Linda met Cooney in the late 1950s at a party arranged by the actor Andrew Sachs. “We were both with other people at the time,” she says mischievously. She starred in One for the Pot, and remembers seeing a young Prince Charles and Princess Anne in the audience, “going backwards and forwards in their chairs, they were laughing so much”. She retired from acting when her two children were born (a second son, Danny, lives in Australia) and turned to painting, but has always found herself involved in her husband’s career.
“I’ve always done what he’s wanted me to do,” she says. “There aren’t many wives like that around anymore.” What sort of things? “When he bought the Shaftesbury Theatre [with his company, The Theatre of Comedy, in 1983] he said, ‘Oh and we’ll have a café. Linda will run it.’ And suddenly there I was, making macaroni cheese. Or he would say, ‘Oh, Peter [O’Toole, who starred in Cooney’s revival of Pygmalion in 1984] wants his dressing room done out in red.’ So I’d spend a Sunday hanging curtains and laying a pink carpet for Peter.”
Cooney wasn’t simply a playwright, he was an impresario, producing and directing plays and, when an actor was on holiday, starring in them, too. Initially working with the actor-manager Brian Rix, who starred in many of his early comedies, he became synonymous with the genre throughout the 1960s, Seventies and Eighties, and was so admired by the French, they called him Le Feydeau Anglais, equating him to their own celebrated farceur, Georges Feydeau.
Cooney was an idealist, deciding when he set up The Theatre of Comedy Company that all profits should be shared equally, right down to the box-office staff. “Which worked fine with a play like Run for Your Wife, which did very well, but not when a play didn’t,” says Linda drily.
Yet, at the same time, his instincts were unapologetically commercial. “His only objective was to make an audience laugh,” says Michael, whose own farce, 1997’s Cash on Delivery, about a benefits scammer, is currently being revived at the Mill at Sonning, Berkshire. (The Mill has a long association with the Cooney family, regularly reviving Ray’s plays, and has renamed their auditorium in his honour.) “He was never interested in experimentation. It was only ever about bums on seats.”