The edge he knows best these days comes with the morning's shave: Playing freethinking history teacher Billy MacGregor, he's minus his trademark beard, a wiry tangle of salt and pepper. "It was a shock when I shaved it off and found I have a downturned mouth," he says. "I thought I had a smiley mouth." It should be a smiley one. After four years on the air, Head of the Class is enjoying its best ratings ever. Part of the reason is that it's now the Tuesday night lead-in to Roseanne. Another part is Connolly. "It's a privilege to be on a prime-time show, "he says. "It's a thing Scottish guys don't usually get to do."
Scottish guys don't usually go into show business because they like The Beverly Hillbillies either. The Glasgow-born Connolly, son of a working-class engineer and a homemaker, dropped out of school at 15, apprenticed as a shipyard welder and worked on an oil rig in Nigeria. But it was watching those bluegrass-lovin' Clampetts that inspired him to buy a banjo and eventually launch (with Gerry Rafferty) a folk band called the Humble-bums. Connolly's intros gradually grew into monologues and, in 1971, into the solo stand-up career that has earned him a fortune yet fallen short of American stardom. That chance came when Class producers, who had been considering Howie Mandel to replace the unhappy Hesseman and boost the show's ratings, spotted Connolly on a cable special with Whoopi Goldberg.
"I've realized for a long time that you can't do America without TV," Connolly says. And if his stand-up act has attracted protesters back in Scotland ("Pitiful," he says of them), he doesn't expect problems here, not as a sitcom star. His students, at least, find him acceptable. "I don't see any of his 'savagery,' " says Dan Frischman, who plays nerdo-supreme Arvid Engen. Better yet, "I have no trouble understanding his accent. I watched all the episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs."
If Connolly started life downstairs, he has spiraled up the banister. Some things haven't changed, he says. "My whole life I've been antiestablishment. But," he adds, "I love where I'm living"—when he's at home—a $2 million estate in the Royal Borough of Windsor, where the neighbors include Charles and Diana.
Sharing the squirrelly comic's squirely life is Pamela Stephenson, mother of three of his five children and—as of this year—wife No. 2. He met Stephenson, best known here for a brief stint on Saturday Night Live, when she was a regular with Britain's Not the Nine O'Clock News.
For now, Pam and fam have joined Connolly in Hollywood. But it has been their hobnobbing with the stars of royalty that seems most to excite the British press. (In 1986, for example, Stephenson, Diana and bride-to-be Fergie, dressed as policewomen, went clubbing in search of Prince Andrew, whose stag party that night included Connolly.)
Whatever the country, Connolly hobnobs more quietly nowadays—he doesn't drink anymore. "I think I am an alcoholic, yeah," he admits. "I used to be such a jolly drunk. Then I was beginning to get two personalities," one of them prone to rights and blackouts. "It was Pamela who pointed it out," he says. "She said, 'You know, you've changed.' I was getting kind of violent—that; Yeah, who are you looking at?' stuff." Sober since 1983, he's also now a vegetarian and Fit for Life disciple.
Which makes Connolly a Rabelaisian comic and clean-shaven sitcomer, an alcoholic and health nut, a Glasgow boy and Windsor pal. And if this suggests a split personality, it's just part of his Celtic character. "Celts are a dichotomy," Connolly says. "The warrior and the poet." In kilt and out of kilter.
—Tom Gliatto, John Hannah in Los Angeles
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
