Drama School
He got me to Guildhall, on a teaching course. The minute I got there, I realised that nobody would question it if I went into the drama classes, so I enrolled for every drama class, and it wasn’t until my third year there, when I was teaching one day a week, that they realised I should not have been doing all these drama classes. I was in three plays that year, and the principal had me in, and said ‘Eileen, I’m terribly confused. You’re down on the teaching course, you’re gradually getting your teaching diploma, but you’re in the plays.’ And I said ‘Well, yes, I’ve been doing both courses’, and he said ‘Good luck to you’. It’s that kind of cheating you can’t do now, which is a shame.
I doubt whether I learned anything much there. We had two hours a week when we had private lessons, one-to-one, with what we called professors. That’s where I learnt anything.The last one I had was mad keen on T. S. Eliot, and I think I did practically the whole of T.S. Eliot with him. We learnt from just doing plays. It was so to do with opera; opera came top, music was next, and we were the poor end of it.
The Guildhall School of Music and Drama
It’s much better now, especially since they’ve moved to the Barbican. I learnt a bit of confidence there, though I was very taken aback by the other pupils at first. There was one chap there who was from my area, but everybody else was so rich! I had some terribly embarrassing, awful, humiliating things happen. I only had one set of clothes, I hadn’t got the money to do things. All the same, I’m lucky to have the kind of personality that gets on, that isn’t crushed by things on the whole, and it lets a lot slide off my back. But it was hard.
Guildhall was down in the basement of John Carpenter Street. I’m one of those people who’s never looked very healthy, but I was grey by the time I left Guildhall, because I was doing two courses. I was utterly exhausted. The last year I had to teach one day a week, and I hated it. So I kept it quiet from my parents that there was no way I was going to be a teacher.I taught something called ‘Free Drama’, it was a nightmare. It was the days when everybody thought that everything had to be frightfully free. It was the early ’50s, and they were saying ‘No desks’, so you couldn’t get the children sitting at desks. I remember endlessly saying to the children ‘We’re playing going to sleep now; I want you all to imagine you’re asleep’. I don’t believe in all that unstructured teaching. I only ever learned anything by people being pretty strict with me.
In those days you had something called matriculation when you were sixteen, and I’d
come bottom in my form every year in the grammar school, because I was doing drama, and out with boys. It was only because this wonderful teacher said to me, I know you’re intelligent, and you keep coming bottom. What’s the matter with you?’ I said ‘Well, I find it so hard to concentrate. I look out the window, and my brain thinks of other things. I can’t be bothered.’ He said ‘You come with me, and I’ll show you what’ll happen if you go on not bothering.’ He took me to an absolutely huge typing pool, with all these girls, and he said ‘This is where you’ll be if you don’t concentrate’. That’s the only reason I did well, in the end. I shut up, and by the time I left, I was third or fourth in the class. But I would never have done it if people hadn’t been strict, and said, ‘Look, there are some things you just have to sit and learn! You can’t expect to get everything in a lovely way’. I loved acting, so I worked my socks off at drama school.
I remember thinking a few years after I left drama school ‘What did I learn there?’, because people would say, ‘Do you think it’s worth going?’ and I thought ‘Well, I learned how to make up . . .’ It was the private lessons that gave me a lot of confidence, and where you could express yourself. Whereas if you’re always in classes, some people get pushed down. In mixed classes, the males tend to dominate. I know in rehearsals, still, men dominate. Not with somebody like me, now, because I’m old and I’ve got a bit of clout, but I can see the younger girls being pushed down. The one-to-one business was good, but I didn’t learn anything about the theatre. I learned a lot about poetry, and I did a lot of plays, but I don’t remember anything in the class that really struck home, nothing. And I didn’t have any money to see things.
The only theatre I saw was when they put on the notice board ‘Drama students will be
welcome at a dress rehearsal’ or ‘This show is now coming off, you can have a seat’, so I
remember seeing Paul Scofield in Ring Round the Moon, and Waters of the Moon, with Edith Evans. I only went to Saturday afternoon pictures as a kid. My only interest in cinema, which I still love, were old American musicals.

Starting Out
I had a terrible time. Nobody got an agent. They used to say ‘If you’re a woman, give yourself eight years, and if after eight years you are not working steadily, give it up. Men, give yourself five years, and if you’re not working steadily, give it up.’ Well, I went nine years before I was working steadily. It took me so long to get going, hanging around for two seasons at Stratford. When I first went there, they wouldn’t even allow me to understudy, I just went as the wife of my then-husband, lulian Glover. I really started to learn about acting at Stratford. I’d done a few seasons of weekly rep in dreadful places, and then I married Julian.
We’d been in rep together in a holiday camp in Skegness, and we were both 21. Then he’d got a walk-on job at Stratford. I was always very sharp; I said to him ‘Michael Redgrave’s going to be the leading actor in Stratford this year. They’ll want tall people so that he doesn’t look too tall. You’re tall; make sure you get an audition.’ I think a lot of cockneys are canny, I just used to know where it was at. So he got into Stratford, and I’d given up by then; I’d had two terrible years, with only a few weeks of rep here and there, and I thought ‘Well, I’ll just go up and be a wife’. I gradually went up the scale at Stratford; I worked as an usherette, and then they asked me if I’d like to work on the postcard stand in the foyer, and I sold postcards of all the old actors, and answered questions about the theatre. I was so miserable, I so wanted to be backstage with the actors.
That season, suddenly, they’d lost about five people, and they were thinning in the ranks of the walk-ons because everybody had moved up. My husband heard they were going to take on some more extras for a crowd scene, and he went to Glenn Byam Shaw and said ‘Look, my wife’s here with me, and she’s dying to be in it’, and he said ‘Listen old chap, we just don’t take people’s wives, because you want’, and my husband said I think she did an audition for you once’. He looked up my audition, and he said, ‘ All right, she can come into the company, but she will not even be allowed to understudy. Okay?’ I was allowed in the company. The thrill! I went in halfway through the season. And I’d only been there six weeks, and the girl who was playing Audrey in As You Like It – Dame Peggy Ashcroft was playing Rosalind – was taken to hospital for six weeks. Then her understudy was taken to hospital in the night with some kind of chest thing, she couldn’t breathe. And I thought ‘She’s the understudy, who is going to play Audrey tomorrow night? What if she’s not better?’ So I stayed up all
night and learned Audrey, and made sure I was in the theatre the next day, and they were all saying ‘Oh my God, is there anyone who knows Audrey?’ and I said ‘Yes, I know it, I’ve played it’. I lied, and I went on as Audrey, and from then on they accepted me at Stratford. But you see, I was cunning.

The ‘Kitchen Sink’ Period
We were going to sweep away the old thinking, the Binkie Beaumont, the tea-party, nicely dressed theatre; it was the beginning of ‘kitchen sink drama’. The people who started to be famous when I left drama school were Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, that was the group. It was very much the first of the new wave of real. I did a play at the time with Larry Olivier called Semi-Detached. Oddly enough, it was one of his few failures, and I had a big success in it. He was just so generous to me. I know people say awful things about Larry, but I adored him. To me, he was the absolutely typical actor: wicked, two-faced, and a lot of other things, but he’d always give you a show. The first time I worked with him, I nearly fainted, I could hardly get through the morning’s rehearsal. There was one point in that play with Larry where I had to go off-stage, run upstairs and come down, and make an entrance again. There were actual stairs, so that people could hear me running up the stairs and back. I had this moment, and I was always a tiny fraction of a second late on my entrance, and he said to me, ‘Darling, why are you always late on that thing?’ and I said ‘Well, I’m running like mad, to get to the top and down’. He said ‘Why are you going to the top of the stairs?’ and I said
‘Because that’s what supposed to do, go to the top of the stairs.’ He said ‘Darling, you’re offstage. It’s magic on stage, not reality, magic’. He said ‘You just go halfway up the stairs.’ That sounds a silly lesson, but I learned that total reality isn’t necessarily what’s total reality on stage. That’s the art of acting half the time, making people think it’s reality.
But if you do total reality on stage, mostly it doesn’t work. A perfect example of that:
when we were at Stratford, Albert Finney was in Lear. Everybody else – because they couldn’t afford it – were in felt costumes. But because Albert Finney was Albert Finney, they gave him real leather. When I sat in the audience, his costume looked lousy and all the felt ones looked great. The felt ones looked like leather, and his looked like plastic. I get awfully bored, if someone says ‘We’re going to cook real sausages on stage’. That was very much my early plays; very much what I started to make a name doing, was in utterly realistic stuff. I pretended to be from the Midlands for years, because that was the vogue, but again, that was just cunning of me. All the plays were coming from Midland and Northern writers.
My husband was watching me in The Duchess of Malfi (for the BBC), because someone wanted to make a movie of it. I wandered in, looked at it, and said ‘My God, I was gorgeous, why wasn’t I a film star?’ and left the room. I happened to say this to a friend, and she said ‘Well, you know why you didn’t get to be a film star, Eileen, it’s because you played those endless washed-out Midlands and Northern women. That was your main diet when you were in your late 20s and early 30s, and that stopped you from being accepted. You didn’t do the looks thing.’ Anyway, I think I’ve had a far more interesting life than if I’d done movies. I mean, I’ve had a charmed life, so what the hell. I still don’t understand actors who want to be famous or make a lot of money. To me, the whole joy and pleasure of acting – and it is a great joy and pleasure, with all its hard work – is to become, or to persuade people, that you are someone else. That is the pleasure, to enter someone else’s persona, someone else’s whole being, and persuade a lot of people that you are not who you are, you are someone else! That process is wildly exciting. Last night, I had the thrill of my life; Alec Guinness, who is an old friend, and who has been very good to me in my career indeed, came to see the play (A Delicate Balance) and he said ‘Eileen, you were marvellous. I could not see you at all’. That, to me, is it. I know that’s not stardom, because stardom is people wanting to go and see what they expect, and getting it. That’s a different thing; and some stars manage to be stars and still sink into their roles. There will always be wonderful actors . . .When I was very young – I never know whether it’s envy or jealousy – but I immediately could scout out who was going to be the opposition. Maggie Smith and I were both sacked when we were 20, from Assistant Stage Managing at Oxford rep. But I was aware, even then,from the tiny bits that I saw her do in university shows, that she was terribly talented, we were the same age, we looked rather alike, and I thought ‘If ever you get going, that’s going  to be someone who’s going to be very, very strong competition’. And let’s face it, she’s beaten me! Glenda Jackson and Maggie Smith and I were all after the same parts. Luckily, I thought that they were all wonderful, and I never minded giving in to someone I thought was terrific. I used to get very angry if I thought someone wasn’t talented, and I didn’t get the part. I used to say so, which wasn’t very good. I was not very nice about some of the older ones. It took me ages to appreciate Peggy Ashcroft.

Acting Lessons
The biggest things I’ve learned have always been from other actors. Not directors, but other actors. Peter O’Toole said to me very early on – I don’t think it’s quite true, but it had a big effect on me: ‘You’re either an actor who goes on the stage and says ‘Love me’, or you go on the stage and say ‘Fuck you, this is what I’m playing, like it or not!’ And I thought, ‘Ooh, that’s me. Fuck you. This is what I’m playing.’
The nearest I came to not doing a part – it was Ian McKellen who told me off about it -
was when I was asked to do Sons and Lovers on the television, playing the mother. Now, that mother was so like my own mother, and I know that I’m so like my own mother – and there was a huge percentage of me that didn’t like my mother. A huge percentage of me hates what’s in me that is like my mother, and I knew I was going to have to pull out everything I knew about my mother and me. And I said no to it three times. Finally, Stuart Burge, the director, said, I just don’t know why you keep saying no to this, Eileen. They all want you to do it.’ And Ian McKellen said to me ‘You’re not doing it because you don’t want to be your mother,’ and I thought ‘He’s right. I’ll do it.’ But then I never wanted to play Saint Joan, because I thought ‘Oh, God, I’m not even religious, I don’t want to play her’. I’d seen it and always thought all that sickly praying and going on’, but I was forced into that accidentally to help a dear friend who was opening a theatre. And that made me very religious for a while! It was weird, but I got in touch with something in me. By then I’d played Celia Copplestone in The Cocktail Party, and that had a terrific effect on me. I very nearly became a Catholic while that was going on, because I was working with Alec Guinness, who is a Catholic. He wasn’t pushing me in any way, but he would lead me through, and he’d give me stuff to read while I was playing it that helped towards those feelings.
My now-husband – who’s been married to me twenty years, and who’s not an actor -
says to me very early on when I do a play, ‘I’d like to read the part so I can know who I’m going to be living with for a few months’. I find it irritating when people say ‘Oh, you live the part’. You don’t, it’s not that you live the part, but certainly in rehearsals, you’re having to endlessly go back inside: ‘If I use that bit of me, I’m thinking like that, therefore, how will I react, or say that line?’ I do one of the few exercises that people told me they learned in another drama school, which was to do your lines while doing very menial tasks, like cooking. It’s a very useful thing to do, and so often when I’m cooking I go through lines. Then my husband will say something to me, and I’ll answer him as the character, because that’s what I’m fishing up at that moment. Once you’re playing, the pressure isn’t on quite so much; you probably aren’t still thinking all day. By the time you’ve opened you’ve got your performance in some way, so you’re not as bugged by it. But certainly, while I’m doing rehearsals, I am very effected. All parts have some effect on me, all of them. Because of course – every actor will say
this – you have everything in you. Each human being has every possibility in them, I would hope. And you mustn’t accept a part if you really don’t think you’ve got that in you. Any part you go into, you’re going to fiddle about and pull out things that may be things you don’t like very much. You’ve got a killer in you – everyone has somewhere; you’ve got a sexual being somewhere in you, and it depends, as an actor, on what you are willing to show. I think you’ve got to be willing to show everything, and that to me is what makes one actor better than the other. I’ve seen good actors actually stop themselves by not being willing to be ugly, or plain, or vicious. I’ve seen actors want to be nice. It’s the worst thing about America. It’s not an accident that for the nasty parts, on the whole, they use British actors! I don’t know what that is; I suppose American actors want people to love them.I often think that actors really shouldn’t need psychoanalysts, or any kind of analysts; I think we’re terribly lucky because we get to go through things legitimately, and get paid for it! We get to release things. Oddly enough, I think the most difficult thing to play, and I hardly ever attempt it, is farce, because you’re not going through anything. It’s technical. And if the other actors aren’t all giving you what you want, it’s the most miserable thing to play in the world. You’re often happier playing something quite miserable, because it’s cathartic. You feel great at the end of the evening, and people come round backstage and say ‘Oh, God,
what a terrible thing, what you’ve been through’. But you’re released by having let something out.
But, strangely, I’ve never made a deliberate decision, I’ve always done the work, and the plays I like. It’s very bizarre, because I’m not an intellectual in any way, shape, or form, and it took me a long time – because I always felt lacking in brain – to know that I was even intelligent. But I have always had a very good nose for what is a good play. The only bad play that I’ve been in – which was a Jeffrey Archer – was the only deliberate choice I’ve made, and that was so I could work with Paul Scofield. We thought we’d all do it for a bit of fun.

Rehearsals
I will do almost anything if someone thinks that’s the way to get the part. As you get older, it does get a little more difficult with directors. I had a lot of difficulty with the director for Indiscretions, in New York, Sean Matthias. I’ve known him a long time, really charming man. I talked to him before we started, and he said ‘Look, Eileen, everyone wants you for this part, and I think you’d be terrific, but I have a method of working that I think you’ll buck against’. I said ‘Oh, God, are we going to play games?’ He calls them exercises, I call them games. And I said ‘Look, all right. If that’s the way you work, that’s the way you work. I think they’re absolute rubbish, and do no good whatsoever, but if that’s the way you work, and we’ve got six weeks, I will do it so that no other member of that cast will know that I think they’re rubbish. I will do them full tilt, because you’ve been honest, and that’s what we’re going to do.’ And I did! Those games do one thing, they make sure that everyone talks to everybody, that everybody knows each other’s name, and that you all know that you’re a group, and you should be pretty relaxed with each other by the time you act. But for my money, that
should be a given before you start, that you always talk to everybody! The same thing would have been done getting there a quarter of an hour before rehearsal, and all having coffee together. To me, it was a thorough waste of time. It meant that I learned my part before I went into rehearsal, because I thought ‘I’m not going to get enough rehearsal to learn it in rehearsal’. I think it’s rubbish.
I watched Tony Sher on Omnibus with a highly regarded voice teacher, Cis Berry. But he
did a speech where she made him keep changing chairs. It would be like ‘To be (moves) or not to be (moves); that is the question’. I thought ‘You’re an intelligent man, Tony Sher. Why can’t you look at the speech, know you need variation, work out where it is, and just think it through?’ I don’t understand why they need some of these exercises. Sometimes in Shakespeare, if it’s all got bogged down and everybody’s getting a bit speechy-speechy, and you don’t quite know what they’re saying, okay then, let’s stop and say ‘What’s this scene really about?’ Often, by the side of the classics, I write little modern things like ‘Well, fuck you’, as if that’s what that means, really. But to me, that’s homework! Or that’s just a chat in rehearsal, like ‘Here, though we’ve got all these words, I’m saying da-da-da-dum, and you’re saying to me da-da-da-dum. Isn’t that so? Or do you think something else?’, and then you discuss it with the director.
Edward Albee said at one point, ‘Oh, English actors can’t feel any emotion until they’ve
moved, and American actors can’t move until they’ve felt an emotion.’ It isn’t true. There are many ways to skin a cat, and everybody has their own method of getting somewhere. There is no absolute, fail-safe method. I’ve seen people use all kinds of things and end up good or bad. The best actors for my money have been the ones that are pretty straightforward.
Give me the blocking, work it out. You don’t throw beanbags; you discuss a scene, but
not endlessly go on and on. Some discussion, but every part and every play is different, and almost any method will work if you’ve got good actors. You will not get a good performance from bad actors. You can take them all through different methods, but finally, were the actors any good or not? That’s what it’s about. It won’t make any difference to an actor who is really good what method you use to get him there. It just means that sometimes you do more work at home.

On the Method
Acting is about you being real to that character, in that situation, in that play. This is where Method acting goes wrong. The weird thing is, I’ve never come across it in America. The difference between American and British, is a barrier often put up that is not actually there. It’s played up by both lots, but having done a lot of work in both countries, I find very little difference. I’ve done so many plays there, but I’ve only found extreme professionalism. And text acting. The reason I wanted to work in America was that I did feel that English actors were too head-based, and not gut-based, and they worked everything out; everything was beautifully done in the head. I often thought they didn’t have the rest of the body, and I thought ‘I’d like to learn to feel more of the whole’. We had a spill of some coffee on the stage the other night, and in character, I hope, I immediately said ‘Claire, that was your fault, you made me do that’, and Maggie (Smith) said ‘Oh yeah, I would be blamed, wouldn’t I?’ And it was off and over, and we went back to the text, because we were being extremely professional. We knew we couldn’t lean on the coffee, we wanted to make it look as if nobody knew it was out of text. It was an accident that we used and got rid of, because there’s a brain telling you that you’ve got to get on with the play. Anthony Page kept on saying that lanet McTeer did different moves every night, and I said ‘That was fine, she was the lead, everybody had to work around her. If you’re going to have six of us doing what moves we
want every night, you’re going to have traffic jams, and the audience won’t hear half the play’. There is a technique to acting as well. The best actors have the technique, and have massive feeling, which they are able to show, and the emotion is bound within that evening’s play, and not about their own wanking! And it is wanking, a lot of the time: ‘Oh, how do I feel, this will be terribly interesting’. It’s nonsense. People who are real Method actors don’t do theatre much. You can do that in film. Wonderful on films, it gives some marvellous, offbeat things.
Vanessa Redgrave does things off the top of her head, and I’ve worked for six months with her. Oddly enough, it’s very easy to act with her, because she doesn’t indulge. She doesn’t affect you by what she does.If she’s going to mess herself up – and I’ve seen her mess herself up on-stage – that’s her own problem. What I can’t forgive, is when they mess you, and the story, and the author up, because you should be serving the author, that’s your first priority, to do what the author wrote. Not what you want to do. That’s the interest: what did he mean, how did he want it?
Most of them – Edward Albee’s still alive – can’t tell you half the time. They’ve written it
down, but they can’t tell you, so you’ve got to find it. I would be hard pressed to give you sensational stage actors that are totally bound up with what I call absolute Method acting. I loved it when somebody told me a story about Helen Mirren, and I believe I’ve heard the same story told about Marlon Brando – somebody said to them ‘The understudy’s on tonight’, and they both said ‘Oh, good, that’ll be interesting’. That is different; I’m with that: ‘Oh, I’m going to get something different thrown at me tonight, that I’ll react to.’
One of the worst things I find about the few so-called Method actors – and I think l most
people get the Method wrong; I know there’s Stanislavsky’s Method, and there’s Lee Strasberg’s Method, and it’s all very different – is that one of the things they do is hesitate a lot: ‘Well,um, I think . . . uh . . . it would be a good idea, uh, if . . . we went out’. Certainly no British person would ever speak like that, and I don’t know any Americans who speak like that. It’s not real. You think, just occasionally, maybe some Mafia boss might speak like that, but my American friends speak, sometimes stop, sometimes hesitate because they don’t know what they’re going to say next, but they don’t have all these grunts, and oohs and aahs. I think being real is much harder work than that, much deeper work, much less easy than ‘Mmmaahh mmm rrrr’.
But to make out that there are two forms, and that some people go on and their priority is reacting, and somebody else’s is text, I don’t see that. They’re both the same thing. You’ve got to react, whoever you are. Reacting is why one only wants to work with good actors; it’s tennis, and you have to react to that ball coming back! And your eye’s always got to be on what’s coming back to you, and you have to react to that. It’s unfortunate to do too much work at home, because the wardrobe doesn’t react the same way as your fellow actor. That’s the only reason for not learning too much at home. But all the same, a lot of time is wasted in rehearsal. The ideas of the Method, should be used by every actor. But it’s natural, I don’t see why you have to do all these exercises to get there. I can do improvisation – the ‘airy fairy nonsense’ of imagined situations – I’m not very good at it, but I’ll do it. But I don’t see the use of it at all.
Whether it’s classical or the latest, wildly modern, it all needs the same kind of acting.
What I get very depressed about is all the kids coming out who can do one or the other – classical or modern. All it needs is that you can act. It connects with something else I get very upset about, which is, that they don’t get rid of the accent now. It’s considered not PC to get rid of your accent. If somebody had done that to me, all I would ever have played would be scrubbers. It seems to me utterly sensible, if you’re going to act, to learn received pronunciation first, and make that your basic voice, because that’s the one you’re most likely to be asked to use. Now, if you go in only with a cockney accent, only with a northern accent, you might say to whoever is casting you (cockney accent): ‘Oh, yer, I can do posh, yer, I do upper class . . .’ It won’t work! In their heads, you are as you present yourself. So what’s happening is there are class distinctions again, and they’ve done it to themselves by being PC! It seems to me absolutely stupid. And you are getting two sets of actors now. There are some actors who are turns, they’re not actors, they’re revue artists, and that is a different kind of acting. You should be able to do anything! I played the most way-out stuff at the Royal Court when I was young, but swapped over to the classics as well.

On the Necessity For Imagination
You shouldn’t be an actor unless you have a huge imagination; you shouldn’t be an actor unless you’re willing to show everything that’s in you – everything. I’ve been on stage stark naked covered with shit, (in Mary Barnes) so I’m not somebody who’s holding back, here. Much more important, I never understood why people get into such a state about nudity. For God’s sake, it’s much, much more difficult and revealing, and incredible, to show your soul, and that’s what you’ve got to be willing to do. Why anyone should want to be an actor, without being prepared to do that, I have no idea. I don’t understand the necessity to do exercises to stir the imagination. My imagination is so big I can’t sleep at night anyway, I have to take a sleeping pill every night, and I have done for thirty-five years. When I was a child, my mother took me to a doctor and said ‘This child doesn’t sleep, she’s driving us crazy’. He said ‘She has too big an imagination’. Nowadays, I would be sent to a psychiatrist,I suppose.
People can never understand why I wouldn’t be in Upstairs, Downstairs. They think it’s
snobbish of me. It’s quite simple: it would have meant I was one character for four or five years. And once you get the character, the interest, as far as I’m concerned, starts to wane. I’d like to only ever do anything for three months, and then the interest is in trying someone else again. To play one character, not even to be famous, but a household name, seems to me utterly depressing. I can see when you’re very young, if you get a series, then yes, take it, if that’s going to pay the rent, and it makes everybody look at you and start casting you. But then the minute they start casting you, for goodness sake, try and get away from that, and say ‘No! That isn’t me, let me do something very different’.
I get bored quickly, although I have various outlets to stop me being bored. When I was
very sick two years ago, I wouldn’t let myself be bored. I immediately rang up the BBC and said ‘Can I do Virginia Woolf’s diaries on radio? I think I can manage that’, and I had huge fun trawling through them. It’s only through boredom that you’re forced to use your imagination. I think we’re killing off kids’ imaginations, because they sit there pressing buttons, lohn Standing, who comes from a very posh family, was talking to me last night, ‘Oh yes, I used to go down in the kitchen to practise circuses with the cook. We used to spin plates on things’. I said ‘Oh, did you? I had circuses in my bedroom; I used to put poles between the beds, and of course I was the tightrope walker.’ He said ‘My kids would think I was mad if I said to them to play games like that.’ The minute boredom comes to me – and it does come – I fish around in the mind for something to do. I’m making myself sound rather goody-goody, but I suppose I find it boring if things are too easy. They sure haven’t been easy the last few years! (laughs) It’s not too bad to have a stick at your back, too, for work.

The Lost Language of Cranes
I was very intrigued by The Lost Language of Cranes. Sean Matthias had done the adaptation; he rang me up and asked if I would do it. And he said ‘Eileen, I don’t think you’re going to want to play the woman,’ and I said ‘It’s a wonderful part, I’d love to play it.’ He said ‘But Eileen, everybody’s going to hate you,’ and I said ‘No they’re not, Sean,’ and then I got onto the set, and I think everyone who worked on it was gay, except me and Brian Cox, and the boy who played my son, and of course in the film, both of them were gay too. Every gay man there said ‘You’re going to be so disliked,’ and I thought I simply don’t understand what they’re thinking. This woman is a rather marvellous woman; I don’t often get to play someone as nice as this.’ But it was because she had the scene with the boy when she got angry. That seemed to me the most natural and ordinary thing. It wasn’t a very hard part to play, because I just
thought of most women I knew, and what their first reaction would be. It might not be PC, but I know that any woman will have a shock when she first realises that her son is gay. She will. That might change, it’ll be different in 15 or 20 years, because what people think changes all the time, and that’ll be great, but you can’t dislike the woman for living in her time. That was such a genuine and real script. The most difficult thing is to do something you feel is not real. So it came naturally to me. And then to find out your husband is gay as well, I think that’s a natural feeling of terrible betrayal. Indeed, she accepts her son at the end, and her love for him comes through, which is also very real and natural. The reason you choose things is because they seem incredibly real to you, your mind immediately says ‘This is real. This is how they would speak, this is how they would react, this isn’t being done for any other reason’. I look as much as possible, in every single script for humour, and I’m happy to say I pulled it off even in John Gabriel Borkman. I only accepted that play to work with Vanessa Redgrave, Paul Scofield and Richard Eyre; all of whom I like very much. I hated the part when I first read it; I thought ‘Oh, God, this is a nightmare of a bore of a woman, she’s monstrous’. I said to Richard Eyre’Can’t I find any laughs?’ and he said ‘If you can find them . . .’, and one did. But there is humour, even of a black kind, in nearly everything. I’m told Lost Language of Cranes – I only saw it at a private showing – collects laughs at some points. And that’s fine too, because in the most terrible situations, things are funny. If you don’t see the humour in human beings, then you’re lost, you’re going to have a very hard life.

Agnes in A Delicate Balance
A quick rundown of how I work on a part – I read it, decide whether I’ve got in me what
I think that part has, and if I can pull it out. I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and don’t look at it again
until the first rehearsal, because I don’t like doing a lot of work by myself. I want to hear
what the director has to say, what the other actors are going to be doing, and I don’t want to have too many set ideas, because I want to be able to move. I memorised Agnes, because I was so frightened of letting Maggie Smith down. It was so
difficult to learn, that I’m glad I did. But if you do learn before – Peter O’Toole learns everything before, and tried to persuade me to do that years ago – you are a bit more set in railway lines. You have come to some conclusions, because you’ve had to learn it. I’m glad I did it for Agnes, otherwise I honestly don’t think I could have played the part. As it was, I dried in Edinburgh on the first night. It was much harder to learn than my one-woman show, A Room of One’s Own. It’s a little more difficult to undo when it’s fixed in your head; you might have some rivetted, wrong ideas from learning it first. But even when you start learning in rehearsal, with others, you still, in the process of learning, rivet yourself into ideas you’re going to have to undo anyway. That’s Peter O’Toole’s argument; he says you have to undo it anyway; you endlessly do something and undo it, do something and undo it. The thing that always annoys me most in a rehearsal is when an actor says to a director ‘But, I’m doing what you told me to do yesterday and you’ve changed your mind’. Well, of course you change your mind; it’s an endless form of change; it always becomes something else. You think ‘Oh, I’ve got that, I see, now. I know I said that yesterday, but today it’s changed.’ So what you’re
doing has to be extremely malleable, and it becomes a little harder to undo, if you go in the first day with everything learned. Especially as we get older.
Albee is a nightmare to learn, I mean, just a nightmare! He doesn’t speak in the way I’m
sure most Americans speak! It is totally convoluted, and every word he uses is exactly the word you wouldn’t normally use. One has to talk about the cat who’s been killed. I have to say ‘Well, what else could you have done, there was no meeting between you’. Now, that’s a very bizarre word to choose. There was no ‘meeting’ between you? Albee’s rhythm is very strange. You must pick up the author’s rhythm, and any playwright who’s any good has a very strong rhythm. So you have to work on text. I don’t only work in rehearsals during the day. I get what’s come up from the day, I go home at night, I do nothing else when I’m rehearsing. I don’t go out, all I do is cook for myself or the two of us if my husband’s in, and go over what I’ve done in a day. Have a break and do something silly, just to release the mind. Then I go over the text, what’s happened in the day, and look back at the text. You endlessly go back to the text, because, in the end, that is what you’re doing. You’re doing the text, and you’ve got to make it live. It’s a sort of tortuous but interesting process. Then you go back the next day, and try and do it, and by then the other actors have changed too, and
you see what happens again. It’s such a weird process. I personally think it’s unteachable, I really do. I always think you can act or you can’t act, and you will only learn from doing it, and you will only learn from doing it with the best.
You shouldn’t have trouble with modern stuff, it should be natural to you. You should
be taught to observe people. Most drama students are so in their own little world; I think it makes them more ‘me-me-me’ than they should be. You should be out with your eye on people: ‘Ohh . . . an old woman in a bus by herself, upstairs smoking a fag. Oh, how interesting she did that.’
I always remember going to see Robert Stephens when he was married to Maggie Smith,and this is the kind of mind that an actor has. I’d gone to see Robert about something; Maggie said ‘I’ll go and make us some coffee’. She pulled the door, and she caught all four fingers in it, it was very bad. And she stood at the door (mimes action of excruciating pain with no sounds coming out of her mouth). And Robert and I both sat and looked at her, and then we both got up and said ‘My God’, and rushed into the kitchen and put her hand under the tap. She had very swollen fingers, but she hadn’t broken anything. Afterwards, Robert and I went back to talk, and we had both immediately thought ‘How interesting. When you really hurt yourself like that, you’re not screaming, you just open your mouth without making any sound. I must remember that.’ That is the first thought of an actor; you should be observing all the time.
Agnes is very difficult because she’s not a totally real character. How many women do you know who can start off with that long monologue? It’s silly to call it anything else but a monologue, because Tobias, her husband, has hardly any lines at all. Normally, I would break down what he said. I didn’t even do that  this time. Most of my scripts are marked with things, I’m always putting it into my own language, which is appalling, a lot of swear words. A lot of my script is marked: ‘Come on, let’s talk about Claire!’ ‘So what?’ Things like that. So the thought is there, but then you have to make your voice
say that language. I just find it interesting to try and make it work. What drove me potty was that the director and everybody kept saying when we were on tour, that the play was failing, because I started it off so badly, and that was very hard for me. They would all come in to my dressing room, very pleased with themselves – I had four or five of them in there; two producers, a director, writer – and they’d all say ‘Everything’s fine, except it’s on the ground when you start, Eileen, at the beginning’. In the end I was crying and saying ‘Will you please stop telling me that I’m the one letting everybody down. I can’t bear it any more’. I said to Albee one night ‘You’ve written a boring opening. You tell me how to do it’. ‘But it’s just light’, that’s all Anthony (Page) would keep saying. I kept thinking, ‘How can I be light with this dialogue?’ It was very sweet, the other night, I had two drama students who had seen it on the second night, and they’d come back again to see it again the night before last. They didn’t want autographs or anything, they said ‘We’ve just come round to say it’s been absolutely fascinating to see how your performance has already changed in two and a half weeks.’ And of course the more I do it, the more I see, yes, you can be light. Anthony would say to me ‘It should be like Noel Coward’. Well, of course it’s not like Noel
Coward, because Noel Coward has got very little underneath it, whereas this has got all this going on underneath it. It’s just difficult to do, but I can’t describe how one does it, except keep trying. On the whole you learn from repetition more than anything. When you know something inside, backside, outside, every which way, you can let your mind loose, and then you can fly on it, and you can just feel. Then you just speak. You don’t get much help from directors on the whole. I mean, one or two have been wonderful. Richard Eyre was wonderful with me in Night of the Iguana, just wonderful.
The most difficult thing in the world is to speak as if you’re doing it for the first time, as
if you don’t know what’s around the corner. It’s only possible if you know the text. One actor said they were doing their lines while swinging round a gym. Well, very few of us have got a gym, but I do things so that I can say the lines whatever’s happening. But text first! Once you’ve got the text so that you’re never worrying ‘Oh, what do I say next?’, you can begin to be real. Then, you can just say to yourself, and indeed the director, on the first night said, ‘Right now, we all know it, we all know what we’re doing. Now just listen to each other’.
But you can’t listen until you know it so well that whatever happens – coffee spilling – won’t matter. Because I don’t care what anybody says, if people are thinking ‘Oh, what do I say next?’, it comes out wrong because they’re not feeling properly. You can’t feel until you know.So the text has to come first; the text has to be a priority.
Somebody said the other day ‘Oh, the play is dated, because it was written when people were frightened of the Bomb. Is that what he means?’ Certainly at my age, and at the age all these people are, death is a pretty big terror. I doubt whether there’s more than two days go by that I don’t think about it. That is quite a big terror, but even for young people, there is ‘the terror’. If you really think about it, what is this where we are? What the hell is this existence that we’re in? I can terrorise myself; I can look up at night sometimes, at the stars, and look at infinity, and be terrorised. I can see that someone like Agnes knows that if you think like that every day, madness is upon you. So you’ve got to drive away madness. And to have her best friend come in the house – and say they’ve come to stay because they’ve suddenly become frightened – she starts to know that there is a terror, it exists. Of course, we’re in Virginia Woolf-land now. So Agnes, quite rightly, is trying to keep the equilibrium. Even Virginia Woolf, who did go mad, said ‘The doctor told me to have a mutton chop, and my goodness, it worked. I felt better after I’d eaten a mutton chop’. Now Agnes knows that you must eat the mutton chop, and then maybe you won’t think about the terror, and the terror’s not going to do you any good anyway, so she is trying to keep everybody calm. That’s
because I’m playing her at the moment. If I was playing one of the other cast, I’d be feeling differently. I think Agnes is rather sensible, and doing the right thing. When people say ‘I don’t understand what the terror and plague are that make her want to get everybody out of the house.’ Well, I think, to have two people in the house who are looking into the abyss every day, would affect anybody, and I think she’s quite right to get them out. But that’s me.
I know when I first saw it, I thought it was pretentious. But it’s always the same, when you’re in it, and you think about it, it’s a very brilliant play. It’s like T.S. Eliot and Beckett. It doesn’t only speak to the ’60s and to Americans. It’s universal, and that’s why it’s a classic, and why it’s so brilliant.

CZ: How did you train to be an actor?
LC: I had a very interesting road in my training, because when I first decided to become an actor I was doing something else. I was very busy trying to become a dancer. I was dancing and rehearsing dances – dancers rehearse forever, they perform very little. Dancers are not really directed the way actors are. They learn the dance and go out and perform it. Nobody coaches you on the difference between rehearsing and performing. So, when I got on stage I had all these actors’ questions. What happens if I don’t feel like it? What is my relationship to the people on stage? What is my relationship to the audience? What happens if I forget something?
I began to do showcases in New York – off, off, off Broadway, in the Bowery, in horrible little theaters where there was usually some bum getting warm, or only my mother in the audience and the director. They were wildly melodramatic plays, and they required that I really throw myself in. With these questions – whether or not they were answered – it became clear what I needed to know. At that point I decided to go to acting class.
I went first to The Stella Adler Conservatory. I began to get a sense of what it was to simply put myself in imaginary circumstances and live truthfully in them. And I enjoyed the experience of what I was doing. I thought, well, wait a minute. I want to explore more about this, so I went and studied with Sonia Moore at The Stanislavsky Studio. This was a very different, much more formal approach, and one I didn’t always understand. I tried very hard, but it didn’t seem to be the school for me. Whereupon I went to the HB Studio. I liked it so much that I thought, now I really want to go to the top here. So I auditioned for Uta Hagen’s class and got in. That was really the beginning of my formal training. The others were explorations for me.
In Uta’s classes you came on time, you were quiet when you were meant to be quiet, you had your work prepared. You did it in a very professional manner in front of the other students, and you were critiqued by her. The moment I stepped into her class, I felt that was the beginning of my being an actor.
During this time, I had been auditioning at cattle calls and got my first parts. So I was acting in the midst of training as an actor. I had always had a sense of the truth, but at this time I had very little technique. I feel kind of sorry for the folks who hired me in those years, because I’m not sure what they got.
CZ: How long did you study with Uta?
LC: I think I was in and out of Uta’s class for seven years. I would take work and then come back and study, and sometimes, I took classes while I was working. And then on account of a couple of things, probably work habits that I got into and a certain propensity in myself, I began to have problems technically with acting. I became paralyzed – perhaps it was like an acting midlife crisis. I suddenly began to question things that were being asked of me and began to attempt to produce results. I started to wonder whether that was really acting. Often when you are out in the professional world for a while there are exigencies which do not coincide with the freedom that you had when you were studying and the correct approach that you’ve been attempting with your technique. So, I became progressively paralyzed as an actor, until I felt that I was in crisis. I thought, “Something is really wrong. I’ve got to find out what acting is, and start again.”
I had been hearing about the Sanford Meisner technique and The Neighborhood Playhouse, and I decided that I would try to study with Sandy. This was at a time when I was successful as an actress, so when I went to Sandy, I told him, “I realize that I am not a beginner, but I would like to be admitted to your beginner’s class. I promise I won’t put on airs, I won’t try to show off, I’m coming as an acolyte. I want to go back to first principles and find out what acting is. And I explained my crisis to him, and he said, “Never try to learn how to act when you are performing.” I said “Well, I’m guilty. I’m submitting to you.”
CZ: What were the basic differences between Uta Hagen and Sandy Meisner’s teachings?
LC: First of all, both these teachers were two of the greatest teachers that I’ve ever had in my life. They really explored the art of acting from a very original point of view. Uta at the time was writer her book Respect for Acting, and you can tell from reading that book how deeply and personally she had delved into her own struggle as an actress and how she had attempted to draw from her own life solutions for others who were struggling with the same things. She did, for instance, studies of how to portray cold and heat, how to wake up on stage, how to wait, how to talk on the telephone – very basic technical exercises. She devised an exercise in which you would bring in what was in the pockets of the character you were playing, or what was in her purse. It was always a fun exercise to do, and it was a great revelation. Uta would say, keep a book on your character, as you’re preparing. What kind of music does the character like best? Where does the character go to school? What would he wear to school? What were his favorite colors? What was his favorite birthday gift? She would say, “This may not appear on stage, but you will carry it in with you as a cloak of authenticity when you walk onto a set. You will have fleshed out the character, you will have painted a three-dimensional picture that will ground you.”

For emotional preparation, Uta had her own theory about an actor having an obstacle in a scene. She said you have an objective in a scene, and you have an obstacle. And you define both, the objectives as that thing you want and the obstacle as that thing which you are pitted against. Working with the obstacle always brought up strong feelings. One of the things that happened to me when I got out in the “field” Is that I began to form a bad habit. I would get so hell-bent on performing the objective that I would often railroad my own impulses or things that were really happening in a scene. I would decide what moments in a play meant, where the big moment came. I was choreographing my performance, which is the way a lot of actors work. I became confused about this.
At that point, I was away from Uta, out on my own as a professional actor and achieving some success. But there was a nagging thought in the back of my mind that somewhere I had gone off the track. When I came to sandy, one of the things he taught me was that when you perform a play, you are going into unknown territory and you don’t know what you’re going to meet. If you place your attention on the other person, you will always know where you’re at, you will always be in negotiation with them. That was really the beginning of my saying, “Well, I guess I shouldn’t just perform a play like a steamroller. I should show up in the first scene and then permit myself not to know what’s going to happen; I’m on a ride.” That’s what his training was rigorously based on, and he did many beautiful exercises to get you antennae out, to sensitize and fine-tune you.
CZ: Can you give me an example an exercise you did in Meisner’s class that was important for you?
LC: I remember one exercise, the repetition exercise, where you have to repeat a phrase with the other actor; it’s magnificent. There’s so little stimuli when you perform this exercise; you’re free to notice very small things that happen. I remember I was doing the exercise with another actor; I thought I was doing rather well. And the actor sitting in a chair opposite me suddenly tipped his chair back and put his hand behind his head in a gesture of boredom. I just kept going, doing the exercise. Sandy stood up and said, “I am absolutely appalled. A gigantic change just happened in the person sitting opposite you and you didn’t acknowledge it.” I said, “What do you mean? He’s just sitting here.” My experience was telling me that there was no change, because I was so little attuned to body language, to the power of the behavior that was happening in front of me. Sandy worked with me very diligently on this and gave me an eye and an ear that were sharp and accurate. This technique allowed me to play with a lot of variety, and, I think, with renewed courage. Just being tuned in to the other person, and knowing that your next action comes from what they do and not out what you decided, gave me a mission to be honest in the plays and the films that I did and brought my acting to a new level.
CZ: At this point in your life, what are your feelings about all of your training?
LC: I’ve come to discover that there’s value in all of it. I’m very grateful for the passion and the clarity of my two great teachers. I’ve been able to sort through them by returning to the first principles that I’d been taught. Very often acting is Zen, you have to completely avoid the thing you are trying to do. Just as if someone asks you if you know a joke, suddenly, you don’t know one. It’s exactly the same mechanism in the mind. If someone says, “Well, the script says you have to cry here,” if you head right for crying, that’s the last thing that’s ever going to come out of you. You have to perform a kind mental acrobatics on yourself. That is what all this teaching is meant to help you with. People have different ways of doing it.
I used to try to be very correct in my technique. A director once said to me when I was very stuck trying to perform a scene, “Nobody is going to know how you got this scene.” And that’s true. If I have to run around the block, if I have to ask everybody to give me a moment alone, whatever is is I have to do, that’s the order of the day. And whatever my technique has brought me to, whatever is working, that is what I will use. Whether it’s Meisner’s technique or Uta Hagen’s technique or my own gestalt, that’s what I have to do. So, I feel that ultimately the technique is there to serve the artist. And just the way Uta did, and Sandy did, I will have to find my own way of working.
CZ: I suppose that’s something you arrive at after years of experience.
LC: One of the first things Sandy told me was, “It takes 25 years to make an actor. I’m not surprised you’re confused, you’ve only been at it for 15.” He was so right. This culture needs to know that good acting requires real maturity, because character in life is no different from the character on the stage. Actors stand for things, and they have to stand for things in their lives before they can be really good actors. The development of character takes time. Acting techniques are meant to develop the inner life of a person and to help an actor so he reveals that life in imaginary circumstances.
CZ: Where does discipline and control come into all of this?
LC: I believe it’s the biggest thing missing in American acting. What we’re great at is this kind of organic, shoot-from-the-hip, react-off-the-other-person, casual arena of acting. What we’re not so good at is the control – voice work, interpretation, clarity, being able to use the text – to be able to the text – to be able to speak it, to know that my voice has the range to handle it, to know that I have enough breath control for it, to know that I can make it loud enough to be heard. These disciplines are disdained in this country. It’s what the English are so good at, and also why we love their theater.
CZ: How did you break into film? Was it a deliberate career move?
LC: I played a reporter, Kay Eddy, in All the President’s Men (1976.) My scene3 was with Woodward and Bernstein, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. My life in the movies started doing that scene with them.
I was doing a play, Present Laughter, by Noël Coward, in Washington, D.C. As I walked out of a matinée one day, they were filming All the President’s Men in the street. So I thought, “Maybe I’ll go over and see if I can get a walk-on or something. Just to find something else to act, to do.” I went over to the office and I put my name down. Then I got a call from the casting person who had seen the play, saying, “would you come in and meet Alan Pacula? There is a speaking role that has only a couple of lines. He said, “Would you audition with Bob Redford?” And I said, “Of course I will.” I met Bob; I auditioned for him. I remember this so well, it’s such a classic actor’s scene: I was in this little hotel in Washington, and I was making myself a horrible little lunch on an old stove, just thinking, “I’m never going to get anywhere, this is all a futile effort, and blah, blah, blah.” The producer called me and said, “We would really like you to be part of our movie.” I was just so thrilled. I would have died rather than not do a good job for them.
CZ: Did you have any difficulty adjusting to the camera?
LC: The biggest thing about film acting is that the physical restriction is just unbelievable. Let’s say I’m talking to you, and in order for the camera to get a good angle, I can’t really look at you. You need to see my face at some point, so I have to figure out where in the speech I can turn. Or let’s say I’m in a shot where my hand comes up, and I cleared my hair out of my ear in an earlier shot – which is the one we are keeping – we want to make sure I do it again, exactly then. If I hold a paper when I have to read something very important to you, the audience can’t see it if it’s down here. So I have to hold it at a totally unnatural height, like in advertisements for a product, but not appear unnatural doing it.
Film acting is like being in a tech rehearsal for a theater actor. It’s those awful couple of days when they have given you the actual props, the actual coat, your hat. Something is too big, too small, something is not quite right. But on film there is no time to change it, and you receive everything right before you go. In other words, you rehearse with a coffee cup, but there’s nothing in it, because you can’t spill anything on the tablecloth and your costume while you’re rehearsing. So you never have the liquid until you actually go. Suddenly, there’s coffee in the cup – you’re playing the scene and all you can think is, “Shoot! This is hot!”
I remember this effected me a lot in Sidney Lumet’s films because Sidney often has people eating, but we wouldn’t eat the food until we actually got to the shot. I suddenly found my mouth full of something either too wet or dry or too difficult to chew, or I was afraid something was in my teeth. Sidney only does one or two takes of a scene, so we had to deal with the food fast, and that became part of the scene. Tech rehearsal is film, so there is a lot more improvisatory skill required to be a good film actor. Actors never have it all together until the moment they’re ready to shoot. Then they bring in the pencil with the lead in it.
CZ: You’e worked with Sidney Lumet on three occasions: Prince of the City (1981,) The Verdict (1982,) and Daniel (1983.) How does he rehearse with actors?
LC: I’ll tell you exactly how he works. It’s brilliant, and every film director should sit up and take note. Sidney is an example to us all. He brings his films in on time and under budget. At the end of each day, everybody goes home at a decent hour and has a good dinner a good night’s sleep for the next day’s work. I took such a cold bath after those three pictures, when I went to work for somebody else. I was on the set 19 hours, no sleep, no regular meals. Ugh!
Sidney most of all lets his actors know from the beginning that the whole thing depends on you, which creates an incredible atmosphere to work in because the actors are usually treated as second-class citizens. He never refers to us as “talent.” He enlists you as a colleague.
Sidney rehearses; he puts three weeks aside, and the first week he lets everybody rip. He encourages it. You can chew the scenery, you can over-act, you can talk loud, you can ask questions, you can emote, you can wallow, you can whatever. Then the second week, he lets you know how the film is going to be orchestrated and what the tone of the piece is going to be. He’ll say, “Now everybody got their rocks off, and you’re all loosened up, and you kind of know what you’re doing. Now we need to figure out where the performance is going to lie.”
One thing he did on Prince of the City that was so extraordinary was that he sat everybody around this huge Italian banquet hall. He had the sets that he masking-taped down to the floor, and he had everybody get up and do their scene. He went from one person to another with the cameraman, as if he was filming the scene, and all the actors involved got to see all the scenes they weren’t in. You got to see the scenes that were before you and after your own. So you knew why Sidney was saying, “You’re going to really have to hold back in your scene. It’s got to be very intense, very quiet. Because before you there’s this big chase, this shoot-out, it’s loud.” He brought you into the whole, to seeing what the tapestry was going to look like, and you saw exactly where your piece fit. He wasn’t going to waste time on the set with you saying, “But I feel like it this way, I want to do it loud.” He had you positioned precisely in the orchestration of that scene, and you understood why. You didn’t send any time fighting about whose interpretation was right because he’d really enlisted you as a colleague and you trusted him. You wanted to give him what the big picture needed.
CZ: What if you disagree with him?
LC: You can talk to Sidney if you disagree with him. Sidney knows how to answer actors’ questions. He knows how to keep actors fresh. What he does in rehearsal is he watches; he’s a great watcher and a great listener. He says that what he observes is your hottest performance in rehearsal, then he tries to figure out how to tell you to get there, so he’s armed with that when you’re on the set.
He does a brilliant thing. He often gives you a very small physical thing to do when you arrive on the set the day of your shooting. He’ll say, “Oh there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned – you’ve been up all night. Maybe you dozed off for an hour.” He’ll give you one little physical thing, and actors love that. You are so busy thinking, “Oh, this is really fun now,” it relaxes your mind, so you aren’t so intensely focused on “Will I fulfill this scene?”
CZ: Your role as Caitlin in The Verdict was relatively small but very crucial.
LC: Yes, a powerful role. I was doing an Irish accent, and I worked a long time with a voice coach to do that performance. My text was “yes,” and “no,” until the very last moment of the scene. And my job in that picture was to be open enough to allow all that was going on in me to come out in those brief responses.
Now imagine you have the pivotal moment in the film, and you’ve got to go from A to Z in that scene. You know you have got to get to a certain pitch at the end of the scene; it’s like your whole life is breaking open. That’s a hell of a thing to walk in at 5 a.m. And know you have to do and not clutch. That scene is one of the best pieces of acting I ever did. I discovered something which I still try to do with everything in me, with every part I do. Because I believe that great acting happens when what is going on in the scene dovetails exactly with something that you have to do in your life – it is your life in that moment. And that girl was making a confession. I worked for months to figure out for myself what confession would be absolutely impossible for me to make, that I absolutely couldn’t make in front of everybody. And I confessed that in that scene. And the event was cathartic for me. I made the confession, and I’ve never had to deal with it again. I did it! Now, you may see the scene and have your interpretation of what I confessed. Another person may have another interpretation. But what came out in that scene, universally, was a woman really confessing.
There’s something interesting that happened in the performance of that part. I was very frightened that morning. I’d done one picture Sidney (Prince of the City,) and this was my second opportunity with him. I would have died rather than not do a good job. The part was extremely intense. And I wanted to get everything out and not go home with it.
Sidney always calls you by your character’s name when you arrive on the set, which is very sweet, and he came up to me as I started the first take, and said very softly in my ear, “Caitlin, just talk, just open your mouth and talk.” Which is, of course, the nature of a confession. The hardest thing is to open your mouth and talk. So I kept that with me. I just had to open my mouth and talk. The effort to do that was so moving.
CZ: Lumet tends to work with classical editing patterns, which means he breaks the scenes into relatively short shots. How does that effect your emotional arc in a scene?
LC: You have to realize what the shot is for. Your master shot is probably for the opening of the scene and the end of the scene. You are going to have the two-shot or medium shot, then over the shoulder to each person, then the single or the close-up sot, and whatever else they decide to do. And that’s going to take all day, maybe two days. And you are going to have to sustain. So you have to know where the emphasis is in the shot. Sidney had designed four different shots for (the confession) scene. He said, “O.K., we’re going to do four moves in, closer, closer, closer, closer.” So I knew that I had to do the scene four times. And on the third move-in, we were really cooking, we went over the top. It was a beautiful, beautiful day. Everyone in the courtroom stood up for me. It was a great moment. And, he said, “O.K., let’s move in.” And I turned to him and said, “Sidney, I’m willing to do anything for you, but I just gave everything that I have, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” And he came over to me, and said, “That’s O.K., we’ll go into the next scene. New deal.” I thought that was very telling of Sidney’s knowledge of acting – he realized he could get the closer angle, which was his plan for the scene – but why the hell do it if the actor had given 150%? You really weren’t going to get the same performance, even though you were going to get your angle. Not a lot of directors would have given up their plan and just gone with what happened.
CZ: Let’s move on to Daniel. It’s based on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, fictionalized in Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel. How much research did you do into the Rosenbergs and the period? Do you think it’s necessary to do a lot of research for a role?
LC: That’s a good question. I think actors are very different on that score. I feel that to play any part, most of what I required is inside me. Whatever I know about the world that the character inhabits, I have to inhabit that world. And I have to bring that world my experience of my own world. Because I was doing something very specific like Daniel – it was fictional but it was based on historical characters, and everybody knew it – I had to know what was up at that time. The person who gave me most of my information was Sidney Lumet. Sidney was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and he knew a lot about the period. I also read a great deal about it.
I felt a great deal for Ethel Rosenberg. She would consistently maintain her innocence and her dignity. She’s one of my great, great heroes. I absolutely dedicated my performance of her, because I felt she had no spokesperson. I said to Sidney before I began, “What do you think, was she guilty or innocent?” He said, “It doesn’t matter, you’re going to play her the same way. You have to step into her shoes, whether she was guilty or not.”
But I did do quite a bit of research on that film. I worked about 40 hours with my voice coach to try to figure out how she talked. I felt it was really important to the credibility of the role that she be placed in the context of her Russian Orthodox, Jewish family. Being cast in that role, I felt a great responsibility to be authentic. And not being Jewish, not being of a Russian background, not coming from that period, I tried very hard to enter it as much as possible, so that nothing would interfere with people hearing her story.
CZ: The way the script is structured and the film is shot gives absolute sympathy to these people. It’s very wrenching to watch the scenes leading to their execution, and the execution itself.
LC: It’s brutal. I found it hard to play for the same reason. And I discovered in doing it that when you play someone who you know is going to die, you’re always overcome. You’re always overcome by the aura of any script, and you try to deny it. You play Othello and say, “I can’t play Othello because I feel so jealous, jealous of the other actors, jealous of the director.” It sounds funny, but it is a phenomenon that happens over and over again. I thought I couldn’t play the part in Daniel because everything seemed futile. I felt like I couldn’t act. I drove Sidney quite crazy, because I kept saying, “I’ve got to rehearse this again,” He’d say, “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, you are doing beautifully.” I’d say, “No, I’m not doing enough; I’m not there yet.” And it’s what I experienced during the entire piece, this accumulation of “I’m not doing enough,” which was coming right out of the script. Ethel couldn’t do enough, she was totally helpless, and this thing was snowballing over her. She was a target, there’s no doubt about it.
CZ: Can you talk about how you analyze a script and develop a character, relating it to the role of Rochelle Isaacson in Daniel.
LC: What I do is, first, look at the overall script and say, “This is a story about…” I make one sentence of what the story is about. Then I take the character and I say, “What this character wants in the story is…”and I make one sentence. “Rochelle wants…” Then I lift the story of Rochelle out of the script. I take Rochelle’s scenes and I type them out and staple them together: Rochelle’s story. I describe the story as if I were going to tell it to you in one sentence: “This is the story about a woman who…” The first job I feel I have as an actor is to say. “You could read the story in a library. What am I going to give you that you couldn’t read in a library, reading this script?” SI have to get rid of what you could get in the library. My responsibility is the second thing, which is: What is it I am really doing? Not what is Rochelle doing, but what am I doing? So, let’s say this scene is – just an abstract scene I’ve made up – a character coming to get money from his father. But what I am really doing, what I feel is the essence of that scene, is that I’m coming to get restitution. The third step that I have to do is : What does that mean to me? Why do I have to get restitution? So that is so important to me that I don’t care if a million people see me do it. I’m going to go up there and do it no matter what. That’s where the real work of acting lies: I have to think carefully about that. That’s what I have to rehearse, getting restitution. So, I do these steps and what I fell happens is that the audience sees me getting the money, but they feel me getting restitution.
In life, we never do what we say we’re doing, that’ why drama works so well. There is always something else going on underneath, some people call it subtext. What I say may be the opposite of what I am really doing. I have to be clear, even though I’m saying something entirely different. That’s why Strasberg says that the text is your enemy. Because you are not there to act the text. You are there to bring out – with all the force of your being – the action of the play. The through-action of the play, as Aristotle said – there’s only one from beginning to the end. That’s true. It’s quite a trick, especially for young actors. It’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.
CZ: Can you think of an example from a film you’ve worked on where the words are different from the internal action?
LC: Sidney is wonderful at directing this way. There’s a scene in The Verdict in which James Mason has a black actor on the stand, a doctor who has come to give expert testimony for the other side. James is supposed to really nail him, put him down. So he did the scene, he was unctuous, wonderfully evil; he was fine. I thought we would go onto the next scene. Sidney sat and thought a long time, and he looked up, and said, “James dear” – he always called you dear – “I want you to do it again. This time I want you to try something different. I want you to thank this man from the bottom of your heart for coming here today, for taking the time to help everyone in this courtroom get to the truth of this case.” Well, Mason became evil personified. You knew why he was the highest-paid lawyer in Boston and why he had a following of 25 young kids who wanted to work in his office. Because this man was a gentleman; he was the model of courtesy, he was magnanimous; you couldn’t find a hole in him, he was perfect. The guy on the stand started to squirm, he started to flub his lines. He was being nailed to the ground with such precision and such tact! Sidney’s direction released James from the obligation to act out the text and made if a far more powerful scene. That was great directing. Because an actor will always want to act out the text. It’s the easy thing to do; it’s the obvious thing to do.
CZ: Did you generally watch dailies while you’re shooting?
LC: No, I don’t go to dailies unless I feel there is something I need to adjust or if the director says to me, “I want you to come and see something.” Or if I really want to see whether something I’m doing is coming across. But I don’t feel I can be inside something and witness it from without at the same time. Some actors can; I’m too critical, too much of a perfectionist. I don’t even like to go see the films I’m in right away. I’ll see them in a year or two, when I feel I can really enjoy them. But I’m too close to them when I’m making them. I would tear myself down, and why? If I had a great time doing it, and it’s done, what can I do? I can’t fix it, and I’ll want to. You know you did the best you could at that time with the technique you had at hand. Sometimes a film comes out a year later, as in the case of Prince of the City, almost two years after we did it. I thought I was a much better actor by then. You say, “I wish I had that opportunity again.” Why put yourself through that? So I tend not look at it while I’m doing it; it just hamstrings me.
CZ: Going back to Daniel, I remember when I was a kid going to the Smithsonian Institute and seeing the Jello box on display that was supposedly used to transmit material between the Rosenbergs and David Greenglas. I’ve always remembered that box in connection with the Rosenbergs.
LC: That’s exactly the kind of emotional memory Uta Hagen talks about, something small but extremely significant. Something on the floor, or a stain on a table cloth. She says you remember by some very mundane object, and that memory will trigger the whole emotion. She says when you have to act a very traumatic moment, sometimes the big moment is not when the emotion hits. It’s not the moment of death,it’s when you have to take the key to the car out of your dead husband’s pocket. It’s something that surrounds the event that is so mundane yet expresses all the pathos of the situation. I think it’s really true.
CZ: The execution scene is very difficult to watch. What was it like to film?
LC: It was like bondage. It was amazing to have it actually happen to me, because in the dress and all the straps, the humiliation of it was worse than the fear. It was the humiliation and the sexual nature of it.
Here’s something I can add about film acting – people always say, :”You have no audience when you’re acting for film.” But that is not true. “There are a lot of people on the set when you work in film, and they are absolutely your audience. How the set is run is so important to how an actor performs, and Lumet’s sets are exemplary. Those technicians have read the script, so they know what is going on that day. They know if an actor has serious emotional work to do, and they are respectful. The days that we were did the execution scenes and the scenes saying goodbye to the children, you could have heard a pin drop on the set from the moment we arrived. Everybody knew how difficult it was going to be and how horrendous.
A funny story about when Mandy Patinkin gets strapped into the electric chair. He was the first one to do the scene, just as Julius Rosenberg was the first one to be executed. And everyone was trying to do it as quickly as possible, because it was so grim. He got in the chair, they pretended to pull the switch, he started to shake in the chair, and the back of the chair broke. (Laughs) Oh Lord, poor Mandy – he had the hood on, it was one of the worst things I ever saw. He didn’t know what had happening. You can get pretty paranoid when you get strapped in an electric chair. (Laughs); it’s a game called trust. But it broke the ice, so the rest of the day we were shaking off the tension.
CZ: It’s very effecting when he collapses on his way to the chair.
LC: That was incredible. When you act you get an education about a world you might otherwise never know anything about. Now I feel I know something of what it was like to be part of that whole situation in the 1950′s. I know where I would have stood if I was this person. That woman’s life had a big effect on me. It took three zaps to kill her, not for no reason. She was defying everyone.
CZ: But what happens if your sympathies are not with the character?
LC: Then you don’t take the part. And chances are you won’t get the part. Because you play roles that have resonance for you, where you can literally say – with every experience of your life leading up to that moment – “If this was happening to me, I would…” Otherwise you cannot play with authenticity, you can’t play with any kind of commitment to the part.
When I did Places in the Heart (1984,) I had a long talk with Robert Benton. My marriage vows were based on the fact that if my husband was unfaithful I would leave him. But in Places I was being asked to play a part where I take my husband, Ed Harris, back after he’s made love to Amy Madigan. I had to really talk that over with Benton, because I felt that I had to truly understand that. Especially because in the moment in which I took Ed back I had no words, no speech, I had no way to get there. I had to be there, I had to communicate that silently and fully. I didn’t want to play a part in which I felt I was doing something that was against my own values.
I grew up by doing that part, in the sense that I took a leap in my own life. I took in the fact that there are things that can happen in a marriage, where indeed you would say, “We’re going to wipe the slate clean. We’re going to step over that and go on.” I really possessed that by the end of the movie.
I also nearly lost that part because Benton wanted me to be nude in a scene. I didn’t feel that it was warranted, and I said, “No, I can’t do this.” He said, “Well, I have to think about it then,” because it was a very personal script for him. And I waited 24 hours thinking, “Maybe I’m not going to be able to do this film. “ But I stood by my conviction. I felt I really wouldn’t be able to enter into the spirit of it. He called back and he said, “O.K., we’ll do it your way.”
CZ: That was very courageous of you.
LC: It was. It might not be right for every situation, but you have to define what you can really get behind. You are a symbol on film for all people. The great ethic of acting is that you are going to do what you said you were going to do, no matter what. If I had promised that I would get up there and offer forgiveness in that scene, then I had better bloody well do that. That’s all we offer to people witnessing the story. So that they can say, “If that woman can get up there and do that when she has all this pain inside her, I can do that.” You set an example, you’re a symbol, so you had better be able to get behind it. Otherwise I think it shows. You’re very translucent when you’re on film. You are a figure of light; your soul comes through. You can tell, easily, when someone is really doing it or not.
CZ: In discussing the ethical dimension of acting, the famous example is Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1924.) Dreyer did tortuous things to Falconeeti so she could get into the suffering of the character. And she ended up, after that experience, spending most of her life institutionalized. Of course, we don’t know what her mental state was before she did the film, or what actually happened afterwards to her, but it’s an archetypal story of something so disastrous that can happen when an actor embraces a role very completely.
LC: Listen, I feel very strongly, and I teach my students this: either you are an actor or you’re not. Even beginning actors with no training can put themselves in imaginary circumstances with all the truth of their being.
For the most part, going to that extreme, is bull, that’s someone who is not an actor. You don’t have to cut your leg off at the hip to play a paraplegic. People say to me constantly, “Did you do a lot of research into psychiatry to play the psychiatrist in House of Games (1987)? I say “Look, a psychiatrist is someone who listens and who helps.” End of sentence! There are 10 people on my block who are psychiatrists and they couldn’t be more different than the other.
Taking on a role is a very tricky thing. And one of the things that technique is based on is protecting the human mind. There are people we know who are locked up in institutions who declare themselves to be Jesus Christ. The point is, as Sandy Meisner very elegantly puts it it’s not that you are Jesus Christ, it’s “as if” you are Jesus Christ. And there is a world of difference. Technique makes that extremely clar – you train your mind to think in those terms so that you yourself remain intact. That’s what personalizing a role means, bringing yourself to that situation, not crowding out your own identity with another one. People say to me, “I don’t know how you do what you do; I couldn’t lie to save my life.” People think I practice telling lies all day until I’m so good at it that you can’t tell the difference. But that’s exactly what acting is not. As any acting teacher knows, the most difficult part of the art is the struggle to bring out the truth of your being, the fullest dimension of yourself. Sandy constantly said to his students, “I don’t want to hear about how the pirates stole your wallet, I want imagination based on truth.”
It’s amazing how people will avoid using themselves in art, because we instinctively know that everything we do is a self-portrait. Acting is the art of self-revelation. We want to avoid that knowledge like the plague because of all the ambivalence we have about ourselves. We are not good enough, we are not good-looking enough, we’re not whatever enough, and if what we are doing is a self-portrait, everybody is going to see us. Oh my God, what will happen then? Technique is there to enable us to step forward and shine and remove all that fear, remove that tension, the self-consciousness, the defenses, all the reasons we say can’t step out. But what a great example we set when we do.
Acting is an art like any other, and art requires practice and control. Artistry requires craftsmanship. But the instrument is not some object removed from us; the instrument is us, and that’s where the confusion lies. Because when you deal with training an actor, you’re training an actor’s mind. You’re creating thought patterns, you’re creating habits – habits of work, of thinking, of behavior. You’re dealing with a human being. And that’s where it gets tricky, you want to deal correctly with that human being so that you focus solely on training an actor. To me the other is like telling a sculptor he has to mutilate himself in order to learn how to chop away at a block. An actor has to consider himself an instrument. He doesn’t have to mutilate himself in order to play a crazy person. I have a wonderful voice coach, Liz Dixon, who says if you’re playing someone who’s uptight, you can’t play her if you’re really uptight. You have to be open and give the appearance of uptightness. A magician doesn’t really need to disappear, he just needs to direct your attention.
CZ: House of Games is very different from the more naturalistic films you’ve been in. How did you go about developing the character of Margaret? What was the character’s “through-action”?
LC: The character of Margaret wanted to serve; that’s what I played in that film. She said, “I just want to do good.” She wanted to serve, and that was her tragic flaw. She wanted to serve to the point that she couldn’t bear not being of service. A kid comes into her office and says, “I’m going to dies. What can you do about it? What do you know?: She can’t bear the accusation. She has to help him. If she can’t help him, her life is a lie: she doesn’t know anything, and she’s not of service. So, she has to help him and that’s what drives her to the “house of games.”
CZ: Why does she have this obsession with being of service?
LC: Well, that’s where the work comes in for the actor, what does that mean to me? My imagination had a lot to feed on there, because being of service is the devotion of my life. And on a personal level, I found that was a great deal to think about. That part had tremendous resonance for me, because I understand what it means to just want to do good. I think it is a very human motivation for living.
CZ: But don’t you need to know where that need comes from in the character?
LC: All you have to know to play that person is that you are compelled to serve. And the “compelled” part comes from, what does it mean to me? How important is it that I serve? If you need to up the stakes of a script, a scene, whatever, you just need to find a better reason. If you have to do something and it’s a chore, you could do it or not do it. But if you have to do something and it’s a mission, you have to find a very good reason to do it. If I have to come back in this house that’s burning to rescue Willa (Lindsay’s eldest daughter,) I don’t give a damn how many people are looking at me. If I have to come back to the house in order to get an extra key, that’s quite a different thing. So in a script like this where the woman is compulsive, you have to find a driving reason for her to want to serve that badly, to that extreme. That’s that technique would require. She risks her life to help this kid; she goes to the “house of games” with these thugs. All you really have to know to play her – you don’t have to have sat in a psychiatrist’s office, you don’t have to study psychiatrists – you just have to know what it’s like to need to serve so badly. And the effect of doing that is the portrayal of someone who doesn’t think enough of herself, a person who feels her life’s a lie, a person who searches outside of herself for her own value.
CZ: Margaret is an extremely controlled, repressed character. Was that difficult to play?
LC: People say, “Was that a really fun part to play” And I say, “No.” A woman who wants to dedicate her life to service is a passionate person, but Margaret couldn’t show anything. The “obstacle,” as Uta would say, was so powerful. It’s as if every day you went out to dig a ditch, and someone kept holding the shovel.
David (Mamet’s) direction to me constantly was “Calm down, calm down, just talk in a normal voice, don’t show them anything.” The essence of that character and why it appears so stylized, is that she couldn’t, she couldn’t, she couldn’t. My instinct was to let the variety out, let her be…something. But the essence of her was that she was restricted. To play her was quite an acting challenge.
CZ: What about the language of the script? It’s very ritualized and repetitious, and you’re speaking almost in a sing-song voice. You must deal with it differently than you would a naturalistic text.
LC: Well sure, if there’s a formal approach to something, there are many ways to justify that internally. If it’s a poem, there are many ways to justify that language. Uta gave me a great clue to this; she said, “Poetry is the most specific language that you’ll ever speak.” In other words, when Shakespeare says, “Make me a willow cabin at your gate, and fall upon my soul in your house,” she says, “What Shakespeare’s saying is that it’s not a log cabin, it’s not a concrete block cabin. It’s a willow cabin, and only a willow cabin could possibly express the unutterable dedication of that girl. Make me a willow cabin.” God! It’s so unbelievably delicate and so poignant an image. That was one of the greatest perceptions that Uta gave me, and something I’ve held with me always, that a poetic text is more specific than anything. And therefore you need to deal with it specifically; you have to give yourself specific reasons.
If you live a life of service, you have to remove yourself. If you’re living for something higher than yourself, you are not the point. David kept saying, “Don’t show ‘em, Don’t show ‘em, you are not the point.
In a way you are very self-effacing when you live a life of service. Your existence is not in color; you’re in black and white, maybe just gray. Because everybody else is the point, that’s what you’re in service to.
David’s language was terribly appropriate and gave the film a very strange life. David pared down everything to the essentials. That’s why the film is so powerful and has such unity. Nothing is extraneous, not even the expression of the actors. It’s bizarre, too, but highly poetic. David used to say to me when we first talked about acting, “Everyone thinks my plays are kitchen plays, but they’re operas!” And that gave me a great clue to David’s work. Joe Mantegna appears to be, “Oh I’m just shootin’ the shit with Margaret here.” But really, he’s singing a song.
Battleship gray – Margaret. I used to study fine arts with James Ackerman at Harvard; he talked about the Lindesfarne Gospels. Monks who wore hair-shirts and went barefoot, senses deprived, did these incredible illuminations. They’d do the capital letter in gold, and these beautiful, very elaborate pictures. I remembered that image when I was playing Margaret because I felt that longing was inside her. But the outside was this monk with a rope-belt, cloth that was rough. She was in this life of service, but inside was an explosion, this passion, this life, like an octopus coming out of her. But that was not what the world saw.
CZ: You teach acting classes; what is the most important lesson for future actors to know?
LC: The great example I can talk about as an actor is that most people spend their lives – and I’m including myself – taking an average. In other words, “Well, I’d really like to, but this is all I can do. If only I could save my mother, or if only I hadn’t done that.” We’re filled with wishes. And actors are meant to get out there and take themselves to the edge of the edge of the edge. To go as far as they can. Not to take an average. I say to my students, “Don’t take an average. If you’re coming in to cheer someone up, if you’re coming in to lay down the law, if you’re coming to get restitution, you get restitution! Let the playwright stop you. But until the last breath that you have, you do that with all the strength of your being.” Because everybody needs to be told that they can shoot for the dream. That’s what all of our stories are about. That’s what all our myths are for. To take us to the next level, to say life can be better. You can bust through the thing you never thought you could. You can change tomorrow what you thought you couldn’t today. That’s why actors are leaders, taking people, as Joseph Campbell would say, “into the forest of original experience.” They’re going in themselves and coming back to recount what it was like, and we can witness them.
That’s why when you see great acting, something happens which changes you, which is so overwhelming,you don’t have words. When you give a great performance you don’t feel it was yours, you feel it came through you. That’s the Zen of it. All you can do is prepare correctly so that, hopefully, you have the privilege of delivering a message that came from above.

My story with Lindsay Crouse is a long one; she is probably one of the actors I interviewed with whom I felt an uncanny connection. Most people probably know Lindsay best from her work in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer when she played Professor Maggie Walsh, amongst many other appearances on television series. Some may have seen her in David Mamet’s first feature film, House of Games or Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. When we first met in her home in Cambridge, Mass, Lindsay was in her early 40s, very enthusiastic and vivacious, and in the midst of a divorce with her soon-to-be ex, David Mamet. They had two children together, Willa and Zosia. Lindsay came from Broadway royalty – her father was Russel Crouse, who collaborated with Howard Lindsay (her namesake) on shows like Life With Father and Anything Goes. Lindsay had gone to Radcliffe and was the first woman to graduate with a diploma from Harvard University.
I met Lindsay the day after I spoke with Julie Harris at her home on Cape Cod. It was one of the very first interviews I had done, and I idolized Harris since I was a little girl. I was very gratified that she consented to the interview and invited me to her private sanctuary, but nervous about meeting one of the gods of my idolatry.The circumstances were a bit strange. First, she insisted on having a “witness,” someone who watched us as we spoke, a young, male friend. It was like being on stage with an audience with no possibility of intimacy, which is an absolute must for a decent interview. I have to admit I was discombobulated by Harris’ home, which had at least 50 photos of Mother Teresa hanging on the walls. Harris herself wore a long, long chain made up of many crucifixes. I thought: “How heavy that must be. It’s like some kind of penance.” During the interview, Harris was distant and would not reveal much, or respond to direct questions. She had been in some of my favorite films like East of Eden and Reflections in a Golden Eye, and if she had any insight into working on these films, she wasn’t going to share it with me, try as I might. I wish I had some of the skills as an interviewer that I developed later, when dealing with non-compliant interview subjects. But, I realized I had nothing of value or interest to work with, and the interview was trashed.
So, it was a blessing the next day when I met Lindsay. She was so thoughtful and intelligent and friendly – I knew I had hit a goldmine of acting information. Our interview lasted two days. After our first meeting, Lindsay greeted me the next morning and said, “I’ve been up half the night thinking about what I said, and I’ve completely changed my mind about some of the things I said. I want to re-do some of it.” Probably some sort of alarm should have gone off in my brain, but at that time, new to interviewing, I thought – how wonderful – someone who really wanted to speak about their profession in a deep and vivid way. I practically kicked up my heels when I left after the second day, knowing I had more great information than I could ever use. The interview was over 100 pages before the edit.
I sent Lindsay the interview several times, as I did with all of the actors and directors involved in the project, to get her to sign off on it or make any changes she wished. I never received a response from her. When I finally did, the first thing she told me was that I had to remove all the material about David Mamet (which was considerable – few pages remain in the interview,) because she was engaged in a bitter custody dispute for the two children, and Lindsay felt anything negative she said could be used against her in the hearings. In fact, she didn’t say anything disparaging about Mamet. I was surprised by her generosity to him in her remarks, considering the circumstances. So, that material went by the boards.
I sent Lindsay the next newly edited version of the interview minus most of the Mamet references. Again, she did not respond. I was very close to publication by this time, and I needed to have her sign a release form in order for the interview to be published. (The publishers were absolute sticklers for this kind of thing – they were so afraid of law suits, that I had to get permissions from the estates of dead people whose photos were going to appear in the book!) After many, many months, I finally received an apologetic note from Lindsay, saying she didn’t want her interview in the book – it no longer represented who she was or what she thought about acting. To say that I was enraged is a huge understatement, not just because the interview was so good, but because I had built the book around her interview. I played the other interviewees off of what Lindsay had said. I valued her interview so highly, I had structured the book around it. I wrote a long letter to her in which I tried to maintain some balance between the very real pleas of an author at the homestretch of an incredibly arduous process (and 6 years of my life,) – and a heavy dose of guilt-tripping. Appealing to her educated self, I said she was messing with the intention and shape of the book, and if she did not want the interview to be used, she bloody well had 4 years to let me know about it.
Finally, Lindsay phoned me. At this point she seemed quite different to the person I had met. The best way I can put it is that she seemed deflated, like a flat tire, virtually affectless. She was at a point in her life where she was thinking about giving up acting altogether, and teaching acting classes. Lindsay said she could never have conceived of being in the place she was now – raising two children (after refusing alimony from Mamet,) with very little work coming her way. Now she was in her mid 40s, and the parts weren’t there; it’s an old, sad story of the way the film industry treats women. Lindsay had taken time out from a thriving career to go back to school, even though she’d already been nominated for an Academy Award. And she had chosen to focus on raising her children. I can’t imagine how betrayed she must have felt when Mamet began a relationship with a much younger woman. It was disheartening – she had been so confident and spirited, and now she was depressed by what life had thrown her. Completely understandable. The interview, she said, was just one more thing that she felt was out of her control.
In the end, Lindsay has rebounded in television. It may not have been what she envisioned for herself as the Theatre World Award winner for her performance in Pinter’s The Homecoming. Television is now the new go-to place for actors, as some of the best contemporary works are on the box. If Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte can do it (in Luck starting in January 2012, directed by Michael Mann and written by David Milch of Deadwood fame,) so can other actors. I loved talking to Lindsay. I wouldn’t, as an acting teacher, agree with everything she said, but everyone who has a mind changes it at some point, and she did. The experience with Lindsay was one of many that caused me to stop doing interviews, even though I think the interview is one of the best I’ve done, thanks to her intelligence. Peoples’ behavior is too unpredictable and sometimes, too difficult to deal with, over an intense 10 year period of traveling anywhere an actor could meet me. Perhaps it’s dealing with people who are highly creative and sensitive – you never know what’s going to happen. You certainly get to experience a wide spectrum of human behaviors as an interviewer. Maybe I’ve just gotten more cranky, or impatient, or intolerant; I don’t know. But my little tape recorder is gone for good.lindsaycrouseinterview

MIRANDA RICHARDSON: I took my exams [in secondary school] early and then moved to Bristol and worked there because it was the only opportunity of getting a grant for drama school. I wasn’t going to get a grant from where I was [near Liverpool], which was partly why I don’t care about going back. They’re cretins, really, this discretionary grant system which was constantly raising its head. I get so many letters every week from students saying “I’m doing six jobs, and I’ve got to pay my fees and I don’t know how.” (1)

CZ: I visited the Bristol Old Vic Theater School and attended some classes. A lot of students told me that they were working at Safeway all night and then coming to classes all day.

MR: Yes, but there’s a perverse romance about it at the time, you’ve got energy to do certain things. I remember at the end of the day, looking at my watch because I had a cleaning job to go to. And Nat Brenner who was running the school then, and knew immediately if your attention wasn’t completely there, noticed me looking uneasy, and I said “I’m really sorry, I’m going to have to go now because I’ll be late for my cleaning job,” and he said “Well, cleanliness is next to godliness, so please go ahead.” He was very understanding, very good about that. All these silly prizes that have names to them, grants given to the school; he would always deal them out to the people who were the most needy.

CZ: Did your parents encourage you to go to drama school?

MR: They didn’t discourage me. I think they were worried, like anyone would be. I did this ridiculous secretarial course for something to fall back on, which actually got me a job before I went to drama school, which meant I could earn some money. But there was never any intention of that being a career. Actors are always saying “Got a job? When’s your next job?” Anything in the pipeline?” No one ever takes anything for granted, because it might stop.

CZ: When did you know that you wanted to be an actor?

MR: Probably around seventeen. I think I still thought I was going to go to university and study either English or drama there. As the practical became more important to me, I didn’t see why I was going to university. So many people, if they have the education, go on to university as the next thing, almost automatically. I woke up to that and thought “Why am I doing it?” I did an interview for the drama department [of a university], and I enjoyed the practical day enormously, and didn’t enjoy the interview very much at all. I felt even then that one’s instincts were going to be quashed, or kind of channeled into certain directions. I suddenly got a very strong feeling that it wasn’t quite the place for me. I was asked what my decision would be if I got a place at both the university and the drama school. Apparently I had declared my intention of applying to the Old Vic. I was so pissed off after the interview, that I said “I’d go to drama school.” And that’s what I did. I’ve always taken it as a compliment that the university didn’t offer me a place. An indication they thought I would get in at the Vic school.

CZ: Was Bristol Old Vic the only drama school that you applied to?

MR: No, no. LAMDA [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts] and Central [School of Speech and Drama]. Central couldn’t even offer an audition, because they were the only subsidized school at that point, (2) and they were just swamped with applications. LAMDA, I got in, but couldn’t get a grant. They said “Don’t worry too much about that,” but by that time Bristol had said “Come back in a year’s time,” which I thought meant that they thought I needed another year in the world and I think they were probably right, so that’s what I did. During that time I worked with Nat Brenner on an outside course about comedy and farce. He said “What are you going to do with yourself?” and I said “Well, I’m going to come to your school, if you’ll have me.” And he said “Yeah. You can come. You’ll still do the auditions, though.” It was great. (3)

CZ: What it was like to be at The Old Vic?

MR: I remember being excited to go in every day, and learn something. That’s the best of being student really, without the idea of having to do exams, and tie yourself in knots about that. There’s speech training, there’s movement training… At that time they didn’t have facilities for film and television really, they just had a radio room. I remember us being in a radio competition. In that sense it seemed quite antiquated. It has a tradition for being quite a workmanlike school, a classical school. You work from the Greeks, and on history plays, and upwards. We didn’t do really any modern stuff; anything like that was extracurricular, and of course that’s what you wanted to do, because it was like a breath of fresh air. Quite a number of plays were done: I remember we did Three Women about Sylvia Plath, some Albee was done, things like that. You have the energy to do that outside of the hours. I enjoyed the speech training although, perversely, I remember that I became so conscious of how to produce a sound that I actually lost my voice for a time. It was very strange, and made me think that actually what I wanted to do was do it by myself–you know, bedroom ranting, as I call it–and I had no business being [at drama school]. To be a performer, you have to be out there. It was a very strange experience.

CZ: What other sorts of classes did you have?

MR: Movement was great, because I’d never really done anything like that very much. This sort of yoga-based stuff, stamina stuff, mad Greek dancing, in the heat of the mid-day sun. It’s very good for coordination and form. I remember also doing Laban-based movement… Also putting routines together, in case you’re ever called to be in a musical, how you put something across, even if you’re not a naturally wonderful dancer. They’re concentrating much more now on that; there are so many musicals around at the moment.

CZ: What did they teach you about characterization at Bristol Old Vic?

MR: Well, they’re very strong on imagination. And whatever your text is, it should offer you all the answers if you study it well enough. And it’s not only what’s in the lines, but what’s between the lines. If there’s a silence, why is there a silence? What might be happening in that silence, what might you be thinking in that silence. But it’s not until you leave drama school and start applying things that you really find out what you’ve learnt. There were many times where you didn’t see how you were going to apply what you were being taught. There were some rather good disciplines, like we would spend ten minutes doing an arm gesture, while saying one speech. It’s very good if you’re extremely young and you’re full of energy and you’re liable to fling your arms and let things go, or snatch at sentences, which is something I still do. In texts you have to follow the line through. And it’s very good for concentration and focus, calming you down and making you think and listen. Particularly if you’re at the age most people are when they go to drama school; eighteen, nineteen. You’re in such a hurry to get things across, to get things done, so I think that was very useful.

CZ: Did you ever harbor any ideas, when you were at drama school, of being a star?

MR: No. I don’t know what I thought. I found something I could do, that was all. I was just sort of following something through. There are times when you really feel lost. You’re in a sort of cocoon, because you’re there.

CZ: When you were a kid, and you were going to the cinema, was there ever anybody that you wanted to emulate?

MR: All the guys. The guys had the best parts. Those were the ones, really. I liked Westerns a lot–John Wayne westerns, I’d go and watch those all the time, and be able to practically recite the whole movie. I had tremendous recall, for things like that, or anything that was on the television that I really liked, I could recall a lot of it.

CZ: Would you watch things over and over again?

MR: We didn’t have tapes then, it wasn’t like that. But, yeah I’d go and see movies several times. Whatever your obsession is at the time, whatever excites the imagination. It was a combination of Westerns, and I remember seeing the film Cromwell at the time. At that time I was a member of the Sealed Knot, which is the Cavaliers and Roundheads Association. I was thirteen, fourteen or something, and not acting but that’s quite similar, it’s enactment. I was extremely into T.E. Lawrence–I don’t mean Peter O’Toole, yes, I saw the film and I loved the film–at the same time I was reading all about the desert, and his time in the desert, and the kind of a guy he was….

CZ: So, you were a romantic.

MR: Broadly speaking, I would say, yes.

CZ: My big hero when I was around that age was Isadora Duncan.

MR: Great! What a wonderful role model.

CZ: I think it’s a little morbid, too.

MR: That’s okay, because that’s what’s going on as well at that time, isn’t it… [in sepulchural tones] death, mortality. The women sort of came later; I wasn’t too enamored of many actresses, I can’t remember many at that time. Well, I remember Irene Worth very strongly, because I went to see her in King Lear, which she’s so wonderful in. It was a mixed bag of people, really.

CZ: Was it your idea to go into film?

MR: I think I’m quite lucky to have a nice guy for an agent who I’m still with, in England. Actually what happened was that I was doing a play Insignificance, back in Bristol, having a great time, and somebody who wasn’t the director [of Dance With A Stranger] came to see that production, and they’d been looking for somebody. I had no idea about film. When you’re doing theater, you don’t really think about film, and when you’re doing film you don’t really think about theater, or I don’t. They saw me and thought that I might be worth seeing in an audition situation, a reading situation. They’d been looking for quite some time. They didn’t know what they wanted; whether they wanted somebody who was already somewhat known, which means that people might have preconceived ideas about them, or to go with somebody who nobody had seen before, I don’t know how many people they saw. My agent said to me afterwards–he was rather confused–because when he set me up for it, he thought that my situation was somewhat similar, not that I was a hostess in a drinking club, but that I had somehow reinvented myself, lost my accent, to do this job [in Insignificance]. I found it completely fascinating that he would think that; we hadn’t known each other very long. But that wasn’t my story. However… it did work out eventually. Not on the first reading. I remember spectacularly meeting Mike [Newell] on the way out; I was just furious. I’d travelled all the way down from Lancaster Rep, and I just thought “Some people just think the whole world stops for them.”

CZ: Did you read with the other actors?

MR: No. But I knew Rupert Everett was going to do the part. I didn’t know at that point that Ian Holm was going to be in it. When I heard that Ian Holm was going to be in it, when I got the part I thought to myself “Oh god, I’ve got to take this seriously now.”

CZ:. Did you ever see the film with Diana Dors based on the Ruth Ellis story? [Yield to the Night, a.k.a. Blonde Sinner 1956]

MR: Eventually I did, a long time afterwards. I liked it, she’s good.

CZ: How did you feel when you got this part?

MR: I didn’t know what I was in for, and they said “Well, you’re going to get very, very tired, go away for a week.” They sent me away for a week supposedly to just prepare for [the fatigue]. And they were right. It was nine weeks of on every day. Originally, it was seven weeks, and then we got more money. I had no resources, really. I didn’t feel protected, but I wasn’t expecting to be protected. In retrospect, I felt very well looked-after cinematically. I thought they did a brilliant job. But I was thrown in the deep end with a million props, and the continuity lady saying “I’m going to bug you. You did this on this, and this on this [take]; if you could do that again that would be wonderful.” Because I was concentrating so much about that, I didn’t have time to worry about other things, or the big pressures; I just did it.

CZ: You mean things like hitting your marks…

MR: It comes to you. And you also have to practice that. If I haven’t done filming for a while, somebody will tell me something and I’ll think I’ve heard it and completely ignore it. Then if it’s really a problem you can work something else out. If it’s really difficult for you to bear down by that time emotionally, or whatever, then something can be worked out. But because it was every day for nine weeks, you get into it quite fast.

CZ: How did you feel about the character? A lot of the women actors that I speak to say that they have to fall in love with their characters, no matter how despicable they might be.

MR: I think you have to find some enjoyment there, yes. I don’t think you have to love them, I think you have to understand them. I felt sorry for her. And I also thought she was funny, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes intentionally. It’s very hard to say….

CZ: Did you work with a dialogue coach?

MR: No, I didn’t actually. I heard one little bit of tape, it was the only bit of tape; they’re very drunk. She, talking to Desmond [Ian Holm's character]. She’s very hyper, you know, she’s very highly strung. That’s where that came from really… And the pretention, somebody who’s trying to make herself other than she is. And the time it’s set in. I thought the film captured the time very well.

CZ: How much did you know about the real person?

MR: Not much. There’s only a couple of books. There’s one very salubrious book which I read, and I read one which concentrated more on the events leading up to the trial. I looked at pictures of her, how she comes across in photographs. That’s very helpful when you’re doing something very physical.

CZ: You didn’t feel this need to create a backstory for her; what happened in her childhood that got her to this point?

MR: Well, I think that goes somewhere here (points to head). The script was good; it’s implicit in the script, though I did read stuff beforehand so I could have an awareness of where she came from, what she was escaping from. You can’t play all that all the time. I remember talking to someone who worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company with one particular director, and the director was finding it hard to articulate what he meant, and eventually somebody said “You mean you want us to invest that line with the sixteenth century?” And he said “Yes!” And you can’t do that.

CZ: You mean because it’s not an actable thing?

MR: No! You can do as much research as you like into the manners of the time; you can try and disclaim all knowledge of the twentieth century, but these are also real people that you’re playing, so you can’t do that ridiculous direction.

CZ: In terms of Ruth’s character, how did you find the actable emotions for her? I would think it would be hard to find what Stanislavski called a “through-line” for her character, since she’s masochistic one moment and sadistic the next.

MR: Is she?

CZ: I think she is extremely sadistic to the Ian Holm character, and will take any form of abuse from Rupert Everett’s character.

MR: I would have to say it’s the day-to-day processes: who you’re playing with, and what they offer you at the time in that situation. I think with film you just come in with a sort of a broad landscape in your mind, and a familiarity with the words, rather than knowing them so well that you can’t discard [something] or find them for yourself while filming. But I don’t know if I knew that at the time, I mean it’s kind of instinctive, really. We talked and read through scenes for about ten days beforehand, but that’s only to make everybody feel at ease, really. You don’t end up probably playing what you did in rehearsal, and of course your playing arena is completely different. Once you get on set, the confines of the set, and what’s around you, paints the picture as much as anything else.

CZ: Is it unusual for you to be given a ten-day period for rehearsal?

MR: Yeah. Certainly in the British film industry, yeah. You get a few days. It depends on the nature of the piece. If it’s improvisational, you probably just do it straight off. Mike talked about the fifties a bit: after the war period, what people wanted, what they were looking for. He said everybody wanted a party, which I found a very useful note, and so she is providing a party atmosphere a lot of the time for a lot of people. She was a very small fish, really, but the big fish in that very tiny pond. Ian’s so great, he was very supportive, and there was no sort of ego-trip going on there, for his character.

CZ: Was this one of Rupert Everett’s first films?

MR: I think it must have been. He’d done Another Country, by then, which, in British film terms, was meteoric, really. This virtuoso performance from the stage, which they then transferred to film.

CZ: I find it surprising that they didn’t make a plea of non compas mento for Ruth Ellis, because of the drugs and alcohol; she’s obviously in a dissociative state when she does the shooting. Did people generally support her hanging?

MR: She’s made an example of.

CZ: Because she was a scummy person who deserved to die?

MR: Yeah. I don’t know if it was even that clear. It was horrific, just horrific. She didn’t make any attempt to save herself, either; she said “No, I intended to kill him.” So it sounds like premediated murder. I think she was very self-dramatizing, and this was the most famous she was going to get, actually. Like the guy who killed John Lennon, except that this was a smaller British personality. She bleached her hair specially, so she would look nice in court, so they wouldn’t think she was a fleabag. She made no attempt to come in looking ghastly and sorry for herself and out of it, if she had then there might have been mitigating circumstances. “Crimes of passion” didn’t apply in England, just on the continent. We’re not supposed to have those here.

CZ: How did you feel about watching yourself?

MR: It was awkward, but I almost didn’t recognize myself. I’d just remember seeing a rough cut; I was terrified, because I knew so little about filming, and the soundtrack was not ready, and the levels hadn’t been balanced, and I was horrified. I saw this scene where there was this enormous sound of a hoover going on in the club, and I thought “They can’t be going to leave it like that.” That’s how naive I was; I just thought this was awful; how can they tell anything? I saw the finished thing, and it was very different. Just this funny little person, really. I thought “How can she have caused such a scandal?” Not really recognizing oneself on screen.

CZ: Do you ever use rushes as a tool?

MR: I should. The only time I’ve sat through a lot of rushes was Kansas City. It was really like a party. Jenny [Jennifer] Jason-Leigh is very practical about that kind of thing. No matter how tired she is, she goes to rushes. She says “Come, come here, you must come here! You missed a great scene yesterday….” She shamed me into going, and when I went, I had a good time, but I was in very capable hands in that movie, so there wasn’t too much reason to feel worried about going. Stupidly, of course, when you feel in less capable hands, those are the times when you should probably go to rushes more, and say “God, I really hated that, I’d like an opportunity to do that again, if it’s at all possible,” or “What are you going to do with this?” or “Are you going to use that shot because that other shot seems much better to me.” Then, there are people who never go to watch their movies.

CZ: Do you generally feel well taken care of? Did you ever have battle of personalities with someone over your treatment on the set, where you felt like you needed more time, or more takes, or more discussion, and you weren’t given the opportunity?

MR: There have been a couple… sometimes in Britain–well, almost always in Britain–there isn’t enough money and enough time, so they get people who can do the work. There is something to be said for not doing too many takes; I don’t necessarily think that take fifty-four is going to be better than take one. It might be slightly different, but just to keep on slogging is not necessarily the best way of achieving a performance. Once you have the pressure of knowing that you have to move on, and you have two takes, that is also very difficult to deal with. If you’re not happy with it, you either get so you don’t care, you go “Oh, fuck it,” which is dangerous, or you just get angry. So, yes, there have been times when I’ve thought “Oh, okay, I’ve got to save myself, because I’m the one who’s up there in the end.” It’s very aggravating and frustrating.

CZ: The first film that you were in was a really big international success, and it played all the big festivals. How did that feel?

MR: It wasn’t well-publicized, though. I was out of touch with it really, because I wasn’t very well after it; I’d just got completely run down. I think everybody was sort of learning at the time. I was in a daze, really, that’s the best way to describe it–not a glorious daze; I mean it was a lot of hot air, a lot of interviewers asking the same things again and again, photo shoots, not feeling up to it, and not knowing what would come next, and not really ready for it either. And there was a big thing about the resurgent new British film industry. I think it was a very good film, but there wasn’t a very obvious follow-up to that in the British film industry.

CZ: Well, it goes in fits and starts, it seems to be re-emerging, and then goes through a period of crisis again. What did you do after this great success?

MR: Actually quite soon after that, I went back to the theater, because I need that variety anyway. There is an unreality about the film world. With theater you can feel the process much more clearly. If you’re going from point A to point B, you know how you got there, and there’s a lot more dialogue, more interaction, really.

CZ: What sort of theater were you doing at the time?

MR: I did Mamet plays at the Royal Court, I did a film and some television, things like that.

CZ: Do you see a pattern in the parts that you’re drawn to?

MR: No. Other people do, I know. But I don’t, and I also feel a lot luckier than people who have to work in America, because absolutely they are made to play the same thing again and again, you know, “You did that well, here’s another one, do this, and then you can move on to something else,” but you end up playing four or five parts which seem to me very, very similar before you can break out of that at all. Then it seems like a huge major move, and “Gosh, we never dreamt that this person could do this! Wow! Because we’re used to seeing them doing….” It’s very strange, and very frustrating, I would think.

CZ: Getting back to the original question: I see you really exploring your dark side a lot in your roles.

MR: Yeah.

CZ: The only parts I’ve seen that you’ve played that are more light-hearted are in Enchanted April and Black Adder.

MR: Well, all right. But you haven’t seen Kansas City, you haven’t seen Evening Star. I don’t know, what other movies have I done?

CZ: Damage, Crying Game, Redemption [a depressing BBC drama]….

MR: Oh, Crying Game. Now, you see, I don’t take those roles for the reasons you might suppose. I wanted to work with Neil [Jordan], I thought it was a great script–it was like being in a circus troupe–and there was a sort of a lack of responsibility about it as well.

CZ: Why was that?

MR: I don’t know, it had something to do with the way he films, or something. I didn’t think “Oh here’s another dark person….”

CZ: I don’t mean you go looking for these sorts of dark parts on a conscious level. Sometimes actors have told me that their lives dovetail with the parts that they choose, and that they learn things about themselves. Again, it’s especially true of the women actors I’ve talked to.

MR: Another reason for doing The Crying Game was because there was a chance to do some more action in it, be quite physical onscreen, which is a relief. A bit of gun-toting, and running, and sort of roughness. I really relished the opportunity to do that in that particular instance. Enchanted April, I sort of had to be persuaded to do, but actually it was rather nice. I liked the idea of the geographical thing, you know, of the English personality being transported somewhere else and something else happening to–broadly speaking–the English psyche. I thought “Oh, well let’s try this, let’s see if it happens,” and of course what happened was that it rained in Italy all the time. We left brilliant sunshine in England and it was perverse, that we were acting under this very cloudy sky for the first two weeks, anyway.

CZ: Do you ever feel that roles affect you psychologically or emotionally, or is it mostly just a job?

MR: The story affects you while you’re doing it, and you’re concentrating on it, and focusing on how does this character react in this situation, so there is some kind of channel for that. But I don’t have a problem leaving things behind at the end of the day. That doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking about the next day, it means that I don’t have to be in character when I’m off-screen. I don’t have a problem with that, I don’t have to wear the same things the person wears. That’s one way of doing it, and I don’t know whether it’s a superstition with certain people, you know, they feel that the process is so nebulous anyway, that they have to hang on to that or nothing’s going to happen… I don’t really know, but I don’t do that.

CZ: That relates to one of the things I’m trying to deal with in these interviews–how British actors feel they’re different from American actors, because usually it’s the Americans you hear about who can’t leave their characters behind at the end of the day. There is something about British actors, even though they’ve been knighted, that makes them want to be treated like ordinary blokes. As [Dame]Judi Dench put it, “I think of myself as a jobbing actor.” What do you think it is about the British character that makes people feel that way, because I don’t think that Americans feel like that? Americans seem to want their actors to be heros to a much greater extent.

MR: Americans have more of a tradition of film anyway, and as I said there’s a level of unreality about film, and there’s so much more riding on it. It’s a complete world for that amount of time that you’re working on it. It’s like a big family; everybody’s focused on that one thing. In theater much more, people have their lives, they go back to their house during the day; you do the thing and you go home. There are other things happening. On location, when you’re removed from most of the things that are normally surrounding you, then different things come into play, I suppose. Myths are built up around actors, which I think are actually very damaging, because people can start to believe what’s said about them, or think they’re gods, or do anything they like. Everybody needs to be given confidence, to be able to work, but I think the hype actually works against people; I think they get less secure, because in the end, people are frightened to direct them, they’re frightened to make any demands on them at all. In the end you get more left alone, and it would be terrifying if somebody felt that they were so in awe of you that they didn’t direct you. I couldn’t handle it.

CZ: In going to all of these drama schools–RADA, and East 15, and all the major places around London and outside of London, there still seems to be this whole debate that’s raging about “the Method,” among the acting teachers and the students.

MR: I think whatever works for you, you can use bits of anything. I think the only book I actually enjoyed reading was Uta Hagen’s book Respect for Acting. I thought there was a lot of sense in that. One of the most important things is just to try and keep open, and observe. Hopefully you have to be curious, otherwise you just end up playing an aspect yourself all the time. Some people do very very well with that; it’s limited, but comfortable for the public, obviously, because they know what they’re going to get.

CZ: You just finished doing a film with someone who would be regarded as sort of a quintessential ”Method” actor–Jennifer Jason Leigh. [Kansas City]

MR: Jenny I feel works in a pretty similar way to me, except that she’s much more researched. She’s extremely practical, and she would get as much information as possible, about anything pertaining to the part beforehand. I feel like I rely on the script a lot more; what’s actually there on the page. I might subsequently find that what I’m actually supposed to say doesn’t completely do it for me. But I think it’s the continual discoveries that go along on a film, you know. When you’re there, you flesh it out more, even if you’re not working in chronological order, which is what usually happens. Jenny doesn’t have any problems shedding the character at the end of the day. She’s tired–we’re all tired–but we go out and play. It’s good to spend time with somebody that you have a lot of screen time with, just so you can trust each other. You feel like “Oh, whatever I’m going to be thrown, or throw at this person, they’ll be fine, there’s no ego basis for it.” It’s character based, or your instinct says to do this. If you stop and say “Actually, that was crap,” or “I don’t think that was really very truthful,” you could do that. You’re not going to spoil the mystery by doing that. It’s partly a practical. It’s not that I’m completely trying to demystify the process, and I’m not, because I don’t think you can. No matter how much you try and analyze it, it is a mysterious process; it’s actually difficult to talk about, because when you get up there something might just come in from left field, and you don’t know where it comes from, but it feels right, or it’s interesting, or something.

CZ: Can you think of an example of where you instinctually did something that turned out to be a happy accident, on the spot?

MR: I don’t know, really; I think the scene in Damage was good. We did it in one take, really, and I thought it was a very well-written scene, that kitchen scene. It didn’t really need to be directed, we knew what the physical confines of it were; it had a natural arc to make, and we knew it was a very emotional high point in the film. I didn’t analyze how I was going to do it, so I just sort of did it, and there’s a bit of you watching what’s going on at the same time at it is happening, and you feel that something is right. That’s the only way I can describe it. The only other way I’ve described acting on film, or what it feels like, is it feels like a sort of moment-to-moment combustion, like an engine firing. It’s partly to do with preparation, partly to do with the atmosphere in the room, and giving more or less energy, depending on whether you’re performing in a close-up or in a really wide shot.

CZ: Do you pay very close attention to those technical things?

MR: I’m aware of the camera, but I’m not always as aware as I should be of exactly where it is. Unless you’re in a big close-up, and then you can’t help it. I always feel like I’m being pulled into the camera when it’s near, like ectoplasm or something. Even when I’m playing a scene where the other actor might be right there, it’s really strange. The same is, I suppose, true in a way, on stage; it doesn’t mean you’re not focusing on the person you’re playing with, but the audience is out there, and you’re aware of that.

CZ: Are you aware of giving the editor cutting points, or anything like that?

MR: Occasionally I am, and I think that’s something that can be an instinct but it can also be learned, and hopefully one learns more the more you do it. I’m sure Jack Nicholson is past master at that. But I also don’t want to be so caught up in technique that I can’t just play, so I haven’t made it my business to learn all about that. I want to be free of that, really, I want to be able to trust that those people know what they’re doing.

CZ: Was there ever a part that you felt you really had a hard time understanding? Would you ask for help in that situation? Do you generally find directors are helpful in that sense?

MR: I know I’m often amazed; I feel I got away with something. I’ve done a take and I think, “That can’t be all there is to it. I must have missed something.” I mean, I remember feeling like that a lot on Tom and Viv; I don’t know how often I articulated it. I thought, “But I just sort of did that.” Sometimes the equation is, if there is no apparent effort, then it can’t be registering, which is ridiculous, because if you see effort, you know something isn’t right. It’s excruciating to watch. But sometimes, it’s like “Why was that so easy?” I don’t trust myself then, I feel I shouldn’t be doing the job because it’s that easy. But of course, the goal is ease, apparent ease; that’s why a lot of fabulous actors don’t really get as much attention as they deserve because it’s so effortless, what they do, it’s so right, it’s so zen! If I don’t trust something then I will say, and Brian [Gilbert, dir. Tom and Viv] was very supportive and actually very confident in what he saw and what he wanted. Oftentimes, he would just say “I’m very happy. Do you want to do another one? Well, if you’re happy, okay, fine!” You have to trust that, you can’t go on forever, wanking. Maybe the reason that felt easy was because here’s somebody who was actually expressing herself [Viv], everybody else was much more cramped and stolid around her, and not saying what they really thought, and she was actually refreshingly honest, and it was a relief, so I felt fine, full of energy and didn’t have a problem and wasn’t emotionally brought down, but I occasionally distrusted that.

CZ: Are there times when you really feel that your creative juices aren’t flowing? What do you do in a case like that? Do you ever use improvisation to get at the heart of a text?

MR: I suppose I do, but just for myself. Jenny and I would do it to free up some energy sometimes. The before and after of a take, in the car, and then we’d drop it, we’d just sort of rush around vaguely in character, and then be in the scene and then come out of it. Bob [Altman] often encourages that anyway, and when he actually wanted specifically some more text–there’s a scene in Union Station where he wanted us to improvise some stuff before we ever shot it. The night before, we sat in his caravan and drew out some stuff about the Lindbergh baby. I was very grateful to Jenny in that instance, because she came in with that already researched. She had got stuff all about what was going on at the time, and that was extremely useful, because we could have these great conversations: two women talking on equal terms about their views on something sensational that was happening in the papers on a daily basis. That was great fun. I won’t stop a set to do that, or anything like that. I saw Holly Hunter giving a kind of a master class, a Q and A, and saying that she wanted to feel in a certain way before a scene, and she actually got the extras to push her around, she said “I’m asking you do this.” She wanted to be really angry, and she said anger was something she had trouble getting in touch with, and she wanted to feel really really pissed off, and so she got them to do that for her. I’ve never asked that; I think I’m too self-sufficient, I always feel that I should be able to generate it for myself. It doesn’t always work if you can’t generate the sad feeling about this, to think of some other situation [in which something similar happened to you]. In Uta Hagen’s book she will ask you to do that kind of thing, and while I see it makes perfect sense, I don’t feel I truly can do that; I can’t necessarily replace one situation with another, and make it work for that moment. It’s more likely to happen off screen, when I’m just thinking around things. But I think what you do is you remember that emotion, sort of a sense memory, it’s part mimicry, part instinct, and part relaxation.

CZ: It’s a curious thing, how different actors learn a script. Do you do it by emotional association?

MR: On a film script, particularly, you can’t work in a vacuum, you have to work in tandem with the people you will be working with. You can see what the text says, but until you get there and find out what the situation is, and whether indeed you are going to say those things, or whether it’s going to be changed, which quite often happens… it’s more a question of thinking around it, saying “What is truthful to my character?” and then you get there and play it out. It’s like boxers in a ring, because you come in from each side and you play it out–not necessarily so that one wins and one loses, but what kind of action you take and when. What was the original question?

CZ: I was asking about how you learn a script.

MR: I familiarize myself with the script, rather than learning it.

CZ: Are you saying that you’re drawing the basic emotional parameters for the character without filling in the details? I think it would be better if we talk about it specifically, because I want to talk about Tom and Viv, because I think that it’s one of the most complex women’s roles that I’ve seen in a recent film. Did you read any accounts of the relationship between T. S. Eliot and Vivien [Haigh-Wood]?

MR: Yeah, but they’re all biased, that’s the trouble. I’m not saying that just to defend her, but it’s everybody bolstering Tom, and saying she’s dragging him down. I’ve just been reading a lot of Woolf, for Orlando, and being swept away by it. There are mentions of Viv in Woolf’s writing, and actually very kind mentions. It’s not at all one-sided. You can see that here’s somebody who’s actually being encouraged to write, and who apparently thought very highly of Virginia, and Virginia had obviously given her enough encouragement to continue her writing. She was using it almost medicinally; she was writing just to express. I didn’t feel I had to read all of Eliot’s stuff to understand. I read quite a lot of his stuff, and listened to his tapes as well. I found him quite mad, really. I mean he’s the one who’s nuts; he’s stuck, that’s what we try to show in the film.

CZ: At the end there’s the image of both of them imprisoned; Viv in the institution, Tom is last seen behind the bars of an elevator. What did you understand her medical condition to be?

MR: A hormonal imbalance. They talk vaguely about the endocrine system. It’s something which is actually quite easy to rectify once it’s diagnosed. It’s appalling P.M.S. Her periods were very erratic–she would have a period for three days, and then a gap of a week, and then it would come on again, so she was all over the place emotionally. She was diagnosed as being morally insane, which really means bad behavior.

CZ: Vivien’s life was tragic; I don’t think there’s any doubt of that. What do you think her motivations were, or what you think was the essence of her character? What was it that made her a tragic figure? What were the different forces that you saw ruling her life?

MR: Well, the time she was in, the lack of understanding about this specifically women’s problem, the concerns of the family for respectability, and the right form of behavior for the class they were in. She’s not pukkah, they’re upper middle class, not top-drawer. They’re merchant class, but the concerns are much stronger. I think had she been upper-class, and with a great deal of money she could have done what the fuck she liked. She wouldn’t have been locked in a tower in the east wing or anything, she’d have just been allowed to roam the property and be eccentric, because she had the money and the position to be. The requirements of that class and that family at that time were other. And the fact was that she then met Tom, who was incapable of rising to the occasion in any manner. She became his cross that he had to bear, which became part of what informed his work, instead of it being a marriage. The intellectual spark was there, but then he was so lionized and applauded and actually needed and wanted that, that I think she felt shut out. The way I’ve described it, actually diminishes her. Her writing, when you read it, is extremely personal. The characters that she does manage to get down, there’s always a central woman, you can feel it very strongly, it’s her, an aspect of her… she wasn’t supported.

CZ: She was treated as an “ill” person, all the time, by her family.

MR: Treading very carefully around her, and nobody saying what they really thought or really felt.

CZ: The mother says, “Vivien will be taken care of as she always has been.” It’s not unlike other families in which someone is labeled a “problem,” and they have great difficulty escaping that role. I’m surprised to learn that she wrote anything, because in the film it seemed that she had no outlet for her creativity, except for shopping; its seems whenever she’s going through one of these manic episodes, she comes back with a lot of shopping bags.

MR: Yeah, low self-esteem. It’s like any of us who are impulse buyers, or hormonal buyers, trying to make herself better, by doing it externally, you know. She’s looking more and more wretched and ragged and worn, and she looks sort of ravaged, really, at the end of her life, in photographs. She also looks like a totally different person from photograph to photograph. It’s quite uncanny. You can see her; there are an awful lot [of photographs] in which she’s blurred, because she’s moving. There’s an energy, she’s on all the time, and the camera’s caught this sort of languid group of people, and Viv’s always in motion, looking at something else. So the photographs, again, were extremely useful.

CZ: There seemed to be a dichotomy that’s presented in the film between the view of her as a free spirit and on the other hand, being unstable. It’s almost as if, had she been an artist, her behavior would have been quite acceptable.

MR: Not in the Bloomsbury group, I don’t think. It’s much too blase and quite snobby. Tom was the star; nobody wanted outpourings, they wanted carefully considered, reworked expression.

CZ: When she says in the film “They all admired Tom’s mind, but I am his mind,” do you feel that she was deluded about her influence on his writing? He says to her at one point “I can’t write without you,” and she says “I know.” It seems like she never formed her own life or her own relationships, or felt that she was worth anything.

MR: That’s it, really, an appalling lack of self-esteem, because she’s let the side down from the moment she reached puberty. You know, it’s a shameful thing, and I think there are times when she reacts with rage against that, and times when she just feels guilty and extremely depressed, and is at the mercy of her body, and can’t see anything clearly.

CZ: Do you think that she was deluded about her influence on T.S. Eliot?

MR: No. He wouldn’t have written the books he wrote if he hadn’t met Viv. She’s threaded through his work. She’s also tremendously supportive to him, and expected and wanted him to be championed, but not to the exclusion of her personality.

CZ: Why do you think that she decided to do nothing about her incarceration once she had calmed down, and was apparently well?

MR: Because I think by that time it was a sort of sanctuary, and I think she would have been more lonely out on her own. Her mother died when she was in there… She didn’t have the resources anymore to start again, and say, “Right then, let’s discover the world now.” And she wouldn’t have had the money; she’s not landed gentry.

CZ: Why do you think that Tom never visited her?

MR: He couldn’t cope, emotionally, at all, with the guilt…. He was free, in one sense, to get on with his work, but bearing that enormously important burden out of which came his work. There wouldn’t have been any conversation between them; can you imagine? It would have been excruciating.

CZ: Do you have a sense of an arc in your career? Do you see or feel a difference in your acting from when you were in your twenties until now?

MR: I think that’s where technique comes in; it’s much stronger. When you’re nineteen, you feel like I can do anything, and you do, it’s just that you do it instinctually. Later on there’s a sort of fusion of the instinct and the technique. The more you think you know, the less you know. Perhaps it’s more to do with a sort of compulsion. I often think I’m not always going to do it; I don’t know quite what else I would do. I think you get more fearful, but then it’s something that you have to work through. At times when I say to myself: “You’re mad, you’re mad. What made you think you could do this?” Partly an act of will, trying to move on in some way, to different challenges. The physicality of it is very important to me, because this is your instrument, and a lot of the time, it’s concentrated up here [points from neck up]. And it’s a relief to feel everything working at once.

CZ: Who do you think has influenced you the most, as a grown woman? An actor, a director, some other person?

MR: Lots of people. I think one takes from a myriad of different things, not just specific parts, but that makes you feel wonderful about the creative process, about art, the visual arts, and music. There are a number of people I admire greatly, and it’s something to do with an honesty about what they do. I think Francis Bacon’s stuff is wonderful, because I find it very honest, not because I’m morbid or like to see something flayed. I find it very honest. There are writers who I love to read because I feel the honesty in their writing, and it’s something to do with “Yes, that’s how I would want to say it if I had chosen that form.” There are actors who are wonderful in specific things; some people who you like to watch all the time. I mean, I love Paul Scofield, Oh god…. Too much, too many. Sometimes people affect you at a particular time in your life; I’m sure that’s true. Maybe you can’t listen to Mozart before you’re thirty, or something; I don’t know if that’s true, but maybe Oasis means more to you at a certain age than Haydn. Just sort of take from everything, I guess.

(1) . Richardson is referring to the British system of discretionary grants. Students in every discipline–with the exception of dance and drama–automatically receive a grant to attend universities and professional institutes. The local town council decides on grants given to those interested in studying drama and dance; thus the grants are given at the council’s “discretion.” It is a fairly universal opinion in the U.K. that the town councils are completely unqualified to determine who should receive such grants. Richardson realized that she was unlikely to receive a grant from her local council, and thus moved to Bristol, where as a resident, the local council (in a town with its own famous drama school) would be much more likely to recognize talent, and award her a grant for drama school.

(2) . Central is one of a handful of British drama schools that has opted to become part of the British University system. The positive consequences of this decision are that all the students who are accepted to Central are automatically subsidized, the negative consequences are that the students must now take many courses that they consider irrelevant to their education as actors.

(3) . A note of explanation concerning auditions for drama schools in Britain, and particularly at The Bristol Old Vic is in order. The Old Vic has over 12,000 applicant each year. They audition each applicant over a series of weeks, and then narrow the competition down to approximately 300 students. These 300 are then broken into several groups, and asked to spend a long weekend at The Old Vic. The instructors then do a series of workshops with the students, determining their suitability for the particular program offered at their school, their level of concentration, discipline, maturity, etc. They also try to determine if the students they choose will work well together as a group. COPYRIGHT 1997 CineAction

From Alan Bates’s Chapter

Derbyshire

What would I call myself? Middle class, I suppose. I don’t quite know what all these denominations and categorisations mean. I was a child in the war years, so I just remember the strictness, the rations. It was a very simple life, really, that I lived. My father was a cellist and my mother was a pianist, and they were both very fine players, and had a huge love of music, so I grew up in a house where music was played and heard a great deal. That was a subtle influence of some kind, I’m sure. My brothers and I all resisted — as children wilfully and sometimes wrongly do — to follow them into it, but then my brothers were both rather gifted artistically. One is a painter now, and an art lecturer. My other brother began in art direction but gave it up, and I became an actor. We almost deliberately did something else, which sounds a bit perverse. I suppose it’s not; if that’s what we wanted to do. Hopefully, people in life do what they either want to do, or are good at.
As a child, I listened to the radio. My mother, when I was 9 or 10, started taking me to the local theatre, and I started going to the local cinema. I became infatuated; I had to go every week. I realised, about the age of 11, that the reason I was going was that I’d found out what I wanted to do, and what I thought I could do. I admired certain films, and certain actors. I wanted to be me, I didn’t want to be them, but I think actors do influence you. I will always remember James Mason, from the day I started going to see films, as absolutely one of the finest movie actors perhaps who’s ever been. He somehow resonated with me. And I think, later in my teens, I was influenced by all sorts of people: Gerard Phillipe, and then a bit later on, Mastroianni, and Swedish actors, and American actors like Spencer Tracy and Montgomery Clift, and others. You don’t want to be like them, but you like what they do, so therefore they are, to some extent, influencing you.
My parents supported my decision to become an actor. They filled me with all the warnings, you know. They said ‘If you haven’t done it by the time you’re 26, then think about stopping’, but they were basically very encouraging. My father got me into a class with a marvellous voice teacher, and my mother got me into the local Shakespeare society, so they both took a very positive stand towards me doing what I wanted to do.

RADA

I applied for RADA, just that one place, and got it. I don’t think I knew about the others. And I got it because of a brilliant teacher in Derbyshire, called Claude Gibson, who was absolutely terrific. He really knew how to get hold of somebody with talent, and draw something out of you, he knew that you had to learn how to speak first. He got you to really articulate, to breathe properly. I went really quite prepared for RADA, from this great teacher.

The outside world: talent and luck

But of course the world outside was waiting, was ready, and we fell into the theatre just as it was coming into a very powerful time with a lot of astonishing young writers — Wesker, Osborne and Pinter. People like Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre. So they were there to grab us, you know. It was a very lucky time, quite apart from however good we all were, or not, or whatever has happened to all of us. Whatever we actually were, we were also lucky. Of course you’ve got to be able to do it, you can’t just be lucky.
At the beginning of my career, I took what job I could get, which was with the Midland Theatre Company, and it happened to be Frank Dunlop who was running it. I went into a company that he was directing in Coventry, which was a very, very strong and well-thought-of company. In a way, I was slightly better off, because if you went to Stratford, you walked on, you were the crowd, you might have a line or two, then you would graduate. It could take years, if Stratford got hold of you in those days. They would keep you for a very long time before they let you begin to emerge. In the other companies, like Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol, Nottingham or Dundee, all these places, you went and played big parts, or at least parts with substance, if not big ones. But friends who got into Stratford weren’t learning anything by experience. They were learning by apprenticing, but they weren’t actually functioning as well as you were if you were in one of the other regional theatres. Even at the National, in much later days, it took you a long time to get what Olivier once said to somebody, was his ‘turn’, which is an awful phrase, really: your ‘turn’, I suppose, practically speaking, that’s what it amounts to.

Inspiration and technique: crawling up to a role It’s very hard to explain. Acting is inexplicable, so we’re having a very weird conversation to start with, because I cannot really tell you what it’s all about. You’ve got to find your won way, you’ve got to take from what makes sense to you, what’s real to you, what applies to you, what works for you, and apply it to who you are. You can’t just suddenly be a Method actor, except that I think all good actors are. It’s such a personal thing; if you’re good you’re good, you know. You work through these things, you’re not made by these things. You fall down as an actor, if you’re not good. We all take a par, or a moment, or a time in our lives where it all comes together and we go beyond our average accomplishments. When you’re lucky, you go beyond yourself; you get a bit of inspiration, or a meeting of yourself and the part. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with any particular training. It has to do with what you’ve drawn from everybody; it’s hanging onto your own instincts, rather than being too influenced by someone else. I once went as an observer to the Actors Studio, and I watched a girl get up and do a piece — it was the first time she’d done anything there — and it was marvellous. And Lee Strasberg said “That was absolutely terrific; do you know what you were doing?’ And she said ‘No’, and I thought, ‘Please, Mr Strasberg, don’t say anything else. She mustn’t know. She must find out; don’t tell her what she’s doing, she must find out herself. Give her a lot more class work, give her a lot more space, give her a lot more stuff to do, but don’t tell her what she’s doing, especially if she doesn’t know, because that would spoil it.’ I’m afraid I get very nervous when people move in on people who are doing something good. You trust your instincts, you trust your responses, you trust your imagination. I mean, you have to be free. There are actors who are not, who haven’t found a way to be free and daring, to follow their instincts fully. For that you need what in the old days would be called technique. I always think: how do you do a performance eight nights a week? You can’t really get to the same depth of feeling every night, so you have to have a way of doing it, and I think you have to trust the fact that once you have found something, even if you don’t feel it the next time, you have been there, and you will be convincing to an audience. Representing someone else is convincing yourself sufficiently that you are in someone else’s shoes, to convince people watching you that you’re in that person’s shoes.   - I like to let the part creep up on me -I do believe in going into a part. I think in a lot of older traditions of English acting, there’s a style of acting where people go straight for it; they have an image of the part, and they never change it. They come in at the first reading with the part, and that’s it, and then they get stuck and they can’t change it even if they want to. I mean, for some people, that works. But I like to let the part creep up on me, just take it on slowly with thought. I’ve fallen into that trap a couple of times in my life, because sometimes you can see a part so clearly that you go straight for it, you know exactly how it should be, and you go for it, and what you haven’t done is you haven’t crawled up to it. You’ve taken a shot at it, and you’ve probably landed on target, but it’s not as interesting as it would have been if you’d really allowed yourself to creep up to it. Maybe that’s my version of Method. I don’t know. I’m not trying to hit it too soon, or to convince the director that he’s cast it well, or whatever is motivating it. It’s usually because you can see it; you know how it should be. I rather like parts where you crawl around them for a bit, and you start selecting. Sometimes you don’t feel the change in yourself, but it’s happening, because you’re doing it so slowly. Whereas if you shoot straight for a part, you feel the change, but it might not be as deep as it could be. There really are no rules. I remember Celia Johnson, when I did Hamlet, she played Gertrude, and the director suddenly said, which wasn’t the cleverest remark, ‘I don’t think it’s moving enough’. She looked rather annoyed, and said “Oh, really?’ and she said ‘Shall we do it again?’ and he said ‘Yes, I think I’d like to do it again’. So she started the scene and everyone fell silent, and just became hypnotised by what she was doing, and completely moved and involved with her. She came to the end of the scene, and she said suddenly, ‘Do you mean like that?’ She was really saying ‘If you want me to, I could do it, and I will do it, and I can do it any way you want.’ There aren’t any rules about this thing. You can do it like that, or you can do it like Celia Johnson, you can do it like Gerard Depardieu, you know.   - Eight performances a week -You should give of yourself as much as you can every time you do something. I think eight performances a week are killers, really. Singers don’t do that, violinists don’t do that, pianists don’t do that, dancers don’t do that: only we do it. I don’t know why. I don’t know why we think we can. I know we always have, for probably hundreds of years, but it’s odd, isn’t it? It is madness, really. You should do an evening, but not a matinee on the same day. It’s part of an actor’s psychology, five o’clock comes, and you start preparing for the evening performance, even if you’ve been doing it for six months. You start preparing for it, and it’s often exciting. You give yourself a whole day, you conserve your energy, you make sure you have some food, or not, depending on what your metabolism happens to be. You just give yourself to the thing. You just have to keep yourself very free, very loose so that something can happen, even if it’s not what happened the night before, even if it’s not what you thought would happen. Something must remain alive and flexible: and you have to develop technique for that. You have to have a way of speaking and moving, and you have to be able to rely on what you’ve decided to do with a certain scene, and at the same time, keep it fresh. Staying open: ‘no decisions’ I do my own version of improvisation, to myself. I think most actors do these things. I’ve always liked acting, but I certainly haven’t been good in everything I’ve done. You can always go further. I think, there’s always more to find out, there’s always more to give a part, you can’t ever rest with it, and say ‘Oh well, that’s it’. I don’t think I’ve ever hit a moment where I’ve ever been over satisfied. I’ve been pleased with some of my work, and disappointed, at times, when I haven’t taken it as far, where two years later you think ‘Oh, I wish I could do that again, because I can see something now that I couldn’t see then’. Sometimes you know you’ve met the part, you know that you’re right, you know you’re in tune, and really onto the centre of the part. You know it sometimes — unfortunately not all that often. You have to work quite hard, even when you’re excited about it, and can see how it should be, to find your own way to it. You don’t always succeed. But I don’t ever feel I’ve dried up, and if I have wanted to rest, I’ve rested. I don’t think you should go staggering out of the theatre. When you read a script that you want to do, then you understand what the main emotions are that you’ve got to follow. I think that’s part of knowing you want to do it. I worked with a director called Richard Wilson, who directed a Simon Gray play, which I did quite recently in Chichester, and he was terrific. He used to say, ‘Right, no decisions. I want no decisions from anyone for days’. And he would suddenly stop in the middle of a rehearsal, and say ‘Sorry, you’ve made a decision, and we’re not ready for it. Stay open, stay open’. And suddenly it all begins to come together; if you stay like that for ten days, suddenly it all begins, suddenly it becomes very clear where you have to go. It takes a lot of nerve to do that. More and more it bothers me not to have enough rehearsal. You’ve really got to have time to come to grips with something, and to get on top of it. There’s nothing worse than chasing yourself. Don’t learn a script for the stage, unless you’ve only got five days or something before you go. Occasionally I’ve learned half of it, or chunks of it, because there’s just so much dialogue, and so little rehearsal time. It’s always fatal when you know it all, because you’re absolutely stuck in it. But you know the Noel Coward thing: he wanted everybody word perfect on the first day. Maybe that suited him. I don’t know. I haven’t done a Noel Coward play directed by Noel Coward — in fact, I haven’t done a Noel Coward play. But I would say, make sure you have enough rehearsal, and learn as you go. On directors I think the best gift a director has is what the actor brings to a part. But I think it is up to the director to control the part, and to understand it, and to be able to tell him where to go and where to withdraw. Sometimes an actor touches something, and doesn’t know he’s touched it, and he has to know that he has. I have taken a couple of parts where I haven’t quite seen where they ought to go, because I’ve liked the project, or the script, or the director or something, and I haven’t felt right about the part. I think you should know where you want to go with a part. You should have a fairly clear vision of it before you take it on. And of course, if you find yourself floundering, you’ve got to go to your director. But you can ask only some for help. Certainly not all. There are some directors you meet — Robert Markovitz (Nicholas’ Gift, 1997) is one of them — and you just feel a complete sympathy; he’s got an understanding of each separate actor, and each actor’s way of working. He can see when someone’s nervous or whether they’re confident; he’s brilliant with the children. Lindsay Anderson was a wonderful director with actors, because he liked them. I think a lot of directors don’t like actors. A lot of directors assume that because they’re the director, they’ve got to be the one that knows everything, whereas they haven’t. They’ve got to be the leader, yes, but they have to be open. I love a director who will actually pick up an idea from a cameraman or an actor and say, ‘Hey, I hadn’t thought of that, that’s wonderful’. That’s a director, not someone who ignores everyone else’s ideas. It’s very hard sometimes when there’s conflict, because I don’t think you can act unless you’ve shared it with your colleagues. Unless you look at them and listen to them, you’re not really doing a part; you’re not portraying life. There’s a famous quote from Michael Chekhov, who said ‘There are three kinds of actors. There’s the actor who acts for himself, there’s the actor who acts for the audience, and the actor who acts for the other actors. The actor who acts for the other actors is the only one who’s an actor.’ He said ‘The one who acts for the audience is at least doing it for someone, and the one who’s doing it for himself is not an actor.’ Sometimes you just have to stick it out. Sometimes you’re dealing with very, very fundamental things in people; it’s not a question of giving them notes or asking them if they mind doing it a different way, or rethinking it, it’s nothing to do with that. It’s so fundamental you can’t change it; they’re not there to be changed. Remarkable writers and outrageous characters When I was first sent The Caretaker, my agent didn’t want me to do it, and he said ‘I can’t understand a word of it, and you’ve been offered something on television’. He said ‘The choice is obvious; you can’t do a piece of nonsense at the Arts Theatre for six pounds a week.’ And I said to him ‘I couldn’t tell you what this play is about, but I know it’s wonderful.’ And I found out what it was about — well, what it was ‘about’. When Harold (Pinter) says it’s about three men, it is about three men in a room. But you don’t have to know cause and effect in order for that to be a remarkable piece of writing. You just understand three rather isolated people in life, and understand their need to belong, and to find some kind of purpose. I find them all very moving characters, those three. I understand them, I know who they are. Mick is a fantasist. He’s got a fantasy of the life he wants to lead, and a place in which he wants to do it. His brother is disturbed, he’s been given a lobotomy. Mick is instinctively, hugely protective of his lobotomised brother, which means loyalty, in this case. And because he’s a protector of his brother, if you like, he’s jealous of the Donald Pleasence character; he doesn’t like him. I understood all of that instinctively, I didn’t need to have anything more specific than that. You could go to town with Butley, he’s a complete extrovert, he’s wonderfully written. Marvellously witty, wonderfully funny and dreadful at the same time. I mean, it is a gift to be asked to play that character. Again, you have to remain truthful. You can be excessive, you can go too far with anything as long as you’re being truthful. But in that, you really can go with it, because he was performing within life, and those characters are fun to play. But then so are people like Guy Burgess (in An Englishman Abroad); he’s a real-life character who is also fun to play, because he’s larger than life; he’s excessive; he’s deliberately outrageous. They’re not dissimilar at all. Diaghilev is different, but then, it was not, I think, a wonderful film (Nijinsky), but it was very interesting and entertaining; I thought it was a very watchable film. I think it should have really been called Diaghilev, and been about Diaghilev, and Nijinsky should have been one of the wonderful moments in his life. Diaghilev’s great, you just read about him and you think ‘This is one of the great visionaries of the century’.

The value of research

I do research until I feel that there’s no room for me; until I feel that I’ve been almost locked out of it by other people’s opinions, say, about Diaghilev. In the end you’ve got to be him yourself, you’ve got to find him for you. There’s a point at which you really have to know when to cut off, when you know enough to play him truthfully, and bring yourself to it as well. I think I can probably read too much sometimes, because you can pick up opinions, and start playing someone else’s idea rather than giving your own interpretation.

I loved playing Marcel Proust (in 102 Boulevard Haussmann). I knew that I wasn’t anything like him, but I felt that I understood that moment in his life, and that particular script. You get the odd critic who starts a review saying ‘Now, Alan Bates as Marcel Proust simply will not do’, and you think ‘Oh, come on’. It’s somebody who things they know everything, and isn’t prepared to just let someone else feel the man out themselves. It’s a beautiful piece, isn’t it? I think the whole thing was quite gentle and subtle and particular.

Working on stage and in film

I’ve always said it’s the same. I mean, it’s a different dimension, different vocal range, different sense of projection, different way of projecting. But you’ve got to be truthful, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. I think film is wonderful in its ability to pick out slices of life, and when you go between the two — theatre and film — you do have to be very careful that you’re not bringing one into the other, that you’re not being too subtle for the theatre, or too big for the screen. My views about it are very simplistic, really.
What is great film acting? Well I just know some people who’ve done it. For example, I’ve seen ten films of Mastroianni, and I suddenly thought ‘I believe this man every time, every single time’, and that’s true of Mason, and I think Depardieu’s terrific. Great film acting is about simplicity, absolute truth, and trusting yourself. Basically, you’re asking me what fine acting is, and I don’t think it matters what medium it’s in. In film, it’s knowing where that camera is and then forgetting where it is. Monroe is said to have never known where it was; that was probably half her success. You hear stories like that, they’re appealing; whether they’re true or not.
I used to go to dailies, but then I found I became self-conscious. I started acting for the camera, and I don’t like to do that. As I say, I think you have to know exactly where the camera is, and then forget where it is. It’s kind of a sixth sense. But if you’ve seen a bad angle, or something that you thought was too little or too much — I think I’ve got to a point now where I trust either myself or the director to catch it. And you have to have an idea of how to play a reaction shot. Robert (Markovitz) was wonderful; within three days, he said ‘Oh, I love what you did when you rehearsed that. We’ll shoot it like that’. So I was rather pleased that he liked what I’d done. Then he said ‘Action’, and he came up to me, and we both said it together, at the same moment, ‘Too much’. Because he’d liked it, I went slightly too far with it. But that’s lovely, when you have that with a director, when you know and he knows.
I think I made a conscious decision not to do some of the things I was asked to n Hollywood. I didn’t want to be trapped there, I didn’t want to feel that I couldn’t get out, or that I wasn’t a free agent as an actor. I did work there once, for “The Rose,” and I worked in New York, and all my other American films have been made in Europe. But that was always working on location; I don’t care where it is, the great thing is to work on location.
I felt like I did in the very early days when I first left RADA, and Rank was still going. It was in the days when those contracts were just ending, thank god, but I knew that a seven year contract with anyone was a disaster. Because there’s no choice, and you have no control, and I never wanted that; I always wanted to be a free agent and to work in every medium, and to be as selective as I knew how. But I did make a conscious decision. I certainly could have stayed in Hollywood after “The Rose,” and earlier, and I didn’t.
I think fame — film fame — is sort of false fame. What do I mean by false fame? I mean phoney fame, hyped-up fame. I like recognition for what I do. I like to be well-paid when they can afford to pay me well, but I don’t really like fame as such. But if people stop you in the street, it means they have seen what you do, and you can’t be an actor without wanting an audience. It’s quite nice, unless you’re in a very bad mood.

Playing with Shakespeare

Just occasionally it really works when you jazz up Shakespeare, occasionally it really comes off. I think you’ve got to let people do all that; people have to be free. You’ve got to see new stuff, you’ve got to see experimental ideas, you’ve got to. Theatre would die without them. But I’m also very torn, I’m sort of schizophrenic about it. I fall back, and I think ‘I really want to see “Richard III,” I want to see it in his century, I want to see it played out then’, because I find that’s what’s exciting about it. I an apply it, you can apply it, it means something to us. I’m very torn about it. I enjoyed Ian McKellen’s “Richard III” when I saw it in the theatre, I thought it was pretty exciting.
But I don’t think it altogether negates an interpretation, because even if something wasn’t intended by a playwright — it may be there. People can get much too clever, and then it becomes just a personal agenda for some directors. You say ‘Well, this isn’t actually telling me anything, except what he thinks, or she thinks, and I really want to know what the author thinks. I don’t want you to interpret the author to a stage where you obliterate or distort that.’
I’m very torn when people do the life of Wordsworth or Tchaikovsky, or whoever it might happen to be, and you think, ‘No, tell the truth,’ because the truth of these people’s lives is what you’ve set out to do, and it’s usually a phenomenal story. Why change it? Why act it, why distort it, why put something in that wasn’t there? Let’s have that person, otherwise do another story. If you’ve got a better idea, do another on, do something else.

The current state of British Theatre

It seems to me either the writer’s a god or the designer’s a god, or the director’s a god. The actor often comes fourth in all this. I mean, a design can kill a production. A design that enhances a play, that highlights it, is wonderful, but one that is just there for its own sake, and does not inform you of something… what is the point of design for design’s sake? I was in a production recently where the designer designed these huge doors. A friend of mine came to it, and he said ‘You could hardly open them; they swung you into the room’. He said ‘They didn’t tell me anything, they didn’t inform me of anything; it’s a designer’s conceit. I don’t want that.’ I mean, I understand about theatricality. But when you have to time your lines in order to cope with the set, something is wrong. I’ve been in a production like that, where you had to time your lines to get across the set. You’re not doing the play, are you?
I think there is a huge drop in what people want to see. I wish I knew the actual reason. I mean, you can point to a hundred things. Is it education that’s dropped? Standards of education, standards of appreciation, or just the hype of the easy and the popular that has taken over. On the other hand, you know, plays are failing, audiences dropping, it’s harder and harder to have a play stay on for more than two months or three months. I can have a great night at one of these musicals, but by the time I get out to the street afterwards, I’ve forgotten what I’ve seen. It doesn’t stay with me at all, it doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t give you anything. You remember perhaps some pyrotechnical stage management, or perhaps a voice, or a song appeals to you whether it’s wonderful music or not; you can enjoy a song that isn’t necessarily a great piece of music. But I don’t think you can be too elitist about this.
The era of the musical is certainly here, at the moment. I loved “Les Miserables;’ I took my two sons to see it when they were about fourteen, and we had a wonderful afternoon. I think there are different contexts in which you can see things, and enjoy them. But you’re not seeing anything that really stays with you. What stays with you from that is that it’s a great story, great characters and great writing. That’s something that pushes through; it has a core. It makes you think. Perhaps people did have higher standards before. There’s an awful lot of what’s called dumbing down going o today, certainly in the cinema. You look at some of these things and you say ‘What is that doing for anybody? What’s it giving, really? Okay, this is sort of fun, but it’s not taking people on any sort of interesting journey.’ You watch it for a rest!

The job of acting

I think there is a whole side of acting … I mean, what’s so special? I think it’s an important job; I hope it is — because I do it — it brings a bit of fun, entertainment, illumination, whatever you happen to be doing, into people’s lives. You are there to entertain, and for people to have either a thoughtful or a good night out. It reflects the lives we lead, hopefully it ‘holds the mirror up to nature’. So therefore it’s got a significant purpose.

But at the same time, people do some incredible things in medicine, they do huge explorative things in space, nurses nursing the sick, teachers teaching the next generation, hopefully! We’re not better than that. I think you just have to keep a perspective on it, and not really believe the sort of hype that goes with, I think, the West End or Hollywood. You can’t be taken in by it. You just do your job well, you hope. I think everything else that might come with it, like superstardom, if you get it, or being an icon, or a legend … you can’t go for that. That happens — if it happens, and if it doesn’t then you’re a working performer, a working actor. It’s just trying to keep things in perspective, and the whole thing of not believing your own publicity. I mean, it’s the big mistake, isn’t it? The Americans do sell their top people, and an awful lot of money goes into selling them in that way. We don’t do that, we haven’t got a big enough machine to do it. The few English people that’s happened to — Sean Connery for example — have done it in American, he hasn’t done it here. I think it’s how much money is put into it. What do you have to do, what do you have to make? What happens to just spin into orbit? If you’re in it, you’re in it, and if you’re not, you’re not.
You may have heard Judi Dench say she’s a jobbing actor; you’ve also heard Marlon Brando say this isn’t a job for a grown-up man. Isn’t that a different way of saying the same thing? Actually it is a little different, because I think he’s belittling it; here’s an extraordinary, unique, great actor saying ‘What am I doing?’ But I think it’s healthy to question what you do, and to say ‘Well, it’s just a job I do, and I’m lucky to be doing it’. Although I must say, I think English actors are not beyond being knocked out by themselves.
Something in me says it’s a little bit more than just a job. It’s a job, but it’s a very visible job, performance. It’s a job that needs an audience, which sets it a bit apart. Most jobs don’t need an audience. So I think performing is a bit different, and sport is the same. If you’re George Best, if you’re Vanessa May, or John Curry, or Pavarotti, there’s only one of you, you know? And it’s public, and for an audience — that sets it apart.

Identifying with a part: emotional effect

I don’t know whether the parts I’ve played have affected who I am or how I live, but I know when I did “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” I had a huge identification with that, identification, sympathy, empathy, whatever is appropriate. Someone who made a hideous mistake in his life, couldn’t recover from it, went through parental love, love of wife, rejection of wife, love of someone else, obsession with a protege, ambition. It’s the human condition, it’s a fantastic story of how we can’t fulfill the ideals we set up, or be this wonderful thing we want to be, or some ideas that youth gives you, and I thought ‘This is really wonderful’. How he ends up at the end of his life saying ‘I don’t want anyone to know I was ever here. Just bury me and don’t mark the grave’. I found that whole beginning and coming to that end, so moving. Because we all fail, somewhere, none of us are heroes, really. And I think that really said it. |||

© Carole Zucker, 1999

From:  In Company of Actors: Reflections on The Craft of Acting
(London: A & C Black/Bloomsbury, New York: Routledge, 2000.)

I met “Dame Eileen” who was then not yet a dame, at her riverside home in Chiswick in west London, which she purchased for a song when London prices were affordable. Knowing people as well as she does, she gave me the grand tour of the warren of quirky rooms that compose her house, without my asking. She has appeared in more stage productions, films, and television series than I could possibly list, including her writing for and acting in the original Upstairs/Downstairs series, and many people now know her from Cranford with another Dame – Judi Dench. Eileen was what I think most people would call eccentric – in a good way. She was still slender in a black Chinese jacket,and had her trademark grey-blonde bob, no make-up, no vanity. Eileen spoke almost non-stop for close to four hours, and she was a great storyteller. She didn’t pull her punches in talking about herself or her fellow actors. No coyness, no pretensions, no nonsense. She talked about taking sleeping pills for 35 years because of her huge imagination, about why she would never contemplate sharing a room with her husband, (“Why would I want to do that?,”)about money and her hard early life in Tottenham. Eileen talked openly about her battle with breast cancer several years earlier and the grimness of treatment. She had about 15 cats (I couldn’t really keep track) with whom she runs her lines while she is learning a part for a play. They leapt about the house, in and out of open windows, onto Eileen’s lap and off. “Not now, Groucho,” or “Enough, Maisie,” she would say as the cats jumped from place to place, or milled around her legs, mewing, or scratching at the window before tumbling out. I was impressed that Eileen could keep the talk going as she chatted on, tossing the cats on and off, making tea, and most generously, not answering the telephone. I had just seen her in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, which most preoccupied her. How incredible to see a cast of seasoned professionals at work on a difficult, almost impenetrable piece about what? The immanence of darkness, madness, fear, death, the apocalypse? Very few actors, including Eileen, want to intellectualize their work; it takes them out of the moment-to-moment interaction that is so critical to an actors’ performance. I will always remember Eileen’s generosity in giving me so much of her time, and being really there with me, when she had a performance to do that evening. An illuminating, fun afternoon with one of Britain’s finest actors.

Miranda greeted me at her rented flat in Edinburgh where she was performing at the Festival in Orlando adapted and directed by Robert Wilson. Miranda had gotten superlative reviews, the production had not. Miranda was following in the footsteps of the German production with Ute Lemper and the French production with Isabelle Huppert. Wilson has collaborated with luminaries such as: Lou Reed; Tom Waits, and Phillip Glass, amongst many others. So, it wasn’t surprising that he chose to work with Miranda, of whom (for her performance in Orlando) one critic wrote: “She is the best actress working in any medium in our country.” An apt testimony to Miranda’s celebrated work in film, on stage, and for television, and her long list of BAFTA, Academy Award, and Olivier nominations and awards.
The first thing that struck me about Miranda is how tiny she is, and then, how much younger, more delicate, and prettier she is in person than on screen. Some people look very plain when you meet them and miraculously engage with the camera in a way that transforms them, while others are not flattered by the camera, and I think Miranda is one of those people.
Miranda seemed fragile and tired.She was a bit withdrawn (as well as drawn)and did not seem to want to talk perhaps because of the exhaustion of her long solo performances where she was onstage for hours.
Miranda is an intensely private person and it was difficult to get her to speak, or to get any personal information about her – everything seemed off limits that was not part of her professional brief. That’s a choice, but it makes an interview subject more difficult to connect with on a human level. She clearly wanted to keep a distance, which made her somewhat remote and not easy to speak with. It is not for nothing that Miranda is known in the British press as “Ms. Sourpuss,” because of her unwillingness to speak with the press, and her general refusal to do publicity for her films, or attend social functions with her peers.
I don’t have any quarrels with Miranda’s stance regarding publicity. There is a high degree of hustlerism in the film world, and actors have no obligation to do anything more than their job – which is acting. Some actors, like Gene Hackman, have resolutely refused to play the publicity game, and more power to them.They have the right to set boundaries if they feel their work on a project is finished. After a while, I came to believe that the act of interviewing was something of an intrusion on an actors’ right to privacy, although I don’t regret having spent years doing these interviews – I do find they help young actors to hear how actors think and feel about what they do.
Miranda was forthcoming about performing. But she almost seemed irritated at times when I asked her about characterizations, and a little disinterested in the interview. Not great for the process, but those are things you just deal with. She was very feline, crouched down with her arms wrapped around her legs. I respect Miranda as an actor particularly for the varied work, her risk-taking (think of David Cronenberg’s Spider where she plays 3 different roles, and her obvious commitment to the profession.
At the precise moment I turned off the tape recorder, as if by magic, Miranda suddenly became quite animated, as if a cork had opened on a bottle of champagne. This was something I had experienced before with other actors who are very guarded and wary of the interview process, and suddenly, once the apparatus is switched off they enter a completely different zone of engagement. While she had maintained her distance during the interview, now Miranda asked if I wanted to have a cup of tea and a good chat! Why not when the interview was happening? Suddenly, it felt like we were two women having an afternoon together, but by then it was too late. The tape recorder was off and I had a flight back to London, so I declined, although it would have been interesting to speak with her in an unguarded way.
I always enjoy Miranda as an actor, and have watched her take on quirky roles as she has become more of a character actor, which I think was always her destiny. Too unconventional to be a leading lady, and certainly too independent to be groomed for stardom on an international level. Miranda turned down the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction, and chose to work in the very unglamorous role of Mrs. Victor, Christian Bale’s surrogate mother, who succumbs to the deprivations of a Chinese prison camp in Empire of the Sun, directed by Steven Spielberg. She has worked with the people she wanted to, and done the jobs that intrigued her. Miranda has remained true to herself and refused to be commodified or hemmed in, and has had the sort of interesting career that comes with that kind of spirited individuality and self-determination, and pure talent.

I met with Alan Bates after a lot of hemming and hawing on his part – he was a most reluctant interviewee who vacillated continuously about meeting with me, something I later learned he was famous for. It was “yes,” “sorry,” “maybe” for about a year. We finally met up in Rome, where he was filming a television movie, and I just happened to be on vacation. Alan and I had a late dinner in the restaurant at the hotel in which he was staying. I have to admit at the outset that I had a tremendous crush on Alan from the time I was a young teenager, after seeing him onstage in New York. So I was that much more nervous about meeting someone I really idolized for a long time (and the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love, only added to my infatuation.) He was as charming as I had imagined he would be, as he tucked into his fish dinner. I never eat when I am interviewing someone over a meal – it’s too much to focus on at the same time. Alan was often evasive, but he was always deeply thoughtful about his responses rather than giving rote answers, which is the problem with someone who does a lot of interviews. I found Alan to be entirely grateful for the career he had, that it had lasted for so long, and gone through so many changes, and he’d been granted such a variety of roles to play. Alan also showed tremendous interest in me, which was surprising – most actors want to talk about themselves, and that really is the whole point – not to talk about me. But I had to keep reminding Alan that I was interviewing him, and not the other way around. He had a great curiosity about people and that kind of power of observation is part of what makes a great actor. The sense of connection was something Alan valued enormously, as an actor and as a person.
I had just seen Alan in a Simon Gray play Life Support; it was one of many of Gray’s plays that Alan had worked in, the most acclaimed,probably being Butley, the role of a lifetime. Life Support was essentially a one man show, in which he plays a husband at the bedside of his comatose wife; he tries to rouse her to consciousness. Alan’s wife, Victoria, had died several years prior to the production of the play, under tragic circumstances that Alan chose to share with only a close circle of friends. He and his wife had a tormented relationship, and Alan eventually was given sole custody of their 2 boys, because his wife was not able to care for them. His son Tristan had also died a few years earlier from an asthma attack after he mislaid his inhaler. Alan was, as a friend of his put it, coming out of a “cocoon of sadness.” I felt uneasy asking Alan about how it felt to relive this death every night for months on end. I knew that he was private person, and I felt that plumbing this subject would be going too far. I was grateful that I did not bring up the subject, but focused exclusively on Alan’s feelings about and preparation for acting. As is clear from the interview, he was a person who did not like absolutes and dead-on clarity -he wanted to remain open to any impulses that hit him during the rehearsal period.
Alan liked to play cat and mouse and to take a counter position just for fun, which made the interview process more tricky for me, but challenging and entertaining.Sometimes, one feels that people are making comments to irritate you, but with Alan, it seemed like his normal modus operandi. Alan was by turns amusing, teasing, testing, but always generous and sensitive – a gentle, completely loveable man. I was genuinely distressed when he died only a few years later of cancer at the age of 69. His illness was another secret that he kept from everyone but his closest friends. I was happy that he got to play another great role, as the main butler in Gosford Park, before his untimely death. An immense loss of a formidable talent.