| Continued from Page 1 "I think I was inclined that way anyhow, but it became more extreme through the acting business. To a greater or lesser degree, I’d suffer from astonishing physical reactions. "During most of the major West End runs I've done I've had some kind collapse. On stage, I would pull myself through, I'd kill myself for the audience. But I was beginning to do myself a lot of damage, physically and mentally. And I realized, in retrospect, that part of the drive was that I was running away from depression." In Malignant Sadness, his best-selling one of the least important autobiographical account of a five-year struggle with crippling clinical depression the eminent embrologist Lewis Wolpert described the illness as "more terrible than watching my wife die of cancer”. The success of Malignant Sadness no doubt contributed to the ongoing discussion of the difficult and often-swerved . subject of depression. It also had a didactic function, arguing that depression, far from being susceptible to the Sock School of Psychiatry ("just pull them up"), was a fully-fledged disease - one that, like most diseases, strikes randomly, without rhyme or reason, afflicting a constituency far greater than those with recognizable cause to be depressed. In common with Wolpert and many other sufferers, Lawson struggles to identify what catalyzed his depression in the first place. While failing to recall the first bad episode, he knows he felt the initial stirrings as a young man, remembering himself as a typically artistic stereotype. He suspects the experience of his parents - both from grim, proletarian origins in I mean guys who were in Glasgow before escaping to Perthshire - inculcated in him a certain anxiety, a fragility of things. "It might even have been around when I was a child," he says. "Of course, you're not self-aware and you can't be sure. But I remember that Celtic, black dog thing being around from a very early stage." Lawson left Crieff in the early 1970s and styled himself as a wandering, quasi-hippy theatrical; his nephew says his abiding memory of Lawson is in flares and long hair, arriving home from Amsterdam. But as Lawson's career progressed, the double bind of his situation revealed itself: acting, the possibility of pretending to be someone else, had offered an escape from his as-yet undiagnosed depression, but the demands of the profession exacerbated the illness. "I remember the first long run I did in the West End, in the musical. Pal Joey, which went on for a year. Again, physically very punishing. As it went on, I became aware that I was losing contact with the real world. This will sound horribly pretentious but I began to think that the real world was on stage and that the fantasy world was what happened afterwards." At their worst, he recalls, the episodes left him "hobbling around like a very old man". But, as in Wolpert's case, there was rarely a traceable cause. A particularly severe attack attended his initial dealings with director Bill Forsyth on the film Local Hero, released in 1983. Receiving the script, he says, was a great moment: the writing was fantastic, and Urquhart was at the heart of the film, masterminding the elaborate double bluff his Highland community plays on an avaricious Texan oil company. After the ignominious bit parts on the Star Wars series, the film was a big break and Lawson was on a high for a fortnight. "And then," he recalls, "I just went right through the floor. I began to think the script and the film weren't that good, I began to withdraw and get very remote. It got so bad that anti-depressants seemed the only option. But those made me feel worse and I had to stop them. "I should have been on top of the world, I was starring in this great film by a very hot director. But I couldn't have been lower. And my father had died five months previously, which took things onto a whole new level. So I went for a long walk on Hampstead Heath and I remember thinking, I'm going to have to do this myself. But it would be a very long time before I did." In the meantime, there did not seem much that Lawson could do to treat his malady. Before the advent of tricyclic anti-depressants, chemical remedies were still relatively primitive. The actor sought a cure in self-discipline, "just pushing on, employing that west of Scotland Calvinist work ethic thing, where you pulled yourself up and did the job, no matter how bad things got". How did Gish react to his despair? "Well. Sheila's always been fantastic about it, because she realized the depression wasn't something that was connected to my relationship with her. And that was a great help. I mean, it would have been hellish to live with somebody who had no sympathy for it, who just tells you to pull yourself together. That would have been the hardest thing. Sheila was never threatened by it, never considered it a reflection on her." The lowest point, he remembers, came when he was appearing in Lend Me a Tenor, while recording a television series at the same time. One morning he foolishly agreed to appear on TV-AM, rising at 6am on a day off. On his return to the theatre, he was "scared witless” during the opening scene. As the days progressed, his terror began manifesting itself during every scene. Then one night, he blacked out on stage. "That was it," he says. "I'd had enough. I got a flight back to see my mother in Crieff, went for a walk on the hills, thinking, as I always did, that I could shake it off. I got about a quarter of a mile and couldn't go on. I was leaning against a wall, I felt 100 years old. I think for years I'd been trying to convince myself that the way I felt was entirely due to exhaustion. Leaning against that wall, I had to admit to myself that I was a depressive." After a quarter century of despair, the end came in Venice in 1996. Lawson was on a location shoot, in one of his usual fugs of lethargy. Now, he suspects, it was the city that prompted him to decisive action; the isolation and the crepuscular gloom of Venice convinced him he couldn't go on feeling as he did. "I was sitting there, looking out over the water and I thought, almost like an alcoholic does in a moment of clarity, I don't want this anymore. I very consciously made a decision that I didn't want this thing in my life. That was the turning point. And so I began to do something about it." Continued Page 3 |