As far as I can tell, Bill Nighy likes to keep things simple. I approve of this attitude — people who want to make the world more complicated than it needs to be give me anxiety, and I’d rather avoid being anxious, if that’s O.K. Simplicity got him to our interview — he walked to and from The Savoy via the melee of London’s Strand, the southern boundary of the West End. The comfort he has in himself makes for comfort in those around him. “I’ve got time, don’t worry about that,” he says as we sit down.
Time was required, because even though his long career famously went largely unnoticed until his appearance in Love Actually (2003), his is a life with a narrative arc that might easily have featured in the fiction books he enthusiastically ploughs through.
Nighy is a passionate man who wears his passion subtly. He is not an evangelist but a quiet, contemplative man who expresses himself in a delicate way. He was born in 1949 and grew up in the North Downs, a beautiful, verdant suburban part of England to the south of London. These days we are talking prime commuter belt — a short train ride (as long as they’re running) to Victoria Station, and as much a beneficiary of the 20th century property boom than the other home counties. In the early 1950s, the scene would have been quite different. The war was over and Britain was rebuilding. Rationing would be in effect for another five years or so, and the mood, while victorious, was tough for all involved.
Bill’s mother was a nurse, and moved south, from Glasgow to Caterham, looking for work: she found it at the nearby psychiatric institutions. Bill got a job as a porter in Caterham when he left school at 15. It would have been more shire-like in the fifties for our young cover
