New role for Roy Marsden

Press, 11 May 1984, Page 11

New role for Roy Marsden

Playing a detective can be murder, says someone who should know, Roy Marsden, who plays Superintendent Adam Dalgleish in a hit television series, “A Shroud For a Nightingale,” now screening in Britain. “Most of the time is spent asking questions — and there are only a limited number of way’s you can do that and keep things interesting,” says Mr Marsden.

He seems to have found the secret — Dalgleish has proved such a popular character that work on the next series will start next month, once again starring the policeman who has been described as “the thinking man’s detective.”

Mr Marsden, aged 42, former star of “The Sandbaggers” and “Airline,” recently scored a hit in Britain as the star of the television version of “Goodbye Mr Chips,” in which he aged from 27 to 85. He still has one major ambition left

— to play James Bond. “I think I know exactly how I would play 007,” he says, “but there are so many roles I still want to tackle that I wouldn’t want to get type-cast — not even as James Bond.

“I enjoy television work, and I have to admit that television has been very good to me. I love what I’m doing and I’ve no complaints about anything.” Married to the actress, Polly Hemmingway, Mr Marsden is delighted to have two thriving careers in the same family. “But acting isn’t everything,” he says. “Afterwards, I come straight back home to all the real things in life.

“Things like washing up, helping around the house, looking after our son — all the things that really matter.

“Polly and I have our own careers,” he adds. “Although we have acted together, we’ve no particular

plan to drift into a professional partnership like John Aiderton and Pauline Collins.”

Polly Hemmingway has painful memories of the time when they did work together — and is not anxious to repeat the experience.

She was playing a corpse in a stage play and as Marsden carried her offstage, he dropped her on her head, and she ended up in hospital. On one car outing, Mr Marsden drove into a ditch and the car was turned upside down, although the pair escaped serious injury.

“Roy is always playing dangerous roles on television, but life with him offscreen seems far more hazardous,” Polly Hemmingway says. “Even so, he does his share of the household chores . . . usually without too much going wrong.” “I’ve never believed in male chauvinism,” Mr

Marsden says, “or that a woman’s place is in the home and that it’s her job to look after everything. "Making the' beds, tackling the washing up or the laundry, are just jobs that have to be done, and if it’s more convenient for me to do so, then I’ll do them.” Born in south London, in the same area as Tommy Steele, Mr Marsden has been fortunate in playing a wide range of roles and never being in danger of becoming typecast. He says he worked extremely hard, especially in “Airline” and “The Sandbaggers,” to get the voices right for two totally different characters. “Burnside in ‘The Sandbaggers’ wasn’t too difficult,” he says, “because he had the rather plummy sort of Civil Service voice. “But Jack Ruskin in ‘Airline’ was quite a different matter. He was a Yorkshireman through and through. I spent a lot of time in Yorkshire, going round the pubs listening to the way the people talked.

"I worked up a real Leeds accent.

“I think it paid off all right,” says Mr Marsden, “because a lot of people started believing I was the genuine article.” Today, Mr Marsden is bald, and he cheerfully admits that in “Shroud For a Nightingale” he wears a toupee. He recalls that in “The Sandbaggers” he had to wear his hair “so closely cropped it wasn’t true. But al the women viewers seemed to like the style.”

Mr Marsden, whose father was a caretaker in a London block of flats, has become a man of property. Recently, he acquired a former distillery in New-castle-Upon-Tyne, and he plans to convert it into an arts and crafts centre. His home in London is a tall town house near Clapham Common. “It’s a great place to live and to bring up kids,” he says. “Our son has all the space in the world in which to fly his kite.” Features International