality that has to be expended during a single performance; even after months of playing, when you move through the play automatically and without nerves, you still have to be strung up to a certain extent in order to get yourself on to the stage at all. There are bad nights when the emotions do not flow easily; scarifying moments when you have no idea what comes next or what has gone before. The mind goes blank. This happens to the best of actors during long runs. A chair placed at a wrong angle, a sudden unexpected noise backstage or in front of the house, a new intonation on one of the other actor’s lines is quite enough to dry you up dead. It is a horrible, sickening sensation and it leaves you shaken and hopelessly insecure not only for the rest of the evening but for several performances afterwards.

In looking back on another June in the United States I can detect a glow of nostalgia upon it. It marks in my life a definite end to a chapter, a chapter in which I no longer felt suspended in a vacuum. My position was not as unequivocal as it had been. My work had been acknowledged. Variety had declared me to be the most promising actor of the year. I had become known as far as the theatrical world was concerned. "William Morris," the top most agents at the time were handling my affairs. I was basking in success.

What saved me from being spoiled by my success was that I did not wish to be a part of the rat race. In those years, the early sixties, actors would go to any lengths to get work and what struck me as pathological was that their most important priority seemed to be the "billing". They were led to believe by their employers, the casting agents, the impresarios, and even by some powerful producers that their worth could only be gauged by the "billing" they had received in their last job. I hardly ever came across any actor saying he was in Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Instead it was "I was featured in Shaw’s Arms and the Man" or, "I co-starred in The Crucible". I cringed when people in the profession referred to me as the man who starred in Memo. I realised that I was in great danger of being spoiled by the sheen that was wrapping me up -- and I bolted back to London.

I have a lot of gratitude in my heart towards many people in America, but it is too private an emotion to spill into print. When I first played on Broadway, I received telegrams of good wishes from a number of stars whom I had never met and one or two whom I had never even seen. There are several ways of describing unkindness and meanness and little cruelties. But just try to write of generosity. Try to frame in words an unrelated, motiveless gesture of sheer kindness and you are lost. The warmth behind the phrases dissipates before they reach the paper, and there they lie, under your hand, sneering at you, coldly effusive and dead as a dodo.

Success transforms ordinary people into monsters of egotism. I am glad to be able to say that in my case this illusion is shattered. My sense of my own importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my sense of my own importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have, to work with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of the others that I am wary of, but my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help and the fewer illusions that I have about me, or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.

Reminiscences are soppy, but on a blustery day they warm the cockles of your heart.