By night, Mark Gatiss is portraying Sir John Gielgud at the National Theatre. By day, he is portraying the great Shakespearean actor on canvas at home.
Gatiss – who shot to fame in The League of Gentlemen, has had screen roles in Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, and acted in and co-wrote Sherlock – has long loved art. Having made a documentary for television on the 1950s painter, John Minton, five years ago, he was inspired to start art classes during Covid in 2021. “Drawing and painting are both relaxing and stimulating,” Gatiss told the Observer. “I don’t know of any other activity where I lose myself so completely.”
Now, along with more than 20 leading British thespians, he is contributing to an exhibition of actors’ works next month. One is his still life of lemons; the other his charcoal of Gielgud, which he is drawing while starring in The Motive and the Cue, a drama about the famous 1964 stage production of Hamlet when Gielgud directed Richard Burton. “Art is challenging and fun,” says Gatiss. “I live off tea, and the only time I ever let a cuppa get cold is when I’m painting.”
The exhibition – Many Actors Make Art (MaMa) – is being curated by Christopher Villiers, known for Emmerdale and films including Bloody Sunday, and Nancy Carroll, the Olivier award-winner, who, earlier this year, was in the highly praised play Marjorie Prime.
“I took up painting as a therapy to acting,” says Villiers. “As an actor, you have little to no control, as you are told where to stand, etc. In art, you are in charge.” Villiers will have 15 of his paintings on display, and many are of lighthouses. “I started doing lighthouses as they are supposed to save us going on the rocks.”
His co-curator Carroll will enter some of her dog portraits in the show, running from 11 July at The Department Store gallery in Brixton. Carroll attended art and drama schools before concentrating on acting. “I love its collaborative process. But I’ve always done art as a hobby, and, in my early days as an actor, for extra income too. I find art meditative, and a great balance for acting as it slows you down. Actors are also observers and creative, so that helps with art.” Carroll agrees that “in acting we have no control. With art, you have much more.”
Included in the exhibition as an “honorary Brit” is American-born John Lithgow, winner of six Emmys for shows such as 3rd Rock from the Sun. He is showing three portraits, including one of Winston Churchill, whom he played in The Crown, while Fenella Woolgar’s portraits of Richard E Grant and Tanya Moodie will also be displayed. “I’m addicted to portraiture and character,” says Woolgar, known for Call The Midwife. “Richard was extremely stoic and sat on a chair and a pile of books for two days.”
James Fleet, from Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Vicar of Dibley, is offering his Danny Sapani, the British actor from Black Panther.
Not all are painters. Nicholas Farrell, who made his name in Chariots of Fire, does lino cuts, often of ducks. Ex-Emmerdale actor Sian Reese-Williams and Anastasia Hille, Gertrude in the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet at the Barbican in 2015, have pottery in the show.
There will also be bird photography by Sam West – noted for many stage and screen roles, and currently shooting the next TV series of All Creatures Great and Small. “I don’t see it – as some photographers do – as hunting or capturing,” says West, now a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ambassador. “There’s quite a divide, too, between those who watch birds and those who take pictures.”
West, son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales, took up photography as a child. “But I was never good enough to consider it a career. I’ve a decent eye for composition, which is useful as I occasionally direct.”
West will also provide a drawing, owned by his parents, by the Hollywood star and talented artist Tony Curtis. It is one of a very few (another is a painting by Noël Coward of a port in Jamaica where he lived) which are not for sale.
Most works – which include one by the late Antony Sher being donated by his husband, Greg Doran – are priced in the hundreds of pounds or low thousands. Many actors will try to be at the exhibition to talk about their work, with one day planned for schoolchildren. The proceeds will go to the Theatre Artists Fund, set up in 2020 by Sam Mendes, initially to help actors during Covid, but now aiding those struggling or out of work.
