OFFICE BOY TO ACTOR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 370, 13 September 1930, Page 15 (Supplement)

OFFICE BOY TO ACTOR

SIR GERALD DU MAURIER TOP HAT AND 8d A DAY “1 am an actor because a firm of shipping brokers in the city smashed,” Sir Gerald du Maurier told the representative of a London daily. “I didn't know as a boy what 1 wanted to be; never thought about it. But when I left Harrow 1 had to du something. I was given letters of introduction to business people. Usually they never saw me. ‘‘One day, wearing a top hat an® tail coat, with, a cornflower iu my buttonhole, I called on a firm. The commissionaire asked; ‘What’s this?’ “1 said: ‘Nothing much; want a job.’ “He took in my card and came back and said: “Have au ufiice boy’s job if you like. Sit here and answer the bell when it rings.’ “I said: ‘All right,’ and I sat there in niy top-hat and answered the bell and ran messages. “I was 18 then. They paid me 8d a day. “1 didn’t wear my top-hat and tailcoat any more. After three months 1 had been promoted to the inland freight department, and I ran a magazine, the ‘lnland Freight Magazine.’ 1 wrote it and another fellow typed it. Everybody was on the free list. We gave it away! “It was filled with scandalous gossip about people in the firm —I should have been terribly rude if I’d been a journalist! Then the firm went smash. “I did nothing for a while. My brother, who was in the Army, acted a lot in an amateur way, and I acted with him. People said to iny father:

‘Why don't you put Gerald on the stage?’ 1 had no particular wish to go, but when, after a while, Sir John Hare offered to take me, 1 went. That was the turning point. “I played the waiter iu ‘The Old Jew’ for £2 a week, and in one scene I had to carry 40 drinks on a tray like an Italian waiter —like this.” He lifted his arm and turned back the palm of his hand to the ceiling. As to the stage as a career, he said: “I’ve warned-off all the people I know. I tell all the nice girls to keep out of it. ‘ What’s going to happen to you in 40 years’ time?’ I ask them. Nobody who’s a player dies leaving any money. “Still, nobody’s grumbling.”