“I wish you’d seen us rehearse this morning — we’re having so much fun,” Lindsay enthuses, settling into the sofa and inspecting the lunch brought for him (“ooh, chips”). “We” means him and Jemma Redgrave, who play Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in a new play about the time King George VI and the Queen Mother came to stay, in June 1939. Springwood, adapted from Richard Nelson’s film Hyde Park on Hudson, tells the story of the first royal visit to America and the King’s doomed effort to get FDR to join the Allies.

Not exactly doomed, Lindsay corrects me: Roosevelt was all for it but the public mood was then, as now, isolationist. “He said to the King, ‘I would, but I have a country that’s very complicated. And it was — Madison Square Garden had hung Nazi flags [at a 1939 rally].” Lindsay, 76, has fallen for FDR, “a wonderful, complicated man. Weirdly, my father served on the North Sea convoys bringing over American food, and I remember him saying, ‘That president is a good man.’ But he had to wait until Pearl Harbor to join the war.”

Being a president is a lot like being a king and a bit like being an actor, Lindsay says: it’s pretending to be someone else, although for world leaders the consequences are rather greater. He has been doing it for half a century now — “I’m being asked to do loads of 50-year reunions” — playing Cockney geezers before landing the career-making role of Wolfie Smith, the charismatic but delusional Marxist of the People’s Front of Tooting, in 1977.

Citizen Smith was watched by 24 million people on the BBC and made Lindsay unbearably famous. “I’d be working with actors who’d get on their bikes after work and say, ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ and I’d stop the pub. People wouldn’t leave me alone.” The other problem was the snobbery of his peers. “A lot of people sneered because it was a sitcom. But I loved it. I was playing myself, a cocky little lad.”

People can’t have sneered too much because he filmed a run of Shakespeare for the BBC, as well as playing Edmund opposite Laurence Olivier’s Lear for Granada Television and Hamlet at the Royal Exchange. “The director used to say, ‘Look at that queue, they’re

all waiting to see your Hamlet.’ I’d say, ‘No, they’re waiting to see Wolfie play Hamlet.’” He wasn’t sure he was good enough. “That’s been one of my problems — [the fear] that I couldn’t be taken seriously.”

***

Lindsay is a great storyteller and an inveterate name-dropper, slipping easily into chat show mode. When I ask if he watched Pathé footage of Roosevelt, he skips neatly to his friendship with Katharine Hepburn. “Oh, darling, the stuff I’ve watched! The way Roosevelt speaks is interesting because it’s ‘Boston Brahmin’, almost English with the burr of American. But I worked in America and met people like Katharine Hepburn [who grew up in New England]. She saw me do Me and My Girl four times and I was invited to supper. We became good pals.” This was in 1987, when Hepburn was 80. “I was madly in love, starstruck. Her mother had founded Planned Parenthood and Katharine got me involved.”

Read the full interview on The Times website through the link below:

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

Springwood plays the Main Stage from 19 June to 25 July

BOOK SPRINGWOOD HERE