Dear Tom

Tom Courtenay was born in Hull in 1937 and brought up near the fish dock where his father worked. They were poor but his parents were determined that Tom would have the opportunities that they hadn't had. To their delight he passed the eleven-plus, went to grammar school and from there was accepted to read English at University College London. He didn't really want to go to university, he wanted to be an actor, so he chose UCL because someone told him it was in the same street as RADA, and if he was in proximity, who knew what might happen. Tom and his mother Annie were very close and from the time he left Hull, she wrote to him every week. During Tom's third year at university, his mother's letters became more searching and more intimate in response to his unhappiness and Tom kept every one. Tom has selected the best of them to go in this book and interwoven with them a portrait of what was going on in his life at the time, in the heady days of the early Sixties when successful young working-class actors were coming to the fore for the first time. Annie's letters are astonishing - wise, funny, with a natural instinct for words, but also deeply painful. She knows she's worthy o