Seeing Lloyd Evans’s tennis play Grand Slam at the King’s Head over the weekend I was reminded that I’d mistaken him three days earlier for someone else entirely.

“Hello, Lloyd, why aren’t you at your own first night?” was my cheerful opening salvo at the Times Literary Supplement’s summer party. “Because I’m not who you think I am,” replied Paul Webb, a theatre historian who once wrote a useful but mildly irritating biography of Ivor Novello.

Now the interesting thing about this is that Lloyd doesn’t really look like Paul very much at all. But I think of them as identical twins. They are both averagely handsome, tall-ish, dark of hair, probably about the same age.

But it’s the eyes, the permanent slight tilt of the head, the unusual mixture of social confidence and critical wariness in their demeanours that does it. And they both sound pretty much the same. And then I spotted Clive James. Or was it Gene Hackman?

We all have our doppelgangers. In Hampstead High Street on Friday afternoon I walked past that fine actor Raad Rawi who always strikes me as a dead ringer for Harold Pinter. I’m always therefore too scared to say hello.

Many moons ago I was mistaken for both Hank Marvin of the Shadows and Freddie Garrity of the Dreamers. But I like to think that in my odd temperamental mixture of misery and good humour I’m more like Woody Allen, only slightly less Jewish.

Another guest at the TLS party was musical theatre expert Patrick O’Connor who is always being mistaken for the actor Peter Eyre. The odd thing there is that the two men are really quite close friends. And then Tom Stoppard hoved into view and one always thinks of him as Mick Jagger, but it’s only rock and roll and probably to do with the shared agelessness and pouting lips.

The agent Michael Whitehall has a lovely story in his autobiography. A great friend of the British film star Stewart Granger, Whitehall bumped into Granger’s second wife, the actress Elspeth March, whom he didn’t know.

He chattered unstoppably on, saying how only the other day “Jimmy” Granger was telling him how much he had loved both his wives, Jean Simmons and Elspeth. His incontinent barrage was met with stony stares and utter silence.

Then Whitehall realised he’d made a terrible error. “Oh my God,” he blurted out, “you’re not Elspeth March. You’re Elspet Gray!” (Another actress, wife of Brian Rix.)

More stares, more silence. Then the woman said: “I’m not Elspeth March. I’m not Elspet Gray. I’m Margaret fucking Courtenay.”

And Rupert Everett ends his autobiography with another classic version of the burbling fan’s faux pas. Sitting in an airport, he was accosted by a man who said that Four Weddings and a Funeral was his daughter’s favourite movie but that he seemed to have gone off the boil lately. The flight was announced and the man gave Rupert his ticket folder, insisting he signed it.

Rupert did so: “”Drop dead! Love, Hugh Grant. XXX”  

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.