Life Tips from a Star Actress

Posted on October 13th, 2008 | by Dee |

Sheila Hancock, Esma Cannon & Miriam Karlin in BBC Television The Rag Trade

Life Tips from a Star Actress or You Can’t Always get What You Want

Last night I went to hear the famous British actress Sheila Hancock give a talk. I found her talk very interesting, it was mostly about her life now and with her late husband. There was one little story that she told her audience that I would like to share with you here. The story is about how she started off in her acting career and I feel it has a life message for us all.

Sheila was a bright child who enjoyed acting and telling stories, she especially liked telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. So you can imagine her delight when her class teacher announced that the school play that year was going to be, you guessed it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Sheila’s hand shot up straight away ..”ooh, yes, miss, please miss, me miss, I know the story miss, pick me miss, please miss, please miss, I know all the lines, miss, pick me, pick me.” By now she could have been almost standing on her chair trying to get the teacher’s attention above all the rest of the class.

Image via Wikipedia

Well, sure enough, the teacher did pick Sheila to play a part but not the part of Snow White that she so deperately wanted. No Sheila, instead of being the star of the show was to play the part of …. Dopey!

You can imagine how she felt as she went home from school that day, perhaps with tears in her eyes to tell her mother. Her mother, though, far from feeling sorry for her daughter, put her arm around her and said; “well, never mind, at least we’ll make sure that you have the best costume.”

So for the weeks before the day of the school play, mother and daughter set about making a ‘Dopey’ costume for Sheila to wear. They turned a pair of old red pyjamas into a dwarf’s costume and made a white beard and moustache out of wool, they also made a pointed hat out of left over red material. At the end thay had a great looking dwarf costume.

So the day of the school play came round and all the pupils were in their costumes, the audience were in their seats; all mothers and fathers waiting anxiously to see their kid’s performance. As the curtain lifted, the music started … “Hi, Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go…” and the children came onto the stage in a line led by Snow White with Sheila at the end of the line playing Dopey.

Snow White stopped center stage and the dwarfs started lining up behind her when disater… Dopey falls over, flat on his (her, Sheila’s) face. Sheila picked herself up and straightened her beard and noticed that the audience were laughing. Later in the play, Dopey fell over again (deliberately) and the audience laughed again, she fell again and again and again, each time the audience laughed and, as Sheila recalls, no one even looked at Snow White for the whole play.

That was Sheila Hancock’s introduction to acting and the start of a very successful career.

Yet, what is the message of this for the rest of us, especially if we do not want to go into an acting career? Listening to Sheila recount her story, it struck me that what happened here is that someone, in this case Shelia, took what had been given to her and made the most of it.

That is the message for the rest of us, Life doesn’t always give you what you want so you have to make the most of what you have.