Not that Kinda Girl. Lisa Maxwell
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look better when you have thin arms and legs. In ballet classes the boys had to lift us, and this was another reason why we were more aware of what we weighed: some boys didn’t half make a meal out of it, groaning and carrying on as if they had to lift a ton of coal.
At stage school you’re in front of a mirror every day in a skimpy leotard and tights. How we looked was a big thing: we were performing children and the school made it clear from the word go that casting directors could come round at any time, picking kids for jobs or to appear in advertisements, so you always think they will choose the most beautiful and you buy into the idea that thin is beautiful. I was worried because I thought if I was chubby then when I was doing all that dancing and exercising I’d be massive by the time I left school.
I still didn’t tell Mum I’d been put on a diet. Years later, when I gave interviews about being told to lose weight so young, I described my mother going up the school to object, but this was just one of my fantasies. I never gave her chance to protest – it was my problem to deal with. Also, I never really talked to my friends about it and I didn’t cry: I just took it on the chin, absorbed it and kept any hurt buried inside me in the same way that I always dealt with difficult feelings.
Somehow, I lost the extra pounds. I’d skip school lunch, which wasn’t difficult. Mrs Stooks, who served in the canteen, always had a fag in her mouth so we’d all be focused on whether that tower of ash was about to drop into our Spag Bol. Often it did, which put us off eating there. Instead I’d head straight for the chocolate machine in the hallway. I’d get a Bar Six and a hot chocolate, then dip the Bar Six into the drink and suck the chocolate off until all that was left was the crispy bit; often that was all I had.
I think I must have developed some kind of body dysmorphia: I no longer trusted what I saw in the mirror because in my mind I was fat, end of, but that’s not what the mirror said and so what I was seeing must have been wrong. Body-conscious ever since, I can’t help but feel thin is more beautiful, although as I get older I know it can also be ageing. However, this view is deeply ingrained and although I would not become one of the anorexic ones at school I can easily see how it happened to others because it’s a very fine line.
One of my Italia Conti classmates was the brilliantly talented Lena Zavaroni, who died of anorexia just weeks before her thirty-third birthday, having battled the condition all her adult life. I was deeply sad when I heard the news of her death but, like everyone else who knew her, not surprised. I’d heard she got married and I hoped she had her life back in shape, but eating disorders are not always easy to defeat.
Just three weeks older than me, Lena had already won the Opportunity Knocks talent show and was a big star when she joined our class, but she wasn’t like Bonnie, who could handle her fame. Lena was very quiet (I remember her hardly ever speaking) and she always seemed to be on her own. No end of pupils were eager to be her friend because she had the two things we all craved, success and fame, but she was withdrawn and seemed to prefer her own company. Lena had an amazing voice (she was a good old-fashioned belter) but she was not cut out to be so far from her Scottish home and she didn’t fit in at a London stage school. She was very thin, with a head that looked far too big for her body, and massive hair.
I’m not blaming the school for Lena’s anorexia – there were plenty of other reasons in her sad life – but it’s easy to see how any girl might slip into an eating disorder. Somehow I managed to avoid it, although the demons still moved in and would come back to haunt me years later. It was drilled into us that how we looked and presented ourselves was very important. My friend Caroline was told she should always have a full face of make-up because you never knew when you might bump into a casting director. She was mortified one day when she finally met one and didn’t have her face on: she wanted to hide, but the woman commented on how pretty she was without make-up.
Despite the emphasis on looks, we did have one girl in my class who stuck out like a sore thumb. She had very irregular teeth: someone once described them as looking like ‘a row of bombed houses’. No one could work out why she was at stage school, but I thought I knew. ‘She’s probably here because they need people to work in horror movies,’ I explained, and I meant it sincerely, genuinely thinking this was a nice thing to say. Kids can be so cruel, but she played up to it, pulling faces to frighten us. I don’t think she stayed in the industry and I’m sure she grew up looking great because you can’t always tell what girls will look like at that age.
At Italia Conti there were boys, too, although they were far outnumbered. We locked one boy (Paul Gadd) into a darkroom with five or six of us and made him kiss us in turn. He rushed around in the dark, air-kissing everyone, but when it was my turn he tripped and fell onto me, so we did touch faces. Does that count as my first kiss? When he got to Danielle Foreman he lingered a bit too long for my liking, and that’s when they started going out together. By the way, I should explain Paul’s dad was the glam rock star Gary Glitter, which might explain why he was quite a troubled boy with a penchant for letting off fire extinguishers in ballet classes. I can remember Mr Sheward stomping through a tap class, yelling, ‘Either that boy goes or I do!’ Really, Paul was just mischievous and we all liked him.
Gary Glitter turned up and bought everything at one school fund-raising auction, which he then donated back to the school. Everyone thought, what a lovely generous man. We had absolutely no idea, and I feel sad for Paul now.
It must have been harder for the boys there. One, Peter, had a really fabulous soprano voice and he was a great dancer. Our singing teacher gave him hell one day when he was doing a solo because he started out as a soprano and ended up as a tenor – his voice was breaking. ‘Get out of here and work in Woolworths!’ he screamed, his standard threat to any of us who seemed to be not putting in enough effort.
I really want to apologise to a boy called Philip, also in our class: I’m ashamed to admit we bullied him horribly. It wasn’t done maliciously, we just thought it was funny, but that’s the thing about bullying – you don’t think how it feels to be on the receiving end. Philip was attractive (and straight) with thick curly hair, but girls of 12 or 13 don’t know how to behave around boys and just the fact he had an extra toilet part made him the focus of our attention. We’d sing ‘More Than a Woman’ from Saturday Night Fever with the words: ‘Philip’s a woman, Philip’s a woman to me …’ When it came to the ‘shuddup bah’ chorus we’d go ‘bah’ right in his face, then do jazz hands and dance around him. We were evil girls. In the end, his mum came up the school to complain about us and we were called in by the head of the academic side. We felt really bad, especially as Philip was moved to another class. It was such a female-dominated environment and all I ever wanted was to make people laugh, but how cruel it was.
We were given pep talks to prepare us for a life in show business. One really savage piece of advice was this: ‘You may think certain girls are your best friends, but they’re not really. If you are up for a part, and it’s down to the last two and it’s between you and your best friend, would you want your friend to get it?’ It was a way of preparing us for a tough business: more than once the staff told us only the tough would survive. I remember thinking, no, I wouldn’t like it if my best friend got a job I was after, but then I felt really guilty for even thinking it. Our school celebrated competitiveness, and it makes me laugh when I hear about schools nowadays where they don’t even have sports days because it’s not fair on the losers. We were bred to be competitive. But I don’t want to make the Italia Conti sound bad – I think girls in ordinary schools get just as many hang-ups, different ones sometimes. Conti’s was a fabulous place, a really good establishment for me to grow up in, and I can’t imagine enjoying another school anywhere near as much.
At first, being so small seemed a disadvantage. Often I was not selected for dancing jobs because they usually wanted all the dancers in a troupe to be roughly the same height. For acting, it turned out to be a plus, especially as I could play children until I was in my early twenties. And I loved acting the best – I like changing into someone else. Mum had set about changing me and I was happy to carry on with it; not just on stage or in front of the cameras, I was acting every day as if my life depended on it, and I was good at it.
Laura and I were two of the girls recruited by Dougie Squires (a top choreographer of the day) to be in