Anthony Head

It’s a rotter’s life outside the Buffy zone

With vampire-slaying behind him, Anthony Head is being cast as a cad Anthony Stewart Head remembers his 21st birthday vividly. Which is surprising, considering he was in a drunken coma. Attempting to mark the advent of adulthood by downing 21 glasses of Scotch and Coke, he reached 18 before passing out.

“My girlfriend at the time was not remotely amused,” recalls the impeccably suave star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Little Britain. “Don’t try it at home, kids.”

In 1975, just as Head was waking up with an almighty hangover, Simon Gray’s bittersweet comedy Otherwise Engaged began its first London run. Coincidentally, the director Simon Curtis has now revived the play, with Head in a key role. Richard E. Grant plays the lead part of a callous, self- absorbed publisher, but his co-star gets to blow off far more steam as a womanising, alcoholic, misanthropic writer.

It is an atypical role, a step outside Head’s portfolio of laid-back smoothies. “That’s why I wanted to do it,” nods the youthful 51-year-old, sipping tea on the terrace of a palatial Bath hotel. “The bizarre thing is, inside of a week I was offered another play and another part that was pretty much exactly the same. Does somebody know something about me that I don’t? Suddenly I’m being offered these real pigs who insult people and get drunk at parties.”

Although successful in its day, Otherwise Engaged seems an oddly time-specific piece to revive, but Head insists that Gray’s chamber piece about emotionally disconnected, sexually incontinent media types offers a revealing historical snapshot of the postpermissive 1970s. One of the female characters, for instance, spends most of the time topless. “At the time it was so passé ,” he says. “Everybody got their kit off on stage. I think it works better now than it probably did then. Now it’s more of a statement.”

Head himself remains fully clothed throughout the play, which will disappoint his army of female fans. Indeed, for a sex symbol, his CV is remarkably free of racy romances and soft-porn romps.

“No one would be interested,” he laughs. “In fact, I’ve only been asked to do love scenes at a time when it’s not quite as interesting as it might have been once. I seem to be taking my clothes off much more of late, which is not necessarily a good thing. One was definitely for comedy, maybe both were. But no, nobody’s asked me to do porn.”

Older readers will recalls Head’s breakthrough role in the Gold Blend coffee adverts, a 12-act yuppie soap opera that became emblematic of the Thatcherite 1980s. He has no shame in citing it as a career landmark. “Why would I?” he beams. “The Gold Blend thing gave me a good old wad that meant that I didn’t have to do stuff I didn’t want to do. From that moment on I’ve been really fortunate.”

The Gold Blend campaign was doubly fortunate for Head, since it was also shown in America, leading to LA and his seven-year Buffy residency.

Meanwhile his partner of more than 20 years, Sarah Fisher, and their two daughters remained in their Somerset farmhouse. From here Fisher has carved a career as a leading practitioner in the Tellington Touch equine awareness method, a hands-on therapy for emotionally disturbed animals.

For this reason, Head says, relocating to LA permanently was never a serious option. “We didn’t want to raise our children over there, and Sarah’s work is very much here. She wanted to make Tellington Touch thrive and become huge in England.”

Coming home for good in 2002, Head walked into another plum role on one of the biggest comedy shows of the past five years: Little Britain. Tony Blair is clearly the model for his character, a new Labour-ish PM with an infatuated, flamboyantly gay personal assistant. But Head downplays the parallel. “There are bits and pieces of him in there, but not really,” Head says. “ I don’t know what Tony’s like. He said his daughter says that I’m a better-looking Prime Minister, but he puts it down to the make-up.”

Much like Blair himself, there is something of the rock star manqué about Head. With his chat-show charm and single diamond ear-stud, he could easily be some 1980s pop veteran semi-retired to his country retreat. Indeed, this might well have been his fate if acting had not intervened.

Inspired by his multitasking older brother Murray, who scored a chart hit in 1984 with One Night in Bangkok, Head tried his luck in a clutch of small-time bands in his twenties. The most promising was a rock outfit called Two Way, who released a single in 1983.

But ultimately acting success eclipsed Head’s rock-star ambitions, although he has since sung onstage in various musicals, most notably a 1990 revival of The Rocky Horror Show. His Buffy fame has also allowed him to indulge this hobbyist sideline further. In 2002 he collaborated with George Sarah on an ambient pop album entitled Music for Elevators. Record shops generally stock it under the Buffy section.