Willy Russell talk

By Jasper Rees 1044AM GMT twenty-four March 2010

Previous of Images Next A friendly participation Willy Russell Photo PAUL GROVER Julie Walters in Educating Rita Photo REX Tom Conti and Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine Photo REX

No one understands escapism similar to Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote dual plays about working-class Liverpool women in moody from a disciplined existence. In one, a immature beautician seeks achievement by a well read preparation with the Open University. In the other, a prime serving woman has an island-holiday romance.

As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine warranted Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have hardly been off the entertainment in productions all over the world. The Menier Chocolate Factory is ingeniously reviving the span of them in rep.

Bill Nighy speak for The Boat That Rocked Edinburgh Festival 2009 lapse of the puppet masters Dustin Hoffman speak Last Chance Harvey Rosamund Pike speak Eminem and Bruno attempt at the MTV Movie Awards was staged

With new actresses Meera Syal as Shirley and Laura dos Santos as Rita will they still mount up? The omens are positively good. In November, Melanie Chisholm, prior to well known as Sporty Spice, assimilated the expel of Blood Brothers, the low-pitched with difference and tunes by Russell that has been parked in the West End for twenty years. The relocating story of brothers faraway at bieing innate marked down tougher or stronger critics to uninformed pools of tears. No consternation Russell tells writers groups to dont think about movie and hang to theatre.

"I wrote Rita for 700 for eighteen nights of opening in the Warehouse right away the Donmar," he says. "I wrote Shirley for 1,500 for a three-week run at the Everyman. I wrote Blood Brothers for Merseyside Theatre Company for 500 to fool around in schools in the Liverpool area. I dont lay down each time to have money. But if you get it right, a fool around will regularly have some-more income than a movie will."

Getting it right is the tough part. Although he claims not to write autobiographically, theres no point in discounting the resources of Russells early hold up as the fuel for his success. He attributes, for example, his capability to live the minds of womanlike characters to a innate upbringing after the war.

"Men worked 3 shifts a day. My grandma ran a mobile grocers on the estate, and mostly women removing together dont think that the kids are listening. You arent indispensably by your ears, but by your pores."

He had serve temperament when he left propagandize at fifteen with one O turn in English and became a ladies hairdresser.

"I was a unequivocally bad hairdresser. The traffic I managed to capture was since people could speak at me. Thinking behind now, I was probably you do shampoos-and-sets for a little women at the initial entertainment of dementia. I can think of dual or three. They would come in each week and discuss it me the same story about their husbands or the faraway past. Some of that contingency have had a temperament on me later, at slightest feeling assured to write about women."

Russell, trimly whiskered and dapper, is a friendly presence. Just dont hang him in a roomful of blokes. "I cant do masculine company. It all becomes about the ultimate car "Did you unequivocally come down the A6? Its about things. Put a organisation of women in a room and the about whats in here." He points to his heart. With Shirley, it was as if he was the ventriloquists manikin from the impulse she non-stop her mouth.

"I wrote the line, "I similar to a potion of booze when Im you do the cooking. Then she incited around and said, "Dont I, wall? And at that impulse the fool around was born. And you knew rught away thats how she survived. When I was essay her, I became witty. I recollect when I wrote, "He kissed me widen marks, and afterwards she unexpected said, "Arent men full of s---? And I fell off the chair laughing. It wasnt as if I knew where I was going when I wrote that riff. I was usually the conduit."

Russell done Rita a beautician since it meant he wouldnt have to investigate her job. He realised usually 10 years after that the complete fool around competence have been called "Educating Willy". At 21, he had left behind to do his O levels out of a remarkable craving to take an education. He assimilated a category of sixteen year-olds.

"I was a Martian. They thought I was a CIA plant. This was in the days prior to "mature tyro was hackneyed as a term. It had been personification for a prolonged time when I realised the usually glaringly autobiographical. Had I been wakeful of it, that would have prevented me from writing."

He became a teacher, but inside of a year was essay professionally full time. His initial big strike was a fool around about the Beatles. Premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in 1974, John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert was, in effect, the initial jukebox musical. The fool around fed on Russells participation at the bieing innate of Beatles, whom he reckons he saw at the Cavern up to 80 times.

"The initial night I stood there and saw the Beatles, being in a stinking, cold and damp bar with the smell of rotting ripened offspring and redolence churned together, observant these 4 geezers who didnt give a ----, you knew that the universe had changed, that zero could ever be the same. The e.g. was there."

Years after he worked on an unfinished book with Paul McCartney. At the time, he never came close to assembly them. "The nearest I got was I recollect John non-stop his Coke and spilled it over me and I apologised."

Of the Liverpool writers who emerged in the Seventies, Russell can be seen as a soft-centred McCartney to Alan Bleasdales some-more disintegrating Lennon. But the more aged with the writer of Boys from the Blackstuff is overworked, he insists.

"Alan and I both contend we are immensely opposite writers from Liverpool, are sincerely tall men who once taught and have beards." Where Bleasdale slipped opposite to television, Russell stranded to the theatre. He doesnt feel he belongs on movie sets. He was propitious sufficient to be there for the last stage of Rita when Walterss Rita, off to America, was behest farewell to her whisky-sodden mentor Frank.

"I recollect [the director] Lewis Gilbert observant to Michael Caine, "Grab Rita and give her a genuine full kiss. I said, No, no!" In a story about tacit romance, mess was averted.

The Willy Russell deteriorate starts previews at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1 (020 7907 7060), on Friday.