Joss Ackland
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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-str 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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