MIKE: There’s a photo of Lizzie that I love. She’s sitting in her
christening gown, and she’s playing with my hand, looking at me. She’s only
seven or eight months old, and I think the reason I like it so much is that
it reminds me of what it was like holding her for the very first time. She
just looked at me.
When Lizzie was born, the first thing I saw of her was her head. Then they put
her on Bernice’s stomach while they cut the cord and wiped her off, and then
they gave her to me while they cleaned Bernice up. I didn’t realise that a
little baby would look, but she looked right at me. It was extraordinary, an
amazing thing. And that’s how it is now with Lizzie: she sort of walks right
into you.
I remember when she got her GCSE results. I’d driven her to the school to
collect them and she said, “Don’t come in,” and we were all watching from
across the road. She came out with a piece of paper in her hand and she
stopped on the steps and suddenly burst into floods of tears. I’ve never had
a physical reaction like it: my legs simply went into overdrive and I was
completely unaware that I had started to run. I ran across the road and got
her, and I still remember the sensation of being on automatic from the waist
down — of my legs suddenly starting to go. But I’ve always had that very
simple reaction to her. It’s just another version of holding her for the
first time and her looking at me, looking straight in. She’s always had the
ability to affect me like that.
What I recall about Lizzie from early on was her will. She is very wilful, and
if her will is denied, it releases a fury which is very similar to mine. I
can destroy things if I’m angry — furniture, a record player or expensive
stuff or chairs. Lizzie once destroyed an apple sapling in the garden, and
that’s the one time that I ran out, seized her around the waist and beat her
on the bum. I remember her being in school uniform — I suppose she was about
12. I don’t know whether my anger is a good thing or a bad thing, but,
whatever, it doesn’t last. It blows away. And I think the same is true of
her. She’s a very, very funny girl. She’s got a fabulous sense of humour and
she sees herself as ridiculous from time to time.
Lizzie had a very turbulent teenage phase. Everything that you hear about bad
teenage girls happened with Lizzie. Everything. She was dreadful. But there
were some very difficult things that had gone on for her. When she was about
nine she’d been at a school where they simply thought that she wasn’t up to
snuff. Then we discovered she had a colossal disparity between her
spatial/mathematical side and the other side. She had a common IQ test and
her results were something like 160 for one side and the other was 95 — sort
of brilliant and idiot-level almost.
I remember my aunt, who’d been a teacher, saying that her generation didn’t
believe in dyslexia. She said some children were just difficult to teach,
and that Lizzie would be fine, because she only needed to be able to count
change from a pound! And Lizzie said: “But I can’t.” And she couldn’t!
Eventually she was diagnosed with dyslexia, but not before she’d gone
through all this frightful stuff. So when she was a teenager it all came
out, and we were both rather anxious about her. With GCSEs, Bernice played
good cop and I played bad cop. But when A-levels came around, I thought to
myself: “I can’t, not again! It was so disruptive, so awful last
time. I’m just going to do good cop. I’m going to make her cups of tea and
toast and stuff like that and let Bernice do the hard work.” Of course she
responded to all that.
But once I remember Bernice and I had gone to the country for the weekend and
Lizzie stayed behind because she wanted a few friends round. She was about
16, something like that. Anyway we came back and there’d been hundreds of
people at the house and some stuff had been stolen. The poor little lamb was
absolutely all at sea, and I felt terribly sorry for her.
I recently went to see an Arthur Miller play, The Man Who Had All the Luck,
with Lizzie. It’s a very odd play, but she nailed it in two phrases. She can
take your breath away by how perceptive she is. It’s the same with her gaze.
You see these great big eyes that are saying, “What’s that? What’s going on
there?” and sucking in whatever it is she’s seeing. It’s the acuteness of
her ability to sense emotion and the acuteness of her perceptions that’s
constantly surprising. And then she can be completely tuned out, vacant —
one extreme or another, never a balanced medium. That’s the sensation of
living alongside Lizzie.
LIZZIE: I think I’ve always had a fiercely bolshie streak in me,
especially when I was a teenager. Me and Dad used to fight something rotten.
I was just awful. And my dad — well, one thing is he’s very, very into his
work, so his big thing was that he wanted me to be working hard and
fulfilling my potential. As long as I was doing that, he didn’t mind what
else I was doing. The problem was that as a teenager I was never “working
hard” or “fulfilling my potential”. I was doing the opposite — trying my
very hardest not to do any work and to go out as much as possible. I didn’t
care at all about my “potential”.
So we had screaming rows all the time. And it was always a fight to the death,
with missiles launched both ways, and me and Dad having to retire to our
bedrooms to calm the situation. But the thing is, we’re similar. We’d both
feel pretty bad afterwards. I would go downstairs and be like: “Sorry, Dad.”
And he’d be like: “I’m sorry, too.” And it would all be forgotten about
immediately.
Every single Saturday night I used to go to the Dome in Tufnell Park. But
there was this one time when I was going on a school history-of-art trip to
New York the next day — which I’d been really excited about, and which my
dad had been even more excited about. It was a really big deal going to New
York. Dad was like: “You know, Lizzie, it’s going to be so great!” Anyway,
there was Dad getting really psyched-up about this trip, and I was going out
and he told me I had to be home by one in the morning, my usual curfew time.
But I was like, “F*** it. It’s fine. They won’t wake up, they never do”, and
I came in at four and my flight was at eight. Anyway I came in and there was
my dad. He was obviously furious, but for once he didn’t explode. He was
more, like, disappointed.
In the morning I found he’d written me this note. He’d sat down and in his
fury penned not, like, horrible things about me, but things that were really
true. Like how disappointed he was that I’d acted in this way because he’d
wanted me to be excited about this trip, and he felt that by staying out
until four I’d just rubbished the whole thing. Reading that note I suddenly
felt... well, it was worse than the rows. I went and I worked so hard. I
think it was the beginning of a changing point for me.
Dad is an amazing storyteller. We used to go for walks on Hampstead Heath and
he would tell these kind of ongoing Hobbit stories — all made up. And he
read to me every night — every night — but boyish books, things like
Treasure Island. I remember once he tried to make me do Meccano, and he was
like, “C’mon, you know, sit down and we’ll do it,” getting this little
spanner out, and I was just like: “F*** off, Dad! There’s absolutely no way
I’m getting into that!”
When Dad’s doing a job he works all the time. We would go out to New York, LA
and Ireland to visit him, me and Mum, before my little brother, Billy, was
born, and it didn’t seem at all swish. It was just, like, frazzled Dad. Work
for Dad must be torture, actually. Every film that he does seems painful for
him, because he just gives so much to it. So it’s a bit like you lose him
when he’s making a film. Like there is this other thing that’s sitting on
him, and weighing on him all the time, and I don’t think that’s pleasant for
him. But it’s necessary. It’s a compulsion.
Dad’s a real English gent. He does not like the heat, so he’s fanatical about
sun cream. He’ll swim with hat, glasses, shirt, and everywhere that isn’t
covered by cloth is bright white sun cream. It’s hilarious that his last two
films were made in Colombia and now he’s working in Morocco. As a result of
this aversion to the sun we always had to go on cold holidays. There’s
nothing that the Newell family like better than a nice rainy walk along the
beach! For years we went to Wales. There are pictures of us by, say, a
waterfall at Dolgellau, squeezed into these shelters in full rain gear —
waterproof trousers, macs, hoods, the lot — smiling on… The great British
spirit! Despite this, I’ve never been embarrassed by Dad. Never, ever. He’s
too absolutely hilarious. I think he’s amazing.
Interviews by Alice Douglas. Portrait by Ilan Godfrey
