I, Claudius at 50: Siân Phillips remembers playing one of TV’s most despicable villains in classic series

Dame Siân Phillips is staggered that half a century has passed since she played the malevolent Livia in I, Claudius. “That’s incredible,” she tells RT. “What I remember mostly now is what fun we had making it.”

The BBC’s garlanded chronicle of ancient Rome was adapted by Jack Pulman from Robert Graves’s twin 1934 novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. Now regarded as an all-time classic, in 1976 the 12-part series had a rocky start.

“We had terrible notices for the first episodes, and I was despondent to begin with,” recalls Phillips. “But O’Toole [as she calls her second husband, acting icon Peter O’Toole] went to the library and looked up the notices for the original book. They were the same. You know, ‘This is ludicrous – people in togas talking English slang.’” For both the books and the TV version, opinion quickly changed.

I, Claudius is the saga of a powerful but venomous family, and has been cited as partial inspiration for the 1980s US soap Dynasty and the recent HBO hit Succession. Derek Jacobi won a BAFTA for his role as the eponymous emperor, who’s taken for a fool, yet is a wily survivor who writes the unvarnished account of his relatives. The cast also includes Brian Blessed as a bombastic Augustus, John Hurt as the terrifying Caligula and Margaret Tyzack as Claudius’s stoic mother, Antonia.

By the mid-1970s, Phillips had already shone in leading TV roles, including Welsh matriarch Beth Morgan in How Green Was My Valley. On the final day of production, “our producer Martin Lisemore came into my dressing room with scripts for I, Claudius. As I opened one, it said, ‘She lifted her wizened face…’ I said to Martin, ‘Oh no, not another of these jobs.’ He told me to read on, and then I realised, ‘Ah, this looks rather nice… I’ll do it.’ It was as casual as that.”

Her glacial Livia is a study in evil, poisoning relatives in a quest to preserve her family’s autocratic rule and ensure her own deification. Even her favourite son Tiberius (George Baker) observes, “They say a snake bit her once – and died.”

“The humour appealed to me,” says Phillips. Director Herbert Wise was determined to tinge the horror with black comedy. Even so, the cast initially struggled to establish the right tone. “I loved Herbie and trusted him. He said, ‘Siân, don’t do it like that, for God’s sake. Be horrible, throw something, smash that door open, kick a slave.’ He ran alongside me in long tracking shots, shouting instructions to be ruder.”

The approach worked. “The public loved it. I was walking down a street in London and a taxi driver said, ‘Ello, Livia!’ I’d been doing TV since I was 17 but never had that recognition. I was amazed.”

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Like many of the principals, Livia aged from youth to the grave as the series unfolded, with 1970s prosthetics achieving variable results. Phillips’s elderly mask took hours to apply and remove. “I had to lie in a bath and soak quietly with a book, then peel it off very slowly.” Her skin was unaffected, but “one night, I put my mask on the windowsill in my bedroom. The next morning I said to my mother, ‘Look at this,’ and as I lifted it, it took all the paint off.”

In 1977, Phillips won BAFTA and Royal Television Society awards for the role. She says now, “It was a wonderful job. Every day was a pleasure.”

I, Claudius is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

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