Interview with Joss Ackland
by Andrew
Gulli
(excerpts)
A
few years ago I saw
Joss Ackland on an interview program on the BBC.
What impressed me most about him was
how
outspoken and straightforward he was. When
I spoke to him last year shortly after his wife of
51 years, Rosemary,
had passed away, he had
lost none of his candidness. Despite his recent
loss, he was as charismatic and as affable as
ever. His own personal character mirrors his
versatility as an actor—reflective yet gregarious,
a stern critic of society’s fads yet a
good-humored observer of the world.
Mr.
Ackland was born in 1928 and graduated from
London’s Central School of Speech and Drama in
1945. That same year, at the age of seventeen, he
made his professional stage debut in The Hasty
Heart. His first screen role was a small
uncredited part in the 1949 film Seven Days to
Noon. In 1951 he met his future wife
Rosemary Kircaldy at the Pitlochry Festival where
they were playing the two leads in J.M. Barrie’s
Mary Rose. A few years later they moved to
Central Africa, and shortly thereafter to South
Africa, where they lived for two years. After
returning to England in 1957, Mr. Ackland joined
the Old Vic and later, from 1962 to 1964, was
Associate Director of the Mermaid
Theatre.
Although
he is known to American film viewers primarily for
playing dark and unpredictable villains such as
the murderous Sir Jock Delves Broughton in
White Mischief (1987) and the dangerous
Arjen Rudd in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), he
has had a varied and prolific career encompassing
the stage, screen, and television. His recent
stage credits include Falstaff in Henry IV
Parts 1 & 2, Captain Shotover in
Heartbreak House, Weller Martin in The
Gin Game, Captain Hook in Peter Pan,
and Juan Peron in Evita.
His
poignant portrayal of C.S Lewis opposite Claire
Bloom in Shadowlands (1985) helped the film
win the BAFTA Television Award for Best Single
Drama. He was equally unforgettable co-starring
opposite Glenda Jackson and Denholm Elliot in John
Le Carre’s mystery A Murder of Quality
(1991). In 1989 he was nominated for a BAFTA Film
Award as Best Supporting Actor for his role in
White Mischief (a film that is a searing
indictment of England’s imperial settlers) and a
year later, in 1990, he was nominated for a BAFTA
Television Award as Best Actor for his starring
role in First and Last (1989). In 1987 he
starred as Mafia Godfather Don Masino Croce in
Michael Cimino’s crime drama The Sicilian.
In 2001 he was awarded the CBE for his services to
acting.
This fall
he can be seen playing Thomas Quarre, the
mastermind behind a bank heist, in the noir film
No Good Deed—based on the Dashiell Hammett
short story, "The House on Turk Street"—a film he
calls "a great mix of comedy, drama, terror, and
tragedy."
AFG: First of all, I’d like to say I’m very
sorry about what happened to your
wife.
JA: Ah,
thank you. Yes, it was very tough.
AFG: I
know how that is. It’s a tough
thing.
JA: It
is. We’d been married for fifty-one years, you
know, and we were inseparable.
AFG: I
know that. That’s why when I watched you acting
Colonel Peregrine in Tales of the
Unexpected I thought, he’s acting like the
kind of person he’s totally the opposite
of.
JA: [He
laughs.] Yes, I remember that now. Somerset
Maugham, wasn’t it?
AFG:
Yes, a Maugham story. So what do you enjoy working
on more, the stage or the screen?
JA:
Well, I think really I came into the business
because I was mad about movies. It just took me an
immensely long time to get into them. I’m contrary
to most people. Most actors prefer to work on the
stage. I enjoy rehearsing, I enjoy the theatre,
but I do have a very low threshold of boredom. So
after awhile doing the same thing every night for
probably up to a year can be murder. But really I
enjoy doing most the thing I’m not doing at the
time! The plays I’ve enjoyed doing . . . I mean, I
loved doing Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 &
2—when we opened the Barbican—which Trevor
Nunn directed, and I enjoyed playing Galileo [by
Bertolt Brecht], but I must confess that I really
like to be on stage all the time or I do get
bored! And I enjoyed the last thing I did which
was playing Captain Shotover in Heartbreak
House which I did at Chichester. Heartbreak
House particularly is my favourite. I loved
that. I’ve done quite a bit of Shaw.
AFG:
What are the projects that you have coming up in
the future?
JA:
Well, I’ve done three yet to come out. One’s just
come out which was K19 The Widowmaker.
I haven’t it see yet. It’s interesting but a
very dark project. We shot that in Moscow and then
Montreal and also in Nova Scotia, in Halifax, and
it was great. This was last year and my wife was
able to come with me and they were very good. They
helped and she was able to move around then in a
wheelchair. And then later on I did another movie
in Montreal which Bob Rafelson directed called
No Good Deed, which is based on the short
story called "The House on Turk Street" by
Dashiell Hammett. There were only about seven of
us in it with Samuel L. Jackson and it was a nice
little subject.
AFG: And
what are you playing in it?
JA: I
was playing an eccentric character who captures
Samuel L. Jackson and then holds him hostage. My
name is Mr. Quarre, a weirdy.
AFG: It
sounds very interesting, especially as it is by
Dashiell Hammett. You’ve been a critic of some of
contemporary films and, to be honest, I agree with
you. Who do you blame for it? The studio people,
the writers, the or moviegoers themselves who will
pay £8 to see two hours of garbage?
JA: It’s
a great shame, you know, because it wasn’t like
this in the old days—well, I don’t believe
it was, because it was before my time. At the time
when studios were in charge of the actors rather
than actors in charge of the studios, you had
monsters like Harry Cohen, Sam Goldwyn, Jack L.
Warner, and I mean, they were real monsters, but
they had one thing in common. They all loved
movies. And now we just have chartered accountants
in charge who have no interest in movies at all.
They’re just interested in making money. They are
always having to aim at the audience to make
money, they aim for the Midwest or they aim for
the Orient or they aim for most kids. They give
them all these car chases, the villain dying
twice, and they play down to the audience. But I
believe you should never give people what they
want. Give them something a little more than what
they want and that way they grow up. But, sadly,
it’s down and down and I do think this is terribly
sad. So really, most of the interesting movies are
independent movies.
AFG:
That’s true someone like David Mamet does very
good work.
JA:
Exactly. But the thing is, if you think of a cast
like Casablanca—where, the whole cast is
what made that movie—it was fascinating and
everybody was interesting right through—Claude
Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter
Lorre, Victor Franck. You can go right through the
lot and everybody was played by somebody with
personality. Nowadays, sadly, when the actors are
in charge and when so much money goes to two
leads, I mean, it’s much easier to make a movie
for $50 million than it is for $10 million because
you can guarantee two people at the top at the
time. They will get their $7 million, $10 million,
$50 million, whatever it is, and you have
guaranteed an audience, but the result is then you
don’t get the rest of the interesting
cast.
AFG:
When you brought up this point you made me curious
about something, Twenty years ago you would see a
film like Murder on the Orient Express
which had an all-star cast. Why haven’t they been
able to bring together an all-star cast like that
for another film?
JA:
Because you couldn’t get twenty people getting $10
million each!
AFG:
That’s true. But I really don’t think Sean
Connery, for example, asked for a lot of money to
be in Murder on the Orient
Express.
JA: No,
no, no. It’s really not so much the fault of the
actors but the fault of the agents. The agents
have far too much power and they are aware of the
drawing power of their particular client and they
will use it accordingly. There should be a
restriction I think. There should be a limit. I
mean who the hell wants to have $25 million?
Alright, give it to them! But then put $20 million
back in the movie as well.
AFG: I
know. And you have a writer who is probably paid
almost nothing, who unfortunately, very often
nowadays, can’t even write!
JA:
That’s it, yes. I mean, sadly, writers have always
had a raw deal with movies, even before the War
when you had people like F. Scott Fitzgerald
writing for movies.
AFG: I
know. Like William Faulkner.
JA: They
were stuck in a small back room with a telephone
and not allowed to come out but, by God, you got
some good stuff. You got stuff with intelligence
and morals. In the days of Preston Sturges, Frank
Capra, there would be a moral behind the movie.
And it made a better world.
AFG:
It’s become very in vogue to be
unethical.
JA: Yes.
Romance is out. It’s considered almost a dirty
word. I think—and this is nothing to do with being
ancient; it is simply the fact that I can really
go through the decades now—I just happen to think
that in twenty years time people with look back on
this particular decade and think, were they all
crazy? But I like movies like The Big
Night, a wonderful little movie about a
restaurant. But again, it was an independent.
Usually the movies I vote for at the Oscars are
all like this. But of course, sadly, my
compatriots obviously don’t agree.
AFG:
There are some great independent films out there,
but they only put them on in one theatre where I
live.
JA: Oh, really. Well, there you
are. That’s what I’m saying. Now I live in north
Devon, which is a million miles away from
anywhere, but I’ve got a sort of huge screen here
and I wait for all the Oscar movies to be sent in
and then I have a field day at the end of the
year. [He laughs.]
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