OFFICE BOY TO ACTOR

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1070, 6 September 1930, Page 24

OFFICE BOY TO ACTOR

SIR GERALD DU MAURIER . TOP HAT AND 8d A DAY “I am an actor because a firm of shipping brokers in the city smashed,” Sir Gerald du Maurier told the representative of a London daily. “I didn’t know as a boy what I wanted to be; never thought about it. But when I left

Harrow I had to do something. I was given letters of introduction to business people. Usually they never saw me. “One day, wearing a toil hat and tail coat., with a cornflower in my buttonhole, I called on a firm. The commissionaire asked: ‘What’s this?’ “I said: ‘Nothing

much; want a job.' “He took in my card and came back and said: ‘Have au office boy's job if you like. Sit here and answer the bell when it rings.’ “I said: ‘All right,’ and I sat there in my top-hat and answered the bell and ran messages. “I was IS then. They paid me Sd a day. “I didn’t wear my top-hat and tailcoat any more. “After three months. I had been promoted to the inland freight department, and I ran a magazine, the ‘lnland Freight Magazine.’ I wrote It and another fellow typed it. Everybody was on the free list. We gave it away! “It was filled with scandalous gossip about people in the firm—l should have been terribly rude if I’d been a journalist! “Then the firm went smash.

“I did nothing for a while. My brother, who was in the Army, acted a lot in an amateur way, and I acted with him. People said to my father: ’Why don’t you put Gerald on the stage?’ 1 had no particular wish to go, but when, after a while, Sir John Hare offered to take me, I went. That was the turning point. “I played the waiter in ‘The Old Jew’ for £2 a week, and in one scene I had to carry 40 drinks on a tray like an Italian waiter—like this.” He lifted his arm and turned back the palm of his hand to the ceiling. As to the stage as a career, he said;—“l’ve warued-off all the people I know. I tell all the nice girls to keep out of it. ‘What’s going to happen to you in 40 years’ time?’ I ask them. Nobody who’s a player dies leaving any money. “Still, nobody’s grumbling.”