My Family star Robert Lindsay shows his serious side in Prism at Edinburgh King's

ROBERT LINDSAY is an actor many of us have grown up with, playing a series of ‘cheeky chaps’ down the years.
Robert Lindsay as Jack Cardiff in PrismRobert Lindsay as Jack Cardiff in Prism
Robert Lindsay as Jack Cardiff in Prism

From Jakey Smith in the National Service comedy Get Some In to Wolfie Smith in Citizen Smith in the Eighties, Ben Harper in My Family in the Noughties to a recent guest appearance in Plebs as Crassus, he has kept us laughing. However, there is much more to Lindsay than the comedy roles for which he is best known.

An accomplished song and dance man he won rave reviews when he starred in musicals such as Me And My Girl, in which he played Bill Snibson, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

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Classically trained, he has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and won a BAFTA for his leading role in Alan Bleasdale’s G.B.H. in 1991.

In 1996, as Becket in Jean Anouilh play, he won an Olivier Award, one of three he has to his name.

At the King’s Theatre from 28 October to 2 November, Lindsay will demonstrate his versatility when he stars in Prism. The 69-year-old plays legendary cinematographer, director and photographer Jack Cardiff, in the piece - his performance has already been described as ‘magnetic’ and ‘amazing to watch’.

Prism is set in the home of Cardiff’s son Mason and for Lindsay, it's a piece close to his heart.

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He explains, “I knew Jack towards the end of his life... The idea of a play on Jack Cardiff’s life was purely one I dreamt up when I saw his famous portrait of Marylyn Monroe which she had signed, ‘My darling Jack if only I could be the way you made me look’ and when Mason, Jack’s son, told me about how his carers became the stars from his career, I knew we had to write a play.

“We originally envisaged it as a film but after eight long years we decided a play would be the right way to start and Terry Johnson wrote this stunning play Prism. Terry and I have worked very closely on the project and, since it’s early development at Hampstead Theatre, he has expanded it to give our audiences an event that will allow them to enter the mind of the most celebrated cinematographer in the world, a man who was a magician with light.”

Cardiff, who won an Oscar for Black Narcissus and, in 2001, an Academy Honorary Award, died in 2009, at the age of 94. In the play, Cardiff has retired to a village in Buckinghamshire.

His days of hard work - and play - on some of the most famous film sets in the world are now long behind him, as are his secret liaisons with some of the most famous women in the world... Surrounded by memorabilia from a lifetime of ‘painting with light’, the writing of an autobiography should be an easy matter - were it not that Jack would now rather live in the past than remember it.

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Terry Johnson’s witty and poignant play based on the extraordinary life of double Oscar-winning Cardiff also stars Tara Fitzgerald as Katherine Hepburn.

Prism, King’s Theatre, Leven Street, 28 October-2 November, 7.30pm (2.30pm), £21.50-£35, 0131-529 6000

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