‘Champagne for my real friends! Real pain to my sham friends!’ This was Francis Bacon’s great toast, his champagne toast, that he always gave to the company as they raised their glasses.
It was John Maybury’s title, Love is the Devil – he wrote it and directed it – that brought me to play the artist. What the title actually meant is summed up by what Francis Bacon the painter was: a physical masochist, a spiritual sadist. He liked to receive pain physically, but he liked to give it mentally, inflict mental sadism on others. Life he would refer to as ‘a spasm of consciousness between two voids’ – not a happy bunny by any means. We couldn’t have been greater opposites.
I knew the paintings. I wasn’t particularly enamoured of them, but I had to get to know them better to play him. We weren’t allowed to use any of them, for the Marlborough Fine Art gallery, representing the Bacon Estate, wouldn’t allow them to be shown on film. John reacted to that by making every frame, in the way he shot it, in the way he lit it particularly, like a Bacon painting. So actually he benefited by their saying ‘You can’t use them.’
Francis was never to be seen painting, for John said, ‘In every biopic of a great artist the moment you start seeing the actor painting you lose belief.’ If you see I have a paint brush in my hand, then the canvas isn’t in the same shot. The only time the two are together, when you see me put paint on a canvas, is when I place a dustbin lid on the canvas and with a brush circle round the lid.
We filmed it fairly quickly, over several weeks, and some was shot in the Colony Club, then recreated in the studios, and elsewhere we filmed in the streets of London. All the extras were Francis’s friends, the real thing, which was very daunting for me. Coming on the set at ten o’clock one morning, with Tilda Swinton playing Muriel Belcher, the foul-mouthed manageress who would sit in a corner and call everyone ‘Cunty’ – she used to shout ‘Hello Cunty!’ – there was one lady, one flame-haired lady who threw herself on me, saying, ‘Oh Francis, Francis!’
She was pissed out of her mind but she really did think I was Francis, which helped enormously. Dan Farson was another one close to Francis, who had written a book called The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, and who had a pub on the Isle of Dogs: he was very encouraging, too. I relished playing Bacon – having the cigarettes stubbed out on me was wonderful!
Bacon wasn’t the handsomest of men ever, and although I don’t consider myself that either, the speed with which they made me look like him in the make-up chair in all of ten minutes rather frightened me. I think it had to do mainly with the eyes. I have always had bags under my eyes, and I think mainly they emphasised these, and of course they dyed my hair. I looked like Francis Bacon pretty much within minutes, which depressed me.
Love is the Devil does very well in DVD sales: this is because George, my boyfriend, is played by Daniel Craig. There are several scenes where Daniel is bollock-naked, so all the girls want to see what 007 has got to show!
I have done many more TV or film roles than I describe at any length, or even at all – for instance Lord Fawn in The Pallisers, and Klaus Wenzer in The Odessa File with Jon Voigt, who disappointed me greatly when he dried on a line, blaming me, saying, ‘Oh, Derek gave me the letter with the wrong hand,’ a typical actor trick.
The highly unsympathetic (I am being polite) Otto Preminger miscast me as the spy Davis in The Human Factor, with Robert Morley. Robert loved his gambling to the point of compulsion. We had a three-hour wait in the middle of one night when filming, so he took me to his club, the Scaramouche, placed £200 cash in my hand and said, ‘This is for you, it’s a present; if you win anything you can keep it.’
I won and did keep it. We didn’t get paid for this film because the production money ran out, and Otto wouldn’t dip into his huge personal fortune to pay his artists: only John Gielgud received his fee in cash, on the very day it was due. But I benefited from Robert’s generosity and kept my winnings.
Otto was a monster, disgraceful, dictatorial, and vile with the crew. With Robert, who played the doctor who poisoned my character, he was little better. Robert had to handle a doctor’s bag and find things in it. He wasn’t good with props, for he would drop them or get tangled and panic, so he said to Otto: ‘Don’t shout at me or I shall get fussed, darling.’
Otto instantly screamed out: ‘Don’t call me darling!’ whereupon Robert completely went to pieces. Nicol Williamson, who was also in the film, used to come up behind us unseen and boom out in Otto’s voice to frighten the hell out of us. The Human Factor was great preparation for when I came to play Guy Burgess in Philby, Burgess, Maclean, a part I adored.
My first opportunity to go to the States had been during the National Theatre years, when we were playing the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles with Three Sisters, and I was Baron Tuzenbach. Maggie Smith had been nominated for her Oscar for The Prime of Miss Joan Brodie, which she later won, and the English company was invited to a reception at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was a sit-down affair after the performance, with four to a table, and my partner was Louise Purnell. An old man came over and sat down at our table, and we had no idea who he was until he introduced himself as George Cukor.
Every star of that era you could think of was in the Pavilion and seated for dinner – I’d be telling Mum and Dad all about it – but we still had not got our lady. At last at the door appeared this glamorous creature with mounds of Titian hair. She had long drop emerald earrings, a long coat-like dress, and it was like the Queen arriving. She sailed in straight to her table – our table. It was Greer Garson, and what an extraordinary and stunning entrance she made! The excitement I had as a child in the presence of a great star was as vivid as ever.
The company had slept in an apartment hotel in the Wilshire Boulevard. I shared with Charlie Kay. Just off the plane with jet lag, Charlie and I couldn’t sleep and both of us went for a walk across the local park, which we didn’t know was the notorious MacArthur Park. When we reached the other side we were taken for drug dealers and pulled over by a police car, for we hadn’t realised this was a seriously dangerous neck of the woods.
‘Terribly sorry, officer, we’re British actors belonging to the English National Theatre!’ – spoken in our plummiest accents.
Moved on, Charlie and I wandered into the Alvarado Street red-light district where every other building was a porno cinema. I’d never been to one, but Charlie was keen: he said, ‘Come on, we have to go and have this experience!’
It was called These Boots Were Made for Licking. A few minutes into the viewing and we were falling about in hysterics – they booted us out!
As for my real-life walks on the dark side, there have been few.
I have always had a problem with hateful and evil characters. Sir Laurence rehearsed in early 1967, while still acting Othello, the part of Edgar, the Captain in Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. This is the extraordinary account the Swede gives of love and hate in a marriage, a part which, as Larry said, was nine-tenths hate. I could never have played it, and never did, yet for Olivier it was a supreme role. He identified with Edgar, saying, ‘There’s hardly a thing I haven’t been guilty of saying or feeling towards some or other marriage partner ... the power to wound became the obsession.’
He gave more than 100 performances, and watching Sir made me, as it did many of my friends, speechless with admiration. Yet there was a moment of great tenderness in this performance. This is when Sir picks up and cuddles a cat, and he is so tender it was extraordinary. It reaffirmed my belief that what made Sir a great actor was the choices he made: to pick up and cuddle a cat at that moment was an extraordinary choice.
I was never capable of hatred, or feel I identify personally with it – and hardly ever see my own life in the characters I play on stage (one exception was A Voyage Around My Father). In my own estimation, at least, I have very gentle eyes (and so I have been told) which makes it difficult to convey malevolence. The aggression does not come naturally in the way the vulnerability does.
In Dead Again, made in Hollywood, which Ken Branagh directed with me and Emma Thompson in the leads, I played the murderous hypnotist Madson. My work before with Ken had been entirely classical. When still a schoolboy many years before, he had come to see my Hamlet when we opened at Oxford. He brought his girlfriend whom he wanted to impress and it wasn’t, he said, the most obvious evening’s entertainment for a young suburban couple. He was obviously bowled over by the tremendous pace and excitement of the production, and my acting excited his ambition, so he wrote me a lovely note about his enthusiasm, and how he wanted to be an actor.
A couple of years later, when he was studying at RADA, he contacted me when I was still doing Hamlet and asked if he could come and interview me for the Royal Academy magazine. He was very personable and ambitious, and immediately quite at home talking to me, and he told me how much he hungered to play Hamlet in the future. I didn’t much remember him except his name, but was really surprised when only about eighteen months later I saw that he’d made a hit with Rupert Everett in Another Country, and become a star almost overnight.
Then, when I was doing the four plays for the RSC, Ken was by now in the other half of the company, and we got together and talked again about Hamlet, which now he wanted me to direct. He struck out on his own, forming, at the astonishingly young age of twenty-six, his own Renaissance Theatre Company, and adopted the role I loved and applauded, that of the old actor-manager – as such a tonic and an inspiration in a theatre world dominated by Oxbridge directors. Here was someone at last with the breadth and energy and the multitasking skills of Sir Laurence who could carry these values into a new epoch, so I fell in, although with misgivings, with his ambition to have me direct him as Hamlet.
Remember, this was the first time I ever directed, and although I held nothing back and put at his disposal all my experience, and helped him achieve a truly remarkable and acclaimed performance, it was not something I found, on reflection afterwards, I ever wanted to do again. I was tremendously happy to offer him all the advice I could, about pacing in the long scenes and speeches, when to rest, how to shape the overall structure of the part. Although Ken kept reassuring me in my hesitancy in telling him what to do, with comments such as ‘You are taking to directing as a duck to water,’ I knew at heart it wasn’t me. Gladly and lovingly I could give to Ken all the tricks and expertise, the instincts the years had built up in me and endowed me with, but I knew this was a one-off: I really needed to keep them in future all for me.
Thankfully this was by no means the end of Ken and me working together, for I played the Chorus in his magnificent film, with his stupendous blood-curdling performance of Henry V, and I then played Claudius in his film of Hamlet. In the former I did have, as Ken joked, scrambled Shakespeare whirring through my brain, because I was just about to open as Richard II, and was rehearsing Richard III. But what greater and more stirring depictions of scene and atmosphere are there than those five Chorus speeches?
Then, having directed Ken as Hamlet, I was thrilled to play Claudius, for me the perfect villain because he smiles and smiles, and behaves in such a courtly and plausible way. I loved him. So with Ken I have been truly in my element.
Now he’d brought me to Hollywood to play Franklin Madson, whose surname conveys exactly what he was. Donald Sutherland had been originally hired to play Madson, but Sutherland and Ken didn’t hit it off. English-born, by profession an antique dealer, Madson was to provide the encounter with Hollywood which enrolled me in the list of notable villains. Branagh made the most of my looks. ‘OK, we’ll take what we’ve got and we’ll use that’ was his attitude.
Acting on screen is particularly to do with thinking. And the eyes, being the windows of the soul, are where the thoughts come through. This film was shot mostly in black and white, which can give the actor a sculpture he does not normally possess.
Sweeping through the gates of Paramount on my first day for Dead Again in a stretch limo seemed to have fulfilled a fantasy of mine. But Ken, Emma and I were far from the usual run of stars. During shooting, things went badly wrong in Ken’s caravan: there was no hot water. Ken arrived back after filming, and there was no hot water running in the tap. He let it be known and they immediately went into panic mode, but Ken said, ‘Don’t worry – I’ll move into Emma’s caravan.’ Your usual Hollywood star would have thrown 10,000 tempers.
One detail provided something for me that had become recognisable from I, Claudius: Madson suddenly develops again the stammer which hypnosis had cured when he was a boy. I told Ken it would look like a professional in-joke, and asked him to cut it. But Ken insisted on keeping it. He pointed out that it was there in the script, long before I was cast for the part, but he also said, ‘You’ve got to stammer on one line, it is an in-joke.’ More seriously the Association for Stammerers took exception to the film’s implication that the disability can be cured by hypnosis. I thought it was quite right to protest, saying, ‘It might give a lot of people false hope,’ and I endorsed a round-robin letter for the British press.
Research for the part consisted largely of bringing a personal experience to bear: the visit I made to a hypnotist in 1979 to stop smoking. The hypnotist had a soporific, melodic, sleeping-pill sort of voice, very relaxing and comforting. That is what I recreated in the film. But I wasn’t so amused when the time came for the big fight at the end when Madson dies. We had two stuntmen for this, but when they put on our hairpieces – the blond one for me and a red one for Ken – they looked ridiculous: two wigs fighting. So it was decreed that Ken and I ‘should fight to the death’ ourselves.
First Ken throws me across the room and he bashes my head into that glass cabinet which shatters, so I almost knocked myself out, even though the glass was fortunately made of icing sugar. Then for the plunge onto the giant scissors, which was my coup de grâce, I had to run along and fall from an upper gallery to the room below – this was about 10 feet high – dive and land face downwards on mattresses and padding. Throughout the day of filming one of the stuntmen taught me by stages how to do it: to start from kneeling to throw myself forward, then from standing throw myself, then to dive from the height. Finally I did it for real and we filmed it. What a relief it was over!
Ebullient Ken, rot his soul, insisted I do it a second time. ‘I really need a shot from below. We want to see the expression on your face all the way down, Derek.’ So his fifty-three-year-old co-star had to do it again. I did it for Ken.
‘Fine. Just one more time, Derek, just one!’ My wrists and arms by now were coming off, but I did it, I did it, but I was in more than a bit of a mess! This was love of one’s fellow actor, it really was!
‘That’s nice,’ I thought when one critic said Madson alone was worth the price of an admission ticket. ‘It’s a success.’ It became a top grossing film in the United States, but I haven’t heard from Mr Spielberg yet.
Being in Hollywood was another world. My natural habitat was the theatre, and the framework of big acting companies. Ken and Emma had a house in the Hollywood Hills with an egg-shaped pool and a view over the city; I would go over for Sunday lunch. The Americans didn’t know what to make of the British actors. Here was a star actor-director and an actress with no ego, no temperament, and who behaved in a completely ordinary way. They were gobsmacked.
Another evil man was the collaborator and murderer Breton in The Tenth Man, the World War Two Graham Greene story. I was in Los Angeles when I heard I had been nominated for an Emmy for Breton. I said, ‘It’s not my scene, I hate it, I’m going back to London.’ When I arrived at LA airport and was in the bar having a little drink to steady my nerves before boarding the plane I saw on the screen at the back of the bar all the Hollywood glitterati walking along the red carpet for the Emmy Awards. I was so grateful I was not a part of it. I flew home to arrive at the airport, and here Richard met me. Richard said at once, ‘You won! You won!’
I thought it was classy not to have gone to the awards.
I was one of the three finalists for the casting of Hannibal Lecter for The Silence of the Lambs: the others were Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Hopkins. The director was Jonathan Demme, who was very sweet and gave me five minutes of his time, but I cannot have sat on my Mr Nice enough, and I knew at once this was never going to happen. They were determined to have a Brit for their villain, though, and I’m not sure what this says about us.
Goodness knows how it would have turned out if I had played the part, but I would have been malevolent in a very different way. Tony Hopkins has harder eyes than I have. He was wonderful, but the only thing about it which remains really puzzling for me is this: Lecter bites people to death, he tears out their hearts and he eats them, and there’s one scene when he’s transported from one place to another, and he has this extraordinary muzzle and mask on to stop him snarling, biting and tearing flesh.
So one thinks – or rather I do – why didn’t they give him an injection and take his teeth out? He couldn’t gum people to death!