Life beyond the Street
Boring? Never. The Corrie actor who won a case against The Sun talks to Sarah Caden about how the streets on and off-screen have changed, a marriage break-up and the leaps in spiritual growth he says he has made since the tragic death of one of his daughters
By Sarah Caden
Sunday January 27 2008
www.independent.ie
WILLIAM ROACHE is a man more comfortable talking about death than retirement. The former he does not fear, the latter he cannot countenance. As the man whose 47 years on Coronation Street mean that it's difficult not to call him "Ken" in person, the idea of retiring from Weatherfield and acting fills Roache with horror of the unknown, but when it comes to quitting life entirely, he is not wracked with the same doubts and fears. So, the subject of life after the Street is swiftly dismissed, while life after death is something he can talk about easily and endlessly. It's not the norm, Roache acknowledges, and it's not something he wants to shove down people's throats, but after decades on his spiritual journey, it's something he wants to share.
"I don't like the idea of the dying, the actual act," laughs Roache, expounding enthusiastically on the central subject of his latest book, Soul on the Street, "and, like Woody Allen said, 'I just don't want to be there when it happens', but I don't fear it. On the contrary, I look forward to it because it will be like walking out of a smoke-filled room into the fresh air. Death is only a change of environment, a violent one, because you have to shed the vehicle of this life and break out of it, but that is the death process.
"Once that's done, it is wonderful because you are released," continues Roache, "Then, it is a fantastic thing. In fact, there is more grieving in the spirit world for someone who has to reincarnate. Then, it's 'poor old you, going back to that awful place'."
William Roache shares his convictions regarding life, death and life after death with absolute certainty, though he understands they will come as a surprise to some people. "A lot of people, even colleagues I have worked with for years," says Roache, "don't know this side of me. It will be a revelation to them. And I'm happy for people to know, but you must not go dishing it out willy-nilly or it will be thrown back in your face. Initially, years ago, I had a huge need to tell everyone, but, with time, you slip back into a sensible understanding. Everyone is on a spiritual journey, whether they know it or not, but what the book is for is to reach out to people who are searching."
The 75-year-old actor's own search has been lifelong, by his own reckoning. Though he comes from a medical and ostensibly conservative background, his Derbyshire upbringing was rather open minded. His paternal grandfather -- a GP, as was his father -- had a great interest in homeopathy and hypnotism, and Roache had some of his education at a Steiner school in the garden of the family home. It is back to these days that Roache dates his openness to ideas regarding reincarnation and other areas of spirituality, but he was well into adulthood before his journey as a "Student of the Truth" began.
"Back to the Dark Ages," Roache says, "the family was church, army or doctor, so when I didn't get into medical college, I felt I was really letting the side down. But I was called up for National Service and thought, 'Well, if I get a commission, then I've fulfilled the family honour', and I did, so I did. I stayed [in the army] for six years and became a captain and when I came out I decided to give the acting a go and, really, I'm still having a go."
"I'm a stayer," he says of his stint as Ken Barlow, the last remaining original cast member on the longest-running soap in the world. "I like to get things right and I'm still trying to get Ken right after all these years." He laughs at this summation, much as he laughs and good-humouredly jokes that maybe Ken shares this trait, what with his repeated efforts with Deirdre and his "25 girlfriends and three wives". That's where the similarity to Ken ends, though, as Roache famously strove to prove with an early-Nineties libel case that saw him sue The Sun for a piece that claimed he was as boring as his Corrie character. He turned down an initial settlement, then won the case but incurred huge costs and a subsequent case against his lawyer for bad advice left him bankrupt.
"But it was an interesting thing," says Roache of the experience. "As I say in this book, you learn more from your bad experiences than your good ones. I could regret that experience, but I don't, I had to go through it to learn what I did. I wouldn't do it now, but it was a wonderful opportunity to make a quantum spiritual leap. I learned a lot about pride, how it's a dangerous thing that needs to be chucked out the window and that it's a big enemy that comes in all sorts of forms. Through something like that, if you're lucky, you learn to forgive and that releases you. Amazingly, it was an experience that had no real negative effect on our lives. The children still had a private education, we still had the house, it was truly amazing.
"If you've lived a very cosy life, you don't learn very much," Roache explains, "but I've led an interesting life and enjoyed it, even some of the bad experiences."
An early evolutionary experience for William Roache was the collapse of his first marriage in the early Seventies, to actress Anna Cropper, with whom he had a daughter and a son, the actor Linus. By his own admission, the marriage's failure was his fault for the most part. Working on Coronation Street, he very much enjoyed the trappings of new fame, there was a great social life associated with the show then and he was repeatedly unfaithful. That divorce, however, prompted a reassessment and from that point, Roache's spirituality took on a new significance for him.
It was during his second marriage, to Sara, that Roache's journey into studying the afterlife and reincarnation really began and when their second daughter, Edwina, died suddenly as an infant, his beliefs took on a whole new and real meaning. That said, Roache does not like the word "belief". "Belief," he says, "is dangerous. Belief is only a stepping stone, but turn it into knowledge and it becomes truth. And once you know the truth, it never deserts you."
"My quest predated Edwina's death and it helped tremendously to know what I knew when that happened and helped confirm, more than anything, what I knew," says Roache, who wrote about her loss in his autobiography, Ken and Me, but approaches it from a different, more surprising point of view in Soul on the Street. "It didn't lessen the grief at the time but it helped in the long run," he goes on to explain of what he and Sara went through. "Because grief, you know, isn't for the person who's gone, grief is for what you've lost and for the people left behind and it should only last so long because they've gone to a better place, a place of joy and you should be happy for them. So, you have a certain amount of time when it's appropriate to grieve the fact they're not with you any longer, but that's all."
THE morning of Edwina's funeral, in 1984, Roache had what he calls "an angelic projection". He saw her face and he knew it was a message telling him she was at peace and that he was not to feel bad for her. "There was a great sense of lifting then," Roache says. "The initial, heavy grief lifted and even though it took another two years, maybe, before I could look at a picture of her and accept that yes, she's OK and only a thought away and I'm just sorry we had such a short time, there was a peace after that morning. But that was only a couple of years, you see. Some people grieve for all their lives and there's no need. People are not dead, they are still alive and if you're grieving, that upsets them."
William and Sara Roache were very much on the same page, spiritually, when they lost Edwina and this was "wonderful", he says. They helped their elder daughter, Verity, through her loss together and later had another child, a son, Will. Today, both are starting into their own careers, Verity as a designer with Nicky Haslam in London and Will as an actor. William Roache rolls his eyes at his son's choice, but seems somewhat pleased by it also. "Poor chap," he smiles, "but so long as you make sure they understand it's difficult, then all you can do is wish them well."
"I think Will understands that it's unique to find what I found [on Coronation Street] and that it's a much more difficult business now. Now, you can pop up and disappear very quickly. But even the Street is very different now," he says. "Of course it is, with a cast of 75. There was a time when we all socialised together and were very much a community, but the show's not like that any more and streets aren't like that any more."
Still, William Roache will stick with the Street. He misses Johnny Briggs, who played Mike Baldwin, and will miss their annual bust-up and regrets the departure of Vera Duckworth (actress Elizabeth Dawn). Roache continues to enjoy the work, though, he gets a kick out of the relationship between Ken and his women, wife Deirdre and mother-in-law, Blanche, and will not be going anywhere soon. With pride, Roache -- who will be 76 in April -- explains how he was filming at Granada just hours before flying to Dublin to promote his book and will be back at work after only a day's break when he flies home again. "While I can still do it and while they still want me, I'll keep going," he asserts.
The end of that life, William Roache does not seem to give any time or real thought to, while the end of life itself, he has given time and thought to over many years, leaving him convinced that when it's over, it's really only just begun. There will be another place, where he will be with Edwina again and there will be other lives and other experiences beyond that. This, says William Roache, he does not believe, but he knows.
"But this is only what I've learned so far," he adds. "It's a non-stop journey but there comes a time when you should give out what you've taken in and if you've spent a life searching, you should not keep what you've found out to yourself. You need to give it out and if it helps only one person, then that's good. What I know, you learn over lifetimes and learn to understand, but really, never ends." With Ken and with William, it's about never ending, about being "a stayer".
'Soul on the Street' by William Roache, is published by Hay House at €25.15
