THERE was a last full house for Michael Williams, the actor, co-star and husband of Dame Judi Dench at St Paul’s in Covent Garden yesterday.
The actors’ church was filled to capacity for the memorial service for one of Britain’s best loved character actors, who died in January from cancer.
Many of his fans could find no room in the church and had to stand outside. The Rev Mark Oakley, the parish priest who took the service, agreed that he had never seen his church fuller.
The reason, according to the theatre critic and historian Sheridan Morley, was that in a notoriously bitchy profession Michael Williams was a man everyone loved and admired. “He was truly nice, and I never heard anyone breathe a word against him,” Mr Morley said.
Ned Sherrin, the playwright, broadcaster and impresario who is a connoisseur of memorial services, writing a regular review column about them in The Oldie, said: “I would rate this one absolutely ten out of ten. It was first class.”
Sherrin contributed to its success with a number of anecdotes about his late friend, including a reminiscence of the relish and vigour with which Williams ripped six pages out of the script for the play Mr and Mrs Nobody, in which he starred with his wife, when it was agreed to dispense with them, to the dismay of the playwright Keith Waterhouse.
Richard Henders read Shakespeare’s sonnet number 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments. Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds. . .”
Musical interludes came from the score for Henry V by Patrick Doyle. Kenneth Branagh, the film’s star and producer, recited from memory Williams’s favourite poem, The Mournes by Helen Waddell.
Sir Trevor Nunn, a friend of both Williams and Dame Judi before their marriage, repeated at Dame Judi’s request the address he gave at the actor’s funeral in January. He prefaced the reprise with an imitation of how Williams, master of doubt and hesitation, might have reacted to the suggestion of running through the same lines twice.
His memories included one from the days of the television sit-com series A Fine Romance, in which Williams and Judi Dench starred in the 1980s. Dame Judi hated having to appear to warm up the audience before the episodes were recorded, and agonised: “Why do we have to do this? Why?” To which her husband responded gently: “The money, Jude. The money.”
Leaving the church after the service, Branagh said: “It was a beautiful service, very funny and very moving, and wholly fitting.”
Among others in the congregation were the actors Richard E. Grant, Kevin Spacey, June Whitfield, Maureen Lipman, Samantha Bond and Sir Donald Sinden and the playwright Alan Bennett.
Thanks to Penny Gray for sending this article which appeared in the The Times on July 10, 2001 and to Kathie R. for pointing me to a site which had pictures of St. Paul's.