Lenny - John Leonard - had a goatee beard and mad hair, was tall and bony and had patches on the elbows of his baggy tweed jackets. He was a real Mr Chalkdust. He was also an inspirational teacher. He taught me art, English and Latin up to the age of 13 at King’s House school in Richmond. I forgave him the Latin, which I don’t think he enjoyed any more than we did, because of his enthusiasm and encouragement in the other subjects.

He loved murals and had decorated the school with his frescoes of Tuscan landscapes. In art lessons he would give you a brief and if you wanted to do something different, far from repress you, he would become excited about it. I remember once drawing a huge picture of Galileo and his telescope, which was much larger than life-size, and Lenny mounted it on a board and got it put up in the school hall where it remained for years until it was destroyed in a fire.

I’d been acting in the local amateur group since I was eight, and Lenny encouraged me to take part in school productions and puppet shows.

In English lessons he had a clever technique for encouraging us to read. He’d start reading from a book then, just as it was getting interesting, he would close it and move on to something else, so we were motivated to finish it ourselves.

At my next school, Westminster, the teacher whom I remember fondly taught maths. I was in the bottom stream. Mr Fox was a young chap with a bushy moustache, probably in his first teaching post, who took the top grade maths people and, because he was starting out, they had given him the bottom group as well. He was a maths genius and he achieved something brilliant - he got me through maths O-level.

At our first lesson he announced: “I know you don’t like this subject, so tell me what you do like.” I said I liked painting and drama, and somebody else said football. Then he explained that he was as passionate about maths as we were about the things we’d chosen, and he would set aside the first 25 minutes of the double maths lesson every Monday for us to try to convince him what was so special about what interested us. In return we had to give our undivided attention and effort while he explained what was so amazing about maths.

He was incredibly patient. If we didn’t understand when he explained one way, he would try a different route. It wasn’t just blackboard and bookwork. I remember him taking us out into the playground to demonstrate, by standing us in various positions, how angles worked.

I didn’t keep in touch with Mr Fox when I left the school, but Lenny came to see me in a play once. Both Lenny and Mr Fox instilled in me the sense of “I can do this”. One other teacher gave me that feeling, and I am still in touch with him; we have become friends. Christopher Martin taught French at Westminster and I was in a production of Waiting for Godot in French, which he directed. I remember him because he inspired me on the sports field.

I was a fat child and dreaded athletics. I was always at the back of every race. In one 440-yard race, Christopher Martin, who was very fit, ran round the field ahead of me, encouraging me by insisting: “You can do it. You can do a personal best.” I have never forgotten that.

Actor Nigel Planer was talking to Pamela Coleman

THE STORY SO FAR

1953 Born in London

1965-70 Attends Westminster school

1971 Sussex University

1972 First job, as a gravedigger

1974 London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art

1976 First theatre job with East Midlands Mobile Arts

1978 In chorus, and understudies David Essex in Evita

1980s Appears in television’s The Young Ones and The Comic Strip

1986 Co writes with Christopher Douglas I, an Actor by Nicholas Craig

1991-93 Writes and narrates 105 episodes of The Magic Roundabout

2001 Appears in Feelgood at the Garrick Theatre

2002 Begins rehearsing We Will Rock You, which opens in London in April