Brian Cox

What are your earliest memories of acting?

Yeah, well um my dad died when I was eight and my mum had a series of very severe nervous breakdowns. So she had electric shock treatment so she was institutionalised for quite a lot of my childhood. But until that happened, until I was eight, life was blissful, really very happy. But the thing that my dad used to do was on New Year, we had a window recess and there was a bunker where we kept the coal and there were curtains. And my sister May, who was a very flamboyant singer, wonderful singer, my sister, and she used to say, presenting Brian Cox. And she would swing open the curtains and I would do Jolson impersonations. And I would do Jolson with the actions and everything. And of course, the thing was one o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day. There would be a lot of drunken people in the room, but they were so giving. And I just thought, wow, this is good.

How did the family keep going through the period that followed your [father's] death?

Well, my sisters were married. They had their own husbands and families and uh you know, modest. I mean, my sister Betty, she lived in two rooms on a uh a landing with five families and toilets on the stair that they shared, two toilets. And I would stay with them on occasion. And I would s I mean there was literally two rooms. They Betty and Dave, my brother-in-law, they slept in the front room and my nephews, uh, David and Kevin, they slept and I would occasionally sleep there with them, you know. It was you know, it was the way it was. And people had to be stoical. I mean, people don't quite realize that about, for instance, my sister Betty, that there was a lot going on for people. It was tough. It was really tough. You had to have a certain stoicism to deal with it all.