‘I am warning you now it will be very very hard,’ he had said, ‘especially for the women,’ and Molly and Pauline with the insouciance and confidence of youth turned to each other at exactly the same moment and grinned. Not for us, it won’t be difficult for us they had seemed to say to each other and, instinctively, Molly had put her hand on Pauline’s arm. Pauline, not a physically instinctive person at all, had despite herself put her hand over Molly’s. They were friends from that moment. They were the same age but had different qualities. Molly was more sexy although she didn’t know it, and more emotional just below the surface. Pauline’s tall, gawky beauty enchanted her tutors but they saw there was something else there: already a kind of contained quality, only betrayed when she was afflicted with her new laughter. And so the parts they played were always imbued with these qualities of their person, of their psyche.

Once three of the students, Juliet Lyall, Molly McKenzie and Pauline O’Brien, shared the role of Viola in Twelfth Night in a class production. In the students’ work the tutors saw at once that each Viola was stamped with their late teenage persona: Molly’s was direct and inadvertently sexy and somehow made them want to cry; Pauline, the beautiful one, was wittier – even her occasional ungainly movements charmed them and made them laugh, yet she held something back. Juliet Lyall’s was the most complex of the three: perhaps the least engaging, hers was nevertheless the most confident, the largest; her remarkable face with its extraordinary angular bones stuck in the memory and she emanated a powerful determination that seemed to be made of cold steel. You didn’t forget Juliet Lyall.

In the staffroom the tutors murmured together about the qualities and talent of their pupils.

Of course none of the students understood what they showed, at the time. But already the basis of their acting was formed, in a way. Many of them thought, years later, about how hard it had been and how destructive to some: all their joys and fears and learning and growing up were compounded by the fact that they had to publicly present what they learned about themselves, on stage. They had to be aware of how they sounded, how they moved, how they looked, so that their knowledge of some aspects of themselves was extended in a different way from many people’s.

Once when they were sharing fish and chips out of a newspaper one evening, walking along to the bus stop after classes, Pauline had said, ‘Molly, don’t you think we’ll seem dumb when we’re older; shouldn’t we be reading more, studying more?’