Self Portrait

Fame is a strange mirror. It gives the public a recognisable shape to point at, then quietly leaves the actual person behind it to get on with the much harder business of being alive.

Anneke Wills’s Self Portrait is the first volume of her autobiography, and it comes from that gloriously overstuffed stretch of British cultural life when theatre, television, coffee bars, Chelsea, satire, marriage, motherhood, art, scandal, youth and reinvention all seemed to be happening in the same smoky room. Many readers will arrive because Wills played Polly in Doctor Who, which is fair enough: British television has always been very good at turning actors into permanent national furniture. But this is not a simple “I was in a famous programme, please admire the wallpaper” memoir. It is wider, sharper and more human than that.

Wills writes about a life lived near the bright, unstable centre of things: acting, studios, friendships, lovers, family, the swinging sixties, and the strange condition of being young and visible in a culture that was busy congratulating itself on becoming modern. The decade has been polished in hindsight until it looks like one long boutique window full of miniskirts, music and charming irresponsibility. Self Portrait is more interesting because it remembers that people actually had to live through it. There were babies, marriages, mistakes, ambitions, betrayals, bills, rooms, choices, and the ordinary emotional weather that no amount of fashionable eyeliner can entirely keep out.

The title is nicely exact. A self portrait is not a mugshot, not a publicity still, and not the version other people would find convenient. It is an attempt to look back at the self without letting nostalgia do all the lighting. Wills gives us the actress, yes, but also the wife, mother, daughter, friend, traveller-through-chaos, and young woman trying to remain intact while life keeps handing her new roles before she has finished understanding the old ones.

There is a lovely irony in a memoir by someone associated with time travel being so firmly about memory. Television preserves people in little glowing capsules: always young, always recognisable, always stepping out of the same scene. Life, rude thing, refuses to do the same. It moves on, changes the cast, loses the script, and expects everyone to improvise. Wills’s book seems to understand this deeply. It is not just about what happened, but what it felt like to be carried through it while the future was busy pretending to be liberation.

For Doctor Who fans, there is the pleasure of seeing a familiar figure step away from the console and into her own voice. For readers of memoir, there is something better than celebrity gossip: a candid, reflective, sometimes painful, sometimes funny account of a woman making sense of a complicated life in public and private. The glamour is there, but it has not been allowed to bully the truth.

This Hirst Books copy is in As New condition, which is almost indecently fresh for a memoir of the sixties, a decade that generally looks as though it should arrive smelling faintly of coffee, cigarette smoke and poor decisions. Crappy Old Books offers it for Doctor Who people, sixties people, theatre and television people, memoir people, and anyone who enjoys the rare pleasure of a public figure reclaiming the mirror and deciding where the light should fall.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Anneke Wills