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Travelling in America with Tony Richardson

RELATED STORIES

Oxford: theatre and being in love
Avrion Mitchison Scientist
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It was pretty misogynist. I don't think I was- I was ever, in fact, to be honest, I don't think I was homosexual at all, but, as I say, the common room, with all these people who I knew and loved and admired, very strong tinge. Probably very little practice. And then, there was the theatre world which I drifted into through, I suppose, through- maybe it was- I think it was through my younger sister, Val, who had arrived in Oxford a couple of years later. And she was a very pretty girl and there were lots of people at her feet, and she sort of swanned through it. She didn't actually do anything in the way of acting, but she was- she knew all those people. And, I was, of course, there were these lovely girls. And my- the peak of my success there was appearing in 'The Duchess of Malfi' not only in Oxford but also when it transferred to Paris. That was fun. Tony and I became great friends and I believe now, in retrospect, Tony's died now- he died of AIDS- that there was probably, you know, this sort of ambiguous feeling. But, in fact, what happened was- in fact what happened was that there was a girl called Ming Craig from London who started as a friend of Tony's, and I fell very much in love with her towards the end of my life in Oxford. Then I moved to America, as we'll come to in a minute. And, I thought I was going to lose touch with everybody, but Tony came over and we spent- I can't remember, quite a long time- six weeks or so on a huge drive through America together. And before I'd left, I'd had a sort of resolution talk with Tony, and he said, you can attach yourself to Ming as far as I'm concerned. I think I should have realised at that point that, although I was pretty naïve, that there were boys and girls and different tastes involved. The tragedy was that Ming contracted leukemia soon after I had parted company and she died while I was away, and I never saw her again. But I can't even really recall what she looked like. I can just recall driving in an ancient Austin, whatever it was, six or seven or something like that- tiny crummy old pre-war car, it didn't have a petrol pump, it was a gravity feed inside under the bonnet- with Ming and Tony, and being in love and, well that was part of my youth.

Avrion Mitchison, the British zoologist, is currently Professor Emeritus at University College London and is best known for his work demonstrating the role of lymphocytes in tumour rejection and for the separate and cooperative roles of T- and B-lymphocytes in this and other processes.

Listeners: Martin Raff

Martin Raff is a Canadian-born neurologist and research biologist who has made important contributions to immunology and cell development. He has a special interest in apoptosis, the phenomenon of cell death.

 

 


Listen to Martin Raff at Web of Stories

 

 

Duration: 3 minutes, 2 seconds

Date story recorded: June 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008