Derek Jacobi at 87: Still Acting, Still Drinking White Wine, Still Refusing to Look in the Mirror

Derek Jacobi is eighty-seven years old and still will not look in the mirror. He sits in his living room with the voice that made him famous—rich, measured, every word placed with the precision of a jeweler—while his husband Richard Clifford makes coffee in the kitchen. They have been together forty-seven years. Jacobi was twenty-two when they met; Clifford was thirty-nine. "I'm a child snatcher," Jacobi calls out, and the house fills with laughter.

The giant of stage and screen has spent a lifetime running from his own reflection. As a boy in Leytonstone, he was ginger-haired, freckled, acne-ridden—the only child of a tobacconist and a haberdasher's assistant. At nine, rheumatic fever confined him to bed for eighteen months. When he returned to school, he had a new accent, new ambitions, and a new way of seeing the world. He wanted to be an actor. He studied history at Cambridge, spent his twenties at the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, and built a career of astonishing range: the stammering emperor in I, Claudius; a sublime Cyrano de Bergerac; Vicious with Ian McKellen; Last Tango in Halifax with Anne Reid. But he has never wanted to watch himself work. "If I were honest, I'd have liked to have been a movie star," he says. "I think I can act. But I didn't have the looks to go with my acting." He wanted to look like Rock Hudson. Clifford laughs. "If I had had the looks as well as my acting ability I think my world would have turned out differently. But I didn't. And I never wanted to look at myself because I didn't like what I saw."

Their house is magnificent—Edward Beale paintings on the walls, toy chimps on the settee, a summer house that serves as a cinema, a carved table that opens into two boxes. One reads: "The art in my life, Richard Clifford." The other: "My life in art, Derek Jacobi." It sums up their different characters perfectly. Clifford is the one who runs things—the social secretary, the cook, the bottle washer, the person who manages the daily machinery of existence while Jacobi remains absorbed in his work. When Clifford had leukaemia and was undergoing chemotherapy, he came downstairs one day craving a boiled egg. "D'you put it in boiling water or cold water?" Jacobi asked. "How long d'you put it in for?" It came out hard-boiled. Jacobi cannot cook. He cannot boil an egg. He has never learned to be a grown-up in the practical sense, and Clifford, sent to boarding school at six, learned early to be self-sufficient. "In our relationship he has stayed the child," Clifford says. "I'm social secretary and cook and bottle washer."

Yet Jacobi's absorption in his work has been his way of dealing with the world. "Dedicating your life to imagination and pretence is an escape, I suppose," he says. "Choosing to create a world that is actually in your head in which you feel well and safe and able. It's safety." Acting has been a compulsion, an obsession, a vocation. He has worked with terrifying directors—John Dexter, who bludgeoned performances out of actors; William Gaskill, who was cleverer but just as nasty. He directed Kenneth Branagh in Hamlet, demonstrating every note he gave, and suspects Branagh went home to stick pins in effigies of him. He played Francis Bacon in Love is the Devil, masochistic and cruel and permanently drunk, sleeping with Daniel Craig, who was thirty to Jacobi's near-sixty. He competes with Anne Reid about how many times they slept with the man who became James Bond. "Annie says, I went to bed with Daniel Craig. And I say, I went to bed with him twice." In his latest film, Moss and Freud, he plays Lucian Freud, another solipsistic artist. "I probably admire Lucian Freud more," he says. "But I knew I'd feel more comfortable with and get on better with Frankie Bacon."

In 2022, Jacobi announced his retirement from live theatre because his memory was failing him. But he and Clifford now perform a two-man show in which Clifford quizzes him about his life and fills in the gaps when they appear. He is still available for film and television work. He announced at twenty-one that he was gay—an unusual and brave move at the time. His mother said she knew, and insisted it was a stage he was going through. In the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, Jacobi and Clifford lost many friends. "We lost so many friends. It was terrifying," Clifford says. "When young people die it's so shocking. And you think of your own mortality." "It was a terrible plague time we lived through," Jacobi says. "It was like we were being punished for some reason." They were not infected, Jacobi says, because they did not "play around." That was safe.

Now, at eighty-seven, Jacobi is determined to reach one hundred. "I want to experience what it will be like to be 100. I want to find out what state I'm in." He has let "the old man in," as he puts it—a phrase he borrowed from Clint Eastwood years ago. His right leg is bad. He shrinks a little more each year. Clifford blames the white wine: two glasses at lunch, then a little siesta. "I think I'm of an age that I've earned that," Jacobi says. Clifford, seventeen years younger, is not wedded to longevity. "When we've been together fifty years and Del will be ninety, we're going to sell the house, have a big party and then drive off Beachy Head," he says. Jacobi looks alarmed. "I'm only two years off ninety." "No, you're not," Clifford tells him. "You're only eighty-seven." They bicker about whether letting the old man in means giving up. "I don't think one should ever give up," Clifford says. "No way," Jacobi insists. "No. No. I just see the inevitability that there is a big disparity in our ages." "I want a divorce," Jacobi says, laughing. "You can go and live in the cinema room," Clifford replies. "There's no lavatory in there, though." "You see that's what's saved us," Jacobi says. "The sense of ridicule. You've got to be able to take the piss out of each other." As the interview ends, Jacobi struggles to his feet. "Ooh. Oooh. Ooooooh." He looks at Clifford. "We used to be the same height. Look at us now." They wave goodbye at the front door, cackling like schoolboys.