LENNY HENRY is a man full of surprises. After a lifetime in comedy, the 54-year-old from Dudley, decided to give serious acting a go, nailed the part of Othello and went on to tackle other Shakespearean roles.
At the end of next year he’ll be appearing in Macbeth.
His transition from stand-up to being an actor made the headlines, particularly as he turned out to be rather good at treading the boards.
What’s less well known about the comedian, who left school at 16 to become an apprentice engineer, is that he has also become an academic.
In fact it was his studies for his BA in English Literature – six years in total – with the Open University that inspired him to tackle Shakespeare. Not only did he go on to secure other roles but he also went on to study for a Masters in screen writing and he’s now working on a PhD in representation of black people in the media.
His desire for self improvement came, he said, from years working at the BBC.
“At the BBC most people had been to Oxbridge and you were made to feel a bit.. unfinished ... and not quite as good as everybody else,” he explained.
As a school leaver Lenny says he didn’t believe himself to be smart enough to go to university and, what’s more, there were few aspirations for working class children from the Midlands.
“The school I went to was described by the head teacher himself as being a ‘sink school’. Nothing was expected of the people who went there,” said Lenny, who is one of seven siblings raised by parents who emigrated from Jamaica in the 1950s. He is the fifth child and describes himself as “the drifty one in the middle who looks out of the windows at school.”
“My younger brother is a writer and chef, another is a theatrical agent, I have a big sister who is in sales, a sister with a social work degree and an older brother in electronics and computing. None of us were stupid but none of us were encouraged to go to university.”
Had it not been for the television talent show New Faces, which, like the current X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, got viewers voting for the acts, he might have had to face a lifetime in an engineering workshop. He was taking an engineering diploma when he won New Faces.
Overnight Lenny became, in his own words, “the family breadwinner.”
“Which you don’t really want to be when you’re just 17, but I took it on because I love my family,” he added. “I could buy them a new fridge and pay for the house to be redecorated.”
He views today’s talent shows with a critical eye: “They’re really quite cruel. There’s a bit of a freak show going on and we’re being invited to laugh at people who aren’t as good as they think they are.
“With New Faces these people were weeded out before anyone got on television.
“If there had been a massive Press intrusion into my private life I think I would have taken it differently. These days in reality television they want to know everything about you before you even open your mouth.
“I just hope it’s not a taste of what’s to come in the future. You wonder how much worse it can get.”
Coming from such a large family gave Lenny a lively upbringing. “Everybody in my family was very competitive and the humour was very dry,” he said. “There was a lot of sarcasm going round and my mum was a very, very funny person indeed. We laughed a lot, particularly around the dining table...and there was a lot of eating in our house. Jamaican families eat when they’re happy, when they’re sad and when they are neutral.”
By the age of 14 Lenny was entertaining his friends at school with his zany impersonations and doing the ‘voices’ that subsequently formed part of his act.
He says he got his early education in comedy and acting from watching television.
“I watched television voraciously and took it all in,” he said.
After New Faces came Tiswas and in 1980 the Comic Strip, where he met his wife-to-be Dawn French. Although the couple endured a widely-publicised split after 25 years together and divorced last year, they remain friends and devoted parents to their daughter Billie, now 21, who is at equestrian school.
One of Lenny’s first loves, next to playing the funny man, was music. It remains a passion and one that has given him the material for his current 38-date tour with Pop Life.
It is a show brimming with the joy of music, a successor to his previous touring show Cradle to Rave, which also took music as its starting point.
But, says Lenny, while Cradle to Rave was a musical memoir of good times and bad, the new show has happiness stamped right through it.
“I read a review that said my autobiographical show was a sad comedy and I didn’t want that so Pop Life is crammed with as many jokes about music as possible,” he said.
It also offers audiences the chance to see another facet of this man of many talents – his piano playing.
“I’m just a Grade Four but I am studying the theory for my Grade Five,” said Lenny, who now lives in London. “Audiences are very kind and give me a chance.”
Once his tour ends – the gig at Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley Theatre on Monday, November 26, is the third from last performance – he begins rehearsals for the 1950s play Fences by August Wilson and will also be preparing for Macbeth.
One suspects that we may see much more of Lenny Henry the serious actor.
“In the last 10 years,” says Lenny, “I have been learning about storytelling, creative writing and short stories. It’s been wonderful.
“I’ve always been fascinated by actors and acting and how you get that performance. Everyone said ‘do theatre’.
“What I found was that I had done acting on television and made a couple of terrible films but I had never been asked to sustain a believable character for any period of time until I did Othello.”
He is clearly hooked: “You learn about variations in performance; the thousand and one ways of saying I love you or I hate you. If you couple that with method acting it’s a very potent mix.”
But this is the new face of comedian Lenny Henry. And it is the old, well-loved, national comic treasure Lenny who will be on stage at the LBT.
When I ask if he finds a 38-date tour exhausting he simply replies: “This is my job, I’m doing what I love.”
For tickets see www.lennyhenrylive.com or contact the LBT box office on 01484 430528, www.thelbt.org
Fans can follow Lenny on twitter @ITISLENNYHENRY
