Adele
“I’m scared of audiences,” Adele says. “I get shitty scared.” In Amsterdam, she was once so frightened that she escaped out of the fire exit. In Brussels, she projectile-vomited over somebody. She copes by telling jokes. “I chat a lot of fucking shit.” She also fortifies herself with her alter ego Sasha Carter, a combination of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce and June Carter. “My nerves don’t really settle until I’m off stage.” What really upsets her is the idea that someone who has shelled out money to see her might decide: “Oh I prefer the record.”
Eileen Atkins
Eileen Atkins finds first nights “complete and utter miseries”. The actor Michael Bryant told her this was conceit. “He said that if you had a Buddhist-like sense of your own non-importance, you wouldn’t get scared. But it’s extremely hard not to feel quite important. Mostly because the main reason for fright is letting the others down.” Atkins hates knowing exactly who is watching her. “I scream and put fingers in my ears if someone says who’s in. I have to think of the audience as one lump of humanity. If you suddenly hear someone you know laugh, it knocks your concentration.”
Peter Eyre
When Peter Eyre played Jacques in As You Like It, Anjelica Huston asked him: “Don’t you get embarrassed doing the Ages of Man?” The speech is often a stumbling block for actors. When Eyre was next about to deliver the soliloquy, he heard Huston’s voice in his head and completely seized up. Cast in the role some years later, he suggested that, as his character had to read in the forest, he should carry a book bag. “In the bag was a copy of As You Like It – just in case I had a similar lapse.” He never did.
Stephen Fry
In 1995, Stephen Fry fled from the West End production of Simon Gray’s Cell Mates. He said that from the beginning he had a “heavy feeling” every time he was on stage. He took to heart a Financial Times review describing him as “a lumpen superior ‘act’”. He blamed a scene in which he appeared in underwear: “I was clearly a middle-aged man with a big gut.” The day after the weekend reviews, he considered suicide but instead fled to Bruges. The play closed three weeks later, with a loss of £300,000. Fry, subsequently diagnosed as bipolar, has since returned to the stage.
Ian Holm
Playing Hickey in The Iceman Cometh in 1976 – decades before he became Bilbo Baggins – Ian Holm felt something was going wrong. Sure enough, “the moment arrived when I knew I would not be able to continue”. He addressed the audience: “Here I am, supposed to be talking to you… there are you, expecting me to talk…” He got off the stage, past the other actors, “frozen in a kind of tableau”. He arrived in the dressing room, unable even to walk. “The black curtain which slowly cowled my brain had become a complete hood.” He did not act on stage for nearly 15 years.
Ewan McGregor
“Contrary to what the tabloids say, I do not have stage fright,” declared Ewan McGregor in 2005. He was apprehensive at returning to the stage, but “that’s partly why I’m doing it. I love that feeling of walking on a knife edge.” Yet he was pursued by horror stories: “All your actor friends will tell you nightmare stories about people’s pants falling off.” Playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, he found himself “making shit up” when he forgot a song. He took preventive action before starring on Broadway last year, tweeting about his use of an app called Conquering Anxiety.
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier suffered five years of agonising dread following a press night in 1964, when he found his voice diminishing and the audience “beginning to go giddily round”. He developed strategies. When delivering his Othello soliloquies, he asked his Iago to stay in sight, fearing “I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself”. He asked actors not to look him in the eye: “For some reason this made me feel that there was not quite so much loaded against me.” The venerable Sybil Thorndike gave him trenchant counsel: “Take drugs, darling, we do.”
Steven Osborne
The pianist first became frightened when playing Mozart. “I didn’t actually forget anything, but it felt like the water was rising and lapping just under my nose.” Some years later, while playing Rachmaninov, he did have slips of memory. “This was like an earthquake.” He thought his career might be over. Realising that colleges did not help students with the condition, he prepared his own talks, advocating mindfulness rather than guzzling alcohol, pill-popping or CBT. Chiefly, he urges a sense of proportion: “Ask yourself: when I’m on my deathbed, will I still care about the fluffed note in bar 14?”
Carly Simon
Carly Simon has devised ingenious ways of dealing with performance panic. Suffering from palpitations in Pittsburgh, she invited spectators to join her on stage. Fifty people came up and massaged her arms and legs. Discovering that physical pain helps overpower fear, she wore tight boots or stabbed her hands with pins. Anxious at following Smokey Robinson at a celebration for Bill Clinton, she appealed to the horn section of the orchestra. “They all took turns spanking me. During the last spank the curtain went up. The audience saw the aftermath, the sting on my face. I bet Olivier didn’t do that.”
Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry, one of the most adored actresses of her era, was gripped by stage fright in 1861, when struggling to learn five parts simultaneously. She left a visceral description. “You feel as if a centipede, all of whose feet have been carefully iced, has begun to run about in the roots of your hair.” Then it seems as if somebody “has cut the muscles at the back of your knees”. As your mouth slowly opens, no sound comes out. “It was,” she said, “torture. Like nothing else in the world.”
