Haunted by Hudson

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 15

Haunted by Hudson

Much as he enjoyed appearing in the award winning series, “Upstairs, Downstairs” (Two this afternoon), Gordon Jackson, who plays Hudson, the butler, never watched an episode on television. “I can’t bear to watch myself,” he says. “My sons - Graham is 22 and Roddy is 21 — much prefer the image of their father as the rather masterful Cowley in ‘The Professionals’ to the stuffy Hudson in ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’.” Of “Upstairs, Downstairs”, Jackson says, “It’s nice to be associated with success. You can act your socks off sometimes and nothing comes of it, but I’ve been very lucky. I always say that an actor’s career is 95 per cent luck.” After more than 40 years in films and television, Jackson is too diverse an actor to be type-cast but he has found that, since returning to the theatre recently, there are shades of his two starring roles in some of the parts he has been offered. “I’ve just finished a run in an Agatha Christie play called ‘Cards On The Table’. I played a Scotland Yard man, a kind of 1930 s Cowley figure, but most of the scripts I get tend to be more Hudsons than Cowleys.” Unlike some actors, Jackson prefers not to mix the worlds of television and theatre. “Lots of actors seem to be able to do both, but I can’t. I feel I’m cheating if I go on stage at night when I’ve been filming a TV show all day because I’m not with it at all.” Gordon Jackson will also be remembered by New Zealand viewers for his portrayal of the Scottish solicitor, in love with Helen Morse, in the Australian series “A Town Like Alice”.