By Peter Craven
In The Last Confession, the David Suchet vehicle, there is a shuffling, curmudgeonly old cardinal played by Kevin Colson, once a starry young Melbourne actor. Indeed, as a child, I was taken to see his Hamlet at Melbourne University's Union Theatre when the MTC was still the Union Repertory Company.
The Colson I meet, black shirted, bald and jowly, is at 77 a bit different from the lean blonde fellow I had also seen in the musical Carnival and on TV compering In Melbourne Tonight.
Kevin Colson in The Last Confession.
"I'd been doing the Tuesday IMT when Graham [Kennedy] and Bert [Newton] decided they couldn't do five nights," Colson says. "But I'd made my mind I wanted to get out of television and I got this call from John Sumner saying would I do Hamlet."
Colson had a distinguished career on the London and also the New York stage both as a straight actor and in musicals. But he was an Australian stage star first. He played the Tennessee role in The Glass Menagerie and the Arthur Miller role in After the Fall, Miller's Marilyn Monroe play. He played the young biologist in the original Australian production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
He could sing, he had a rich Rodgers and Hammerstein-style baritone and did Irma La Douce and Sail Away by Noel Coward, with Maggie Fitzgibbon. Coward told Colson how to do a particular song by singing it and showing him how to move to it. "You don't argue with the master," Colson recalls.
He hit it off with Coward from the first and in a flawless imitation of the great Noel's voice, he recalls him saying, "I've been geesed." "Goosed surely, Noel?" "Geesed," came back the famous voice. "I know the difference between two fingers and one!"
He got a ship to Europe and having traversed the Italian Riviera, he found out he was in the vicinity of the French Riviera and that the Cannes Film Festival was on. He had met some Australian dentists and he was lolling on the beach and one of them said – here Colson's rich, deep, standard English voice broke into a broad, high-pitched Strine – "Hey, Kev, you say you met Noel Coward. 'E's staying at the Hotel Carlton. We dare ya to ring him up."
"Well, I couldn't resist a dare so I rang him and he did remember me. And he invited me to a drink in his room. And sitting on his couch was Rex Harrison. And Noel said to me, 'Dear boy, I'm just off to London but you must come to Geneva. Just ring Coley.' So I went to Montreux and this voice says, 'The Master said you would be coming.' And I found myself not only staying at Coward's but having dinner with Marlene Dietrich."
Coward told Binkie Beaumont, the all-powerful West End producer, that he must see Colson. He told Lionel Bart (who wrote Oliver!), he told everybody.
But Colson's luck trumped even Coward's patronage. The first week he was in London he went to a party with the cast of Robert and Elizabeth, the musical about the Brownings which starred Australians Keith Michell and June Bronhill. Michell wanted to leave the show and Colson took over.
He was the original male lead in the first West End production of Cabaret with Judi Dench. He was the lead in Chess and in his favourite show Aspects of Love.
"I adored that role," Colson says. "Although he was an old roué, I loved that character. The role was originally to be played by Roger Moore but the director, Trevor Nunn, and the producers were worried. They asked Colson, who was doing Chess, to cover the role a week before the opening as Moore had pulled out.
"So I got a desperate call. 'Get your arse in here, Kev.'"
He did every production of it in sight including Broadway for which he got his Tony nomination.
He's had a rich, satisfying career. So who is the greatest performer he worked with? "Judi Dench. Anyone who's ever worked with her would say that. She has such an easy sparkle beneath her eyes. Such a joy – she's magic."
Colson reminisces and rolls his rumbling easygoing voice around his more than half century career and sounds remarkably modest about it.
He says Coward only "chatted me up once". And then with great gallantry and restraint, though Colson saw him lose "thousands and thousands of francs on the roulette wheel".
He talks, lovingly and with relish, about his family such as his brother Phil B. Colson the guitarist and with glowing pride of niece Sia Furler, the singer-songwriter who has taken America by storm. "She wrote Diamonds for Rihanna. And she's written songs for Beyoncé and Britney Spears. She's living in LA now and bought part of the Max Factor estate. She's the one who always sings her back to the audience. She was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. You can look her up on YouTube: Sia-Ellen."
And so I do. How strange that this modest, charming old man should be telling about his connection with a pop star.
It all seems such a long way from that night amid the cloisters of the University when this blonde intense figure spoke of ghosts and doubts and the play as the thing.