Bill Kenwright: Perfect pitch

Will the West End impresario who is also the chairman of Everton be on to another winner when his club meet Chelsea in today's FA Cup final?

(GETTY)

Bill Kenwright would be the first to admit that the curtain rises this afternoon on a production that, for dramatic potential, beats anything he has ever staged in the West End or on Broadway. This matinee is the FA Cup final, starring the 63-year-old impresario's beloved Everton, the football club he has supported from boyhood, and of which he is now chairman.

Anyone doubting what the club means to him had only to see the television footage of the semi-final, in which Everton beat Manchester United in a penalty shoot-out to book their place in today's final against Chelsea. When Phil Jagielka struck the winning kick, the camera caught Kenwright throwing his head back in a roar that would not have disgraced the Lion King (which alas for him is not one of his productions). There was something visceral about it, and it carried more than just a sudden rush of euphoria. There were years of frustration and thwarted ambition in there too.

Yet reaching the FA Cup final, still the domestic game's blue riband event, does not mean that Kenwright's problems have ended. In a way they have intensified, because he knows that his increasingly fruitful partnership with the man he admires above all others, Everton's excellent Scottish manager David Moyes, can yield only so much success. Much as he craves the joy of seeing Everton's royal blue colours tied to the venerable trophy around five o'clock this afternoon, Kenwright is keenly aware that, with him as majority shareholder, the club does not have the financial muscle to make the next stride, to break up the cartel of four clubs that dominate English football in season after predictable season and challenge for the Premier League title itself. He doesn't need to shake hands with the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich this afternoon to be reminded that he is a millionaire in a billionaire's world.

He is also a luvvie in a laddish world, yet he radiates an easy-going, knowledgeable charm whether he is discussing the 4-4-1-1 formation in the company of football fans, many of whom know Stanislavski only as the Spartak Moscow reserve goalkeeper, or talking acting techniques with those who know sweet FA about football. When Kevin Keegan, during his brief second tenure as manager of ill-starred Newcastle United, drew a scornful comparison between the proper football-lovers of the north and the theatre-going folk of the south, it can't have been Kenwright he had in mind, a Scouser and Labour donor who lives in swish, stuccoed Little Venice, where he has entertained both Paul Gascoigne and Andrew Lloyd Webber, albeit not at the same time.

It can be discombobulating to others, this powerful relationship with two such distinctive forms of entertainment as football and the theatre. But to Kenwright they are easily juggled. On the train from Lime Street to Euston he once took a call on his mobile phone from the actress Jessica Lange, and gave her an in-depth assessment of how Everton had got on that day against Arsenal.

On another occasion, he was Sue Lawley's guest on Desert Island Discs, and when she asked him which of his eight records he would choose above all the others, which included numbers by his hero Elvis Presley, he opted for the theme to the TV series Z-Cars, the tune to which Everton players take the field at Goodison Park. Lawley, evidently not a football fan, could scarcely hide her incredulity. And when Kenwright then said that the book he wanted on his desert island, to go with the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare, was a history of Everton, she was downright dismayed.

Sharing this great passion is yet another great passion, his long-time partner, the actress Jenny Seagrove, whose vocal encouragement of the team was once so loud that the then-manager, Walter Smith, seated alongside her, moved further away. It is probably fair to assume that Seagrove was not a student of the School of Science, as Everton were once known, before she got together with Kenwright. But she certainly embodies the zeal of the converted. As for previous women in his life, he was briefly married to the actress Anouska Hempel, whose attendance record at Goodison Park is not documented.

It can't have seemed like his destiny, sharing his bed with beautiful actresses and living in a posh house in London, to say nothing of running Everton, when he was born in 1945 in Botanic Road, Liverpool, the son of a former bricklayer with an eye for the main chance. Bombed-out Liverpool wasn't a bad place to be in the building trade and Kenwright senior made plenty of money, but the family business wasn't for young Billy.

He created a theatre at the bottom of the garden and resolved to tread the boards. By the time he left Liverpool Institute High School in 1964, the extraordinary showbiz success of two old boys, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, can hardly have suppressed the ambition. Whatever, one story has him arriving in Manchester to read English and drama and finding that folk turned right out of the station for the university, but left for Granada Television. He turned left, blagged an audition, and became an actor, abandoning all ideas of university. He got an agent, John Cadell (father of the late Simon Cadell) and landed a West End musical with Pauline Collins, Jane Birkin and Francesca Annis.

Then, in 1968, he was offered a role in Coronation Street, as Gordon Clegg, the son of Betty Turpin, a part he played on and off, though mostly off, for the next two decades. He once said that he accepted the part only because his beloved mother, Hope, fancied walking through the Liverpool department store TJ Hughes with a soap star on her arm. But when he started producing his own shows, Kenwright found that it helped to have Coronation Street on his CV. Theatre managers would talk to him.

He fell into producing by accident. He was due to play the lead in Billy Liar, but the show was cancelled. So he put it on himself and the career of the West End's most prolific impresario was born. His first tour was backed by Pat Phoenix and seven others in the Coronation Street cast, who put up £250 each, but since then Kenwright's maxim has been never to stake any money that isn't his own on a show, and never to have fewer than 20 shows running at any one time.

It is a principle that has made him a fortune, but not a sufficiently large one as far as the future of Everton FC is concerned. For more than a year, Kenwright has been energetically seeking a mega-rich investor, or even an outright buyer, who can support with hard cash the remarkable work Moyes has done on a relative shoestring.

It was in 1993 that Kenwright was first invited to take a controlling share in the club, and he balked at the idea. "My first thought," he once told me, "was 'how can anyone own Everton?' My gran owns Everton. Everton is history and fantasy. Besides, I know nothing about stocks and shares. If Jessica Lange in A Streetcar Named Desire takes £100,000 a week, and my costs are £95,000, then I've made five grand minus royalties. That's what I know about business."

Nevertheless, he formed a consortium and made a bid, which was gazumped by the hamper tycoon (and Liverpool fan) Peter Johnson. Just over nine years ago, however, he made a successful bid to buy Johnson out, and today represents the high water mark of his occasionally tormented ownership, during which time he has worn his emotions on his sleeve at practically every Everton game, except for a few weeks in 2007 when he was a judge looking for a lead for his production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the television series Any Dream Will Do, and recording took place on a Saturday afternoon.

For Everton and Bill Kenwright this Saturday afternoon, only one dream will do.

A life in brief

Born: 4 September 1945, Liverpool.

Family: Previously married to the hotelier Anouska Hempel. Has a daughter and two grandchildren from a relationship with the actress Virginia Stride. Now is the partner of the actress Jenny Seagrove.

Education: Attended Liverpool Institute, where Paul McCartney and George Harrison had also been pupils.

Career: Started out as an actor, spending a year in Coronation Street. Moved into theatrical production, and has clocked up more than 300 shows in the West End and beyond, most famously the long-running Blood Brothers, by Willy Russell. A lifelong Everton supporter, he was a club director for 15 years before becoming chairman in 2004. Made a CBE in 2000.

He says: "I loved the days when I stood with 60,000 fans and had a meat pie at half-time, with soggy water coming out of it. But the big thing in football today is money. The manager needs money; the fans want money spent on players."

They say: "His dedication is incredible. Sometimes he gets glorious results and sometimes he gets smacked in the face. He's not tainted by refined southern sophistication." – Playwright Willy Russell