The actor, who found fame as a clueless hippie in The Young Ones, reveals that his father was a Jew who escaped the Nazis.
Nigel Planer always knew his father was “foreign”. “He didn’t sound English, he didn’t behave English. Sports days at school were an embarrassment, he couldn’t do anything,” says the writer and actor when we meet in a pub near his home in south London.
Planer grew up in the suburb of Mortlake and, as far as he and his brothers knew, their father, George, was an atheist who developed scientific incubators and he had immigrated to Britain from Austria when he was 13. “He counted in German, read in French and spoke in English. So he was a clever fellow. He wasn’t much good at sport, but if you wanted discussion, he was your man,” he says.
That could be a motto for every Jew I know, I say.
“Well, the thing that makes me feel very Jewish is my dad hid his Jewishness until he was in his 70s,” he says.
Planer, 70, has written books, plays, songs and appeared in everything from Blackadder to Hairspray, although he will forever be associated with Neil the hangdog hippie he played in The Young Ones. Forty years later those big, anxious eyes are still unmistakably Neilesque. His conversation ranges from Russian literature to ancient history. But the reason we are meeting today — he reminds himself several times, trying to stay on a single topic — is he has decided to talk, for the first time, about his family’s Jewish heritage, which he only learnt of recently.
“But given they all spent 80 years trying to hide what happened, it’s difficult to tell a truthful story,” he says.
Yet Planer has managed to find out a lot, along with his brothers, Geoffrey and Roger (when I comment on how English their names all are, Planer smiles: “Well, obviously that’s why my dad did it.”). Like so many other descendants of Jewish refugees, they found documents and photos shoved in a drawer: “We’ve got papers from Berlin, documents giving my granddad permission to enter Britain, papers showing them trying to get to Brazil. More papers than I can read, really.”
But Planer never guessed that his father was Jewish?
“It was probably always in the air, but when you’re young you pick up a vibe, don’t you? It was so strongly inculcated in me not to ask, not to say anything. Don’t put your neck out, don’t sign anything, definitely never join a political party. I remember things like when we’d go to a restaurant he’d say, ‘Check the flowers for microphones.’ He probably got that from his relatives who had gone to Romania. When you’re told that as a kid, it makes a big impression,” he says.
He wonders if this is why he was drawn to acting and fiction writing: “Wigs, characters, disguises — that’s my comfort zone. I’ve never been comfortable going on chat shows, just being who I am. I prefer to make something up and let something come through that, rather than all that ghastly sentimental stuff.”
It was only after he finished writing his latest novel, Jeremiah Bourne in Time — a delightful Pratchettesque fantasy novel that’s the first of a trilogy — that Planer saw the book was really about him processing his father’s experience. A young boy, Jeremiah, finds a biscuit tin filled with mementoes of his missing mother, and promptly falls through time, trying to find her. “I realised I’d written about rootlessness and time travel through memory,” he says. Soon after that, he was offered two roles, one in a forthcoming Radio 4 play called The Egg Man by Catherine Dyson, and the other in a trilogy of short plays called The Arc, coming to the Soho Theatre in London next month. Both offers were for him to play a Jewish grandfather.
“It was strange because I’d never been offered a specifically Jewish part before, and here were two. I didn’t have to practise the accent at all, it was just right there,” he says, morphing into a Germanic accent. “Playing where you come from, just hearing it come out of your mouth. Wonderful.”
Even though George came to England when he was only 13, he always clung on to his distinctive accent. So why did he wait so long to tell his children he was Jewish?
“When my dad left Berlin, people were being encouraged by the state to grass up their own parents if they were Jewish. I was born in 1953, not long after the end of the war. So it was kind of a reasonable position for him to take, don’t you think?” Planer says, and suddenly looks both amused and stricken. “But I’m grassing him up now, aren’t I?”
George Planer left Berlin in 1933, along with his parents and brother, Felix. Hitler had been elected Chancellor of Germany, and suddenly the Planers’ house was the only one on their street without a Nazi flag.
“Did you see Leopoldstadt?” Planer asks, referring to Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical play about an intellectual Jewish family in Vienna before and during the war. “That kind of hits the culture of my family: not religious, lots of scientists, lots of them marrying out.” Nonetheless, George’s father, Viktor, an inventor, had the prescience to see that a lack of religiosity would not protect them and he said to his family after Hitler’s election, “This will not end well.” And so, sewing whatever money they could into the linings of coats, the family fled and went first to Switzerland, then France and eventually London. George had to leave behind his toys in Berlin, but he brought his violin: “Of course — very Jewish,” Planer says.
Eighty years later, for George’s 90th birthday party, his sons hired a klezmer band. The family became naturalised British citizens in 1939, “virtually on the eve of the declaration of war”, Planer says.
George never sat his family down and made a big announcement that he was Jewish and from Germany. “It was more a gradual loosening and, by the time he was 70, he was letting things slip.” Has finding all this out — in particular that he’s Jewish — changed how Planer sees himself?
“But I’m not Jewish,” he says before I finish the question. After all, he says, his mother was English and not Jewish, although she must have known the truth about her husband. “I think of myself as a category error, a misfit,” he says, and partly this is because he wants to be accurate, but it’s also because he doesn’t want to be reduced to a cliche: “I don’t want people to put a label on me,” he says. For example, the theatre of one play he was recently working on wanted to make an announcement that the cast was entirely Jewish: “And I said, ‘Well, I’m out, because I don’t go in for that, the whole identity politics thing, especially when it’s connected to religion.’ I just don’t see much good coming from that.” How much of this aversion to being labelled comes from him wanting to retain his individuality, and how much of it is inherited trauma from his father? He is, he says, still figuring that out.
George died in April 2016, aged 96. “And it was lucky in a way, because he missed Brexit and Trump, and he wouldn’t have been very happy about Corbyn either. The savagery of the communists was given no greater respect in my family than the savagery of the Nazis. We’re not Cambridge communists, those poncey English bastards who think ‘Russia good, Germany bad’. Then we were given a choice between Corbyn and Johnson, and that was the s***tiest choice of my lifetime, and I’m 70,” he says.
Planer has become much more aware of antisemitism in recent years, partly because of awareness of his own heritage, and partly because of his third wife, Roberta Green, who is Jewish. The two first got together when he was in his 20s and she was his landlady, 13 years older than him. “She had two children, 12 and 10, and I was only 25, so it was a bit much,” he says. They amicably split up, but stayed in touch through Planer’s two marriages - he had a son with each wife. After his second divorce about 20 years ago, he and Green, a retired group psychoanalyst, got back in touch, and have been together — blissfully — ever since.
“We can’t believe it — we’re smug as smug. We got married about a decade ago and because she’d had two marriages before, and so had I, neither of us thought we were the sort of people who deserved whatever it’s called. Love, I guess. It doesn’t come easy to us to be not just happy, but shamelessly so,” he says with a truly joyful smile.
Sometimes “the age thing” causes moments of comedy, he says. They recently went to the wedding of Green’s granddaughter, who is in her 30s. Someone asked Planer’s younger son, who is in his early 20s, how he knew the bride. “I’m her uncle,” he replied.
Green teaches him about the Jewish traditions he missed out on as a child. “The apples and honey, all that,” he says, referring to the foods eaten on Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year. He’s wary, though, of talking too much about his happy marital life: “I think something will come and get me, like she’ll break her ankle,” he says. But then he brightens: “That’s a very Jewish way to think, isn’t it?”
- Jeremiah Bourne in Time, by Nigel Planer (Unbound), is out now
Family surprises
Ainsley Harriott, 66
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Justin Webb, 62
The Today presenter revealed that his father was the newscaster Peter Woods, with whom his mother had an affair.
Danny Dyer, 45
The former EastEnders star is a descendant of King Edward III and William the Conqueror, and related to the Tudor fixer Thomas Cromwell.
Jack Nicholson, 86
After an investigation by Time magazine in 1974, the actor found out his biological mother was the person he had been brought up to believe was his older sister, 17 years his senior. His mother gave birth to him out of wedlock.
Judi Dench, 88
She is a descendant of the lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Denmark in the 1500s, serving in the castle that was the backdrop to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London
