My home life was a battlefield: Mike Leigh tells of early traumas

Film director Mike Leigh is to talk for the first time about the impact of childhood conflict on his art and the decision by his father to send him to a child psychiatrist.

Speaking to Alan Yentob in a new and unprecedentedly personal interview for BBC1’s Imagine, the director of the acclaimed new film Mr Turner and the creator of many celebrated British comedies, including Abigail’s Party, Life is Sweet and Happy Go Lucky, will reveal the “awful, terrible” family “screaming matches” that were the chief characteristic of his home life as a boy in Salford. The high level of discord, he suggests, has provided him with dramatic material ever since.

Leigh, 71, tells Yentob that his father, Dr Abe Leigh, was deeply opposed to the idea that he might become an artist or an actor. He forbade him his frequent habit of sketching visitors to the house and regarded him as a problem child because of his creative interests.

“I was always drawing caricatures of people and he asked me to stop because he thought it might offend them,” Leigh will say. “Even the word ‘artist’ was very frightening to him, anathema. So the idea that I would be any sort of artist was terrifying to him”

At the age of 14 Leigh was taken to see an NHS psychiatrist. “He [his father] decided I had something wrong with me mentally. So I went to see this extremely nice guy. And these were the first adult conversations I had had with another adult.”

The psychiatrist told Leigh’s father that there was no mental problem with his son, but the news was not welcomed. “He said, ‘There is nothing wrong with him. He just doesn’t like being at home.’ My father was very angry and stopped me going. So I used to go along on my own to see him, and when my father found out about that he threatened to have him struck off the register.”

The film director also recalls that both his parents were concerned about social appearances and about doing “the done thing”. The family moved from a working-class area of Salford out into the suburbs and their desire to conform became the centre of conflict. “I remember life at home becoming a battlefield every night,” Leigh says. “There were rows about nothing really. And what Dr Leigh was really doing, of course, was giving me a lifetime’s ammunition for my film-making. But the screaming matches were awful, terrible, horrifying to remember.”

When the teenage Leigh, who went on to win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, showed an interest in acting, his father urged him to shake off his ambitions as “the moonings of a stagestruck girly”.

After failing all but three of his O-level exams, Leigh went to London to study acting in the early 1960s. He later won the role of a deaf mute in an episode of the popular TV series Maigret, but then lost interest in performing.

Leigh remembers his nascent interest in film-making first taking hold when he was a boy in Salford attending a funeral, a Jewish wake or shiva held at a family home. As he watched the coffin being carried downstairs and listened to a family argument die down, Leigh tells Yentob he suddenly thought it would make a great film. “It was already a tragi-comic scene, you see,” he says.

In London the director eventually attracted funding for his first film from the actor/director Albert Finney, who was then in his mid-30s. Finney decided to use his newfound wealth to fund three films: one by Stephen Frears, who made Gumshoe, starring Finney; another by Tony Scott, called Loving Memory; and Leigh’s Bleak Moments, which was hailed by the late American film critic Roger Ebert as a masterpiece.

In the Imagine documentary, Leigh talks through his early career in theatre and television, before he was finally able to attract funding to make a feature film again, 17 years later, still using his trademark improvisational techniques.

Leigh has two sons with his former wife, the actress Alison Steadman, and, according to one of them, he may not have an entirely encouraging attitude to the arts himself. Interviewed in 2009, his son Leo Leigh, also a film-maker, jokingly revealed that his father had warned him away from acting “from junior school. My dad said: ‘If you become an actor, I’ll break your legs.’ ”

Imagine will be screened on Tuesday 25 November at 10.35pm on BBC1