John Standing: ‘I danced with Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez'

Times

24-07-2025

The actor John Standing, 90, has been in the business for 70 years — he was nominated for an Olivier award in 1979 for Close of Play at the National Theatre and appeared with Michael Caine in the 2023 film The Great Escaper. A baronet, he is also part of an acting dynasty: his maternal grandfather, Guy Standing, was a Hollywood character actor in the 1930s and his mother, Kay Hammond, starred in Blithe Spirit in the West End. Standing lives in central London with his second wife, Sarah (the daughter of the actress Nanette Newman and director Bryan Forbes), whom he married in 1984. He has four children.
I'll never forget dancing with Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez in the mid-1960s. I was at a table in a nightclub with my first wife, the late actress Jill Melford, on a summer's evening. And who should be sitting at the adjoining table with friends? The lovely Brigitte, who had shot to fame a few years earlier in the film And God Created Woman. Brigitte suddenly fancied doing the Madison, a dance popular at the time, and invited me to join her. So I had the pleasure of dancing with this pretty young actress. Thankfully Jill was relaxed about it — it was, after all, just the one dance.
As a child the war was raging, so my first real trip was being evacuated from London, where I grew up, to Argyll, Scotland, to escape the Doodlebugs raining down on the capital in 1944. We lived on a farm and it was a magical experience. After the conflict ended my brother and I would holiday in the summer at my mother Kay and actor stepfather John Clements's cottage in East Farleigh, Kent, where I spent many happy hours playing cricket on the village green.
I got to know New York pretty well when I was appearing with Maggie [Smith] in Private Lives on Broadway in the 1970s. Rex Harrison, an old family friend who looked upon me as a surrogate son, was starring in a Terry Rattigan play down the road so we would meet up every day, wander around Central Park and, after performing, dine out at Elaine's, a famous Upper East Side restaurant patronised by actors and authors, in the evening.
Some of my fondest holiday memories are doing what Rex jokingly referred to as 'high comedy swimming' — larking about in his outdoor pool with him and his pals — at the beautiful villa he owned outside Portofino. He much preferred living in sunny Italy to cloudy England.
I also had some memorable adventures with my great friend and fellow actor Peter O'Toole, who invited me to stay with him at his home in the breathtakingly beautiful Connemara, Co Galway, in the 1970s.
We had a hilarious time, smoked a lot of weed, usually got back to his house around 4am from the local pub, and played snooker until dawn. We would then sleep until lunchtime and have a can of sardines for lunch. Happy days!
We subsequently toured Australia together for six weeks in a ghastly play, Dead Eyed Dicks, emptying theatres. On the plus side, we got to play a lot of cricket.
In the mid-1980s I was cast opposite Robert Wagner in the US television drama series Lime Street, so my [second] wife Sarah and I moved to Los Angeles where we spent the next seven years.
Being in LA was like being on one long holiday and the sun was out every day. I already knew the city reasonably well having been in films like King Rat which was shot there. Every now and then I'd have lunch or dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air, my favourite LA hotel, with a mate of mine, like the actor George Segal. And I saw a lot of LA Dodgers baseball games too.
When my family and I returned to the UK in the early 1990s we had a couple of lovely summer holidays in Cornwall. Someone very sweetly lent us a cottage in Fowey, overlooking the bay; I thought it was terribly important that the children learnt how marvellous an English seaside holiday could be, even if the weather sometimes disappointed.
I'm also very fond of India, and the state of Rajasthan in particular, which I've visited several times with Sarah over the years. I've usually stayed with my great friend Shatru, a scion of the Deogarh family, and his charming wife Bhavna, who together have transformed their magnificent ancestral home into Dev Shree Deogarh, now one of the finest resort hotels in the country. Going there is a wonderful, life-affirming experience.
I don't travel so much these days but I suspect that a visit to Paris could soon be on the cards since my daughter and her husband are threatening to move there. If they do, I'll happily jump on a Eurostar and visit them, and pop into an art galley or two while I'm in town.John Standing's latest film, The Great Escaper, is streaming online. He is a supporter of the Motor Neurone Disease Association (mndassociation.org)
In our weekly My Hols interview, famous faces — from the worlds of film, sport, politics, and more — share their travel stories from childhood to the present day. Read more My Hols interviews here