Richard E Grant (London Sunday Times Magazine, December 8, 2019)

Richard E Grant on the cover of The London Sunday Times
I met Richard E Grant earlier this year at the Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles, peak Awards season. He was on “the ride of his life.” Nominated in every possible award ceremony for his performance as the rakish Jack in Can You Ever Forgive Me? opposite Melissa McCarthy’s literary forger Lee Israel. A crookster, with impeccable charm based on a real-life character who died of AIDS in the 90s, it was a standout performance, but what stood out more was the way he rode those awards.  A veteran of over a hundred movies. He made his 61st year a spellbinding second act. He reinvented. This was his most talked about role since he debuted as the debauched Withnail in Withnail and I in 1987. And it’s not like he didn’t have a career. He’s worked constantly in wonderful movies like LA Stories, Gosford Park and who can forget his hair as Michael Heseltine opposite Meryl Streep’s The Iron Lady. Jack put him on the map he’d always been on, but not everyone had noticed. 
     I’ve known Richard E for years. I’m always enthralled by his diaries which are luxuriantly observed and sparkle with sharp, diamond wit. He deals with the minutiae of life like no other. I also loved his autobiographical film about his unusual childhood in Swaziland, Wah Wah (2005).
     More importantly he was the only human who could touch my then cat Shiksa without blood being drawn. We bonded over our mutual obsession with Barbra Streisand.  To put it in perspective, he would ask me if he could listen to old interview tapes and this year, she got in touch with him via a Tweet that he posted around the time of his Oscar nomination. He tweeted a picture of a letter that he wrote her as a 14-year-old fan. ‘And look at you now’, she replied as if he were 21, not 61 but nonetheless, it made more than his day and he has since been invited into her inner circle.
     Has his life changed since the nominations? He’s working a lot, but he’s always worked a lot. He’s in the new Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker but he’d already filmed that.  Now he gets the precious ‘Oscar nominated’ before his name which is a very elite and fancy club to be a member of, but for him the Oscars meant meeting Streisand at the Governors Ball which he attended with his daughter Olivia.
     “She grabbed Melissa McCarthy’s arm at the Governor’s Ball and said ‘That woman in the sparkly black beret is Barbra Streisand. And you know what this is going to mean to my father if he sees her.’ So, Melissa grabbed me and said, ‘You’re coming with me,’ and that was the first time that I had seen her since the Tweet.” And now he gets invited to be in the celebrity section when she played Hyde Park, where the other 65,000 who’d paid hundreds for a ticket, scrambled on the grass.
     “She sent me tickets to see her in Hyde Park and then she asked me if I was going to be in New York for Madison Square Gardens, so I said yes. I was filming in Philadelphia when I got an invitation to see a private screening at Donna Karan’s house in East Hampton where Barbra was the guest of honour. I thought how do I get to the Hamptons from Philadelphia? A bus? A train? A helicopter? I ended up in Ron Perlman’s helicopter and I was invited to stay in a guest cottage on his 90-acre estate. I literally ran from the restaurant I was having lunch with Sally Field in. The Hamptons is this surreal place. You already feel like you’re in a movie. The screening was outdoors. A big screen at the other end of the pool with big sofas and I got to sit next to James Brolin and Barbara Streisand and then I sat speaking to her face to face until 1am. I couldn’t believe it and I’ll never forget it as long as I breathe. Everything else pales in comparison…”
     The Awards ride started at Telluride Film festival in September 2018. “I kept meeting actors who said ‘you’ll be on the campaign trail for 5 months’ and I was shocked. I can’t not work for 5 months. I have to earn a living. I would say what, have you seen this in a crystal ball? And they would say ‘no, but that’s how it is.’ So much smoke gets blown up people’s fundament in this profession, you’re in one day and out the next, but it all just snowballed and suddenly everybody that I newly wanted to meet or had wanted to meet for a lifetime was in one room. The Governor’s ball – the Vanity Fair party. A second act – it’s more like planet movie star and you’re Cinderella about to turn into a pumpkin.”
    The pumpkin never happened. “Tom Hanks said to me it doesn’t matter whether you win or not because for evermore you will be Academy Award Nominee. That moniker goes with you for the rest of your life.” And of course, no one remembers who won but we all remember Richard E Grant’s hell of a ride.
     At the time, he’d already worked on Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker but he wasn’t allowed to talk about it, not even to his family. Not even the name of his character which is Pryde, an evil General. And even now, weeks before the film’s release, he has not seen it. Did he enjoy the experience?
     “Star Wars is like a marmite factor. If I say to people, I’ve been doing it, sometimes they proudly tell you ‘I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie and I’m never going to see one’ and some people love it and are obsessive and have seen everything. I saw the first one when I was 20 in 1977.
     Two months before I started doing this, I got sent a scene to self-tape with top secret written across it. Your name is written across the pages so you can’t reproduce it and you have to delete it once you’ve learnt it and self-taped. I knew immediately it was generic. A 1940’s B Movie interrogation scene. I taped it, sent it off and didn’t think about it and then I got a call saying you’re still in the running and I had no memory of ever doing it but my agent said ‘the producer wants to meet you at Pinewood. They’re sending a car for you’ and that never happens. They took me to the Carrie Fisher building which was weird in itself as I knew Carrie. I met her back in 1990 when I was doing LA story (where he also formed a lifelong friendship with Steve Martin). I was ushered upstairs and passed on to various people and then I met JJ Abrams (writer/director) in his vast office which is like a Star Wars memorabilia museum. I’d met him once before when I was 24 and he’d just made Regarding Henry with Anette Bening and Harrison Ford about a man who has an accident and has to rehabilitate his whole life. What I remember about Abrams was he was a man who spoke incredibly fast who seemed so self-possessed and I’d written in my diaries that he said ‘I’ll work with you one day’ and almost 40 years had gone by since then.
     I walked into his office and Daisy Ridley was there. JJ Abrams speaks bullet speed like a Scorsese and he’s asking me if I’m going to do it or not and I said I haven’t read a script and he said ‘nobody gets a script’ and then he starts telling me ‘you’re going to play this guy’ but at such speed it was surreal and somehow he segued into ‘you’re a Streisand fan.’ Daisy Ridley had done a duet with Streisand for Streisand’s album (Movie Partners on Broadway – 2016) so suddenly we’re just talking about Streisand for an hour and a half. I don’t remember him telling me the name of the character or anything. He just gave me a big hug and said, ‘so you’re going to do it?’ and I said of course I’m going to do it whatever it is. And then I was told I couldn’t tell anybody anything. 
     They had a dinner for the cast where I was told ‘You’re playing Pryde and Daisy Ridley said, ‘It’s a good part.’ The secrecy continues when you start working. There are bodyguards and you have to hand over your mobile phone.  Apparently, you can read the script on an iPad that they give you, but you can’t photograph it or take notes and you’re just given the pages of the daily work.
    “They are printed on crimson paper so you can’t photograph them. You’re not allowed to take them away, so you’re handed them on a sealed plastic folder where it says in bold letters that if you do not return these at the end of the shooting day… You’re even given a cloak with a hood on it that you have to wear if you move from your trailer into the studio because various news organisations have got drones flying over the studio.
    When you walk onto the set there are various security people with Security written all over them. You’re allowed to use your phone for calls and texts but if you lift it as if to take a photograph, a hand will appear.”
     As a person who likes to diarise everything that happens to him, how did he take notes or pictures and aide memoires?
     “You couldn’t on this, but I don’t normally. I could sit and text or write. At that cast dinner, what struck me was not a single person took a photo of anybody else…. I can’t remember a dinner with actors or performers where everybody wasn’t instagramming everything. I’m now allowed to say that I’m an evil General. JJ Abrams described what I do as the normalcy of evil, so the most heinous things are completely normal to this person and that’s as much as I’m allowed to say. 
     JJ Abrams is someone whose brain works very fast and feels like you have to run and leapfrog to catch up with him. He’s always pushing the boundaries of what you do and he speaks to extras as if they leading actors which is a very disarming and delightful thing. But one thing I love about this movie… is that you walk into this set that is a huge spaceship that you have seen your whole life. They open those huge octagonal doors. In the movie they seem like hydraulic doors that have no sound. They just open as you walk towards them. I thought they must have some fancy system of how they work them, and I look around the corner and there’s a middle-aged English crew member standing with ropes and literally pulling the thing with weights. It was so endearing. Walking backwards and forwards down a corridor with troopers all helmeted up and these doors opening and closing. I felt like a kid again.”
    Earlier this year he said, “I’m a 61-year-old Awards virgin.” He’s now 62 and an Awards veteran. He’s pretty astonishing at playing characters of dubious sexual orientation and next up he plays a retired drag queen who becomes the mentor to sixteen-year-old Jamie. It’s based on a true story and hit West End show Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.
     “I sing and dance in vertiginous heels. It was the most frightening job that I’ve ever taken on because of the singing and dancing and also playing a drag artist. All in a proper Sheffield accent. But it’s a very good thing when you’re of my vintage to have that sort of voltage.”
    Both Withnail and Jack were louche and addicted to alcohol which is bizarre because Grant himself has an enzyme problem which means he can’t drink. His father was a demented alcoholic. Maybe that put him off also. 
     “Technically I should be an alcoholic and for years I thought it was a psychosomatic thing not being able to drink alcohol, but I was tested and they said the missing enzyme means I can’t digest alcohol.”
     Grant also doesn’t eat cheese or chocolate because he hates them. If he had to be a dish it would be Christmas pudding. He eats them quite a lot because he tells me they get drastically reduced in January and they keep a long time but mainly because they’re so “rich”. He luxuriates as he says the word “and you cut the sweetness with lemon sorbet”.
    He cooked dinner for Meryl Streep, crab linguine followed by pannetone bread and butter pudding. “She loves eating so it’s a pleasure to cook for her.”
    Did he not feel vulnerable cooking for Meryl? “Isn’t that the nature of talent?” 
     He manages a life without alcohol very well, but he says he’s not without addiction. His lifelong addiction has of course been Streisand.
    He fell out with his mother in his youth but had a reconciliation and she tells him that she’s proud of him after all these awards. “And that has been surprising and gratifying.”
     She asked him to forgive her and he did after a year or so of therapy. He gallantly goes off to get me a coffee even though coffee and tea are repulsive to him. “Hate the taste. The taste of it is pants. Likewise, chocolate, likewise cheese.”
    I tell him that’s maybe why his skin is so fresh and radiant after hours and hours of long-haul flights. He says it’s DNA.
     He took the character of Jack Hock from the essence of Chariots of Fire actor Ian Charleston who died of AIDS in 1990. “Ian had this amazing little boy lost quality and charm in tandem with a scabrous wit and enormous appetite for life. More than anybody I’ve met, and I thought he was the essence of what Jack Hock was.”
     He recently saw that, American actor Darren Chriss, who won the Emmy and the Globe for playing the leading role in The Assassination of Gianni Versace announced that he wasn’t going to play another gay character because he felt he was taking parts away from gay actors.  “And I’ve always had that concern. The Transgender movement and the Me Too movement means how can you justify heterosexual actors playing gay characters? We are in a historical moment. If you want someone to play a disabled role that should be a disabled actor.”
   I thought the easiest way to an Oscar was playing disabled. Just look at Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything.
     “Yes, I know but I understand why and how it’s come about.”  It seems a long time since his friend Rupert Everett complained that he wished he’d never come out because now he only got gay best friend roles. These days there are so much more scope for the non-specifically gay actor. I n the way that Andrew Scott can get away with playing heterosexual very endearingly.
    “And what’s extraordinary about Timothy Chalemet is that he has such an androgynous quality. Of all the actors out there, he is the most gender fluid of them all.”
     Grant has never been gender fluid, but he’s quite often turned in his best, most nuanced performances when sexuality was never even involved in the part.
     Has he witnessed any of the horrors where women were abused or taken advantage of by male producers or actors?  “I haven’t been involved in one of those projects where there was misogyny at large. Logan (which starred Hugh Jackman and was an X Men spin off) was particularly blokey.  Guys with huge arms. Star Wars is not blokey but it’s not misogyny.” He also starred with Jude Law in Dom Hemingway, which has been loosely described a bromance movie.
        
I asked a transgender friend what they thought of Grant playing a drag queen and they didn’t hae a problem with that. He’s playing a drag queen,, not a transgender. And his role is as a drag queen mentor. It’s not like he’s got any gay sex scenes. 
 
    When he was growing up, he wore a big eyelash inspired by Clockwork Orange when he went to see the movie. His father was drunk and threatened to kill him. He shot him but missed.
    “He was so angry because I got back from a movie wearing make-up, but he was also infuriated that I’d emptied a crate of scotch down the sink. If I hadn’t done that, the Clockwork Orange eyelash worn on the lower lid would not have been a catalyst.”
    At his father’s funeral a priest jumped into his grave to raise him from the dead. “I put that in Wah Wah the movie but at preview screenings people said it was too extreme, so we cut it. He died 38 years ago at 53, of alcoholism and a devoted love of my mother. That was the tragedy of his life. He drank to numb the pain.”
     His mother left him for someone she fell in love with then married someone else and they have been together 40 plus years. His father Henrik was the head of education for the British government administration in the protection of Swaziland. Famous scene in Wah Wah is when Grant was a boy about 10. He was sitting in the back seat of the car and had to watch his mother have sex with his father’s best friend. This led to their divorce and his father’s alcoholism and a fractured relationship with his mother.
     From an early age Grant kept a diary for the same reason he’s kept a diary throughout all the Awards seasons. “You establish a reality and a way to process – which seems too fancy a word but to understand what’s going on.”
     Because of the deception and adultery of his childhood “secrets to me are kind of toxic. They cripple families. If you have secrets, you have to deal with an awful amount of defence. If you choose not to keep them, you have to evolve and be the stronger for it. It’s a contradiction. People think keeping a secret will make you stronger but it’s the opposite.”
    Grant has been married to voice coach Joan Washington since 1986. They live in Richmond and he seems particularly devoted to his daughter Olivia.
    He’s still friendly with Lena Dunham. He was in her cult series Girls.
    “Lena had seen me in Spiceworld The Movie which completely exonerated all the flak I got at the time for being in that movie. Olivia was 8 years old and a Spice Girls fan and that’s why I was in it, but all the grandees of my profession asked how could you be in Spice World? But the bonus of that is I got cast in Girls and I got tickets to Adele at the 02 because she knew me from Spiceworld. Adele and I share the same birthday but not the same bank balance.”
    He got to be in four episodes of Girls, one of which he was in rehab. So often in artistic rehab but in reality, never even a drink or a drug. Does he feel that everyone is less pigeonholed as a result of Me Too and as a result of diversity, or is that just a new box. Have people become less judgmental?
     “We’re always judging. My role model for inspiration when I was a teenager was Donald Sutherland. He had a very long face and didn’t look conventionally good looking.”
    I was recently at a Big Cat Sanctuary where one of the lions had a really long face and a high forehead. I took a picture of him and told Grant I would name the lion Richard because it looked like him. He was pleased.
Richard E Grant and Chrissy Iley
Richard E Grant and Chrissy Iley
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Cameron Douglas (London Sunday Times Magazine, December, 2019)

I pretend not be shocked when I see the Uber driver taking me to Cameron Douglas’s house is wearing a surgical mask.  She drove me up the canyon to a quiet street, to a typical canyon house –  white stone, small front yard with a large dog.  I knew I had arrived at the right place because the tattooed torso of Cameron Douglas seemed to be rising from the roof.  It looked like something you might see from Dynamo the magician, he seemed to levitate. He was actually catching some pale winter sun on his terrace.

He has the face of his grandfather and the intense eyes. In his white wife beater, I even think he has the torso of Spartacus – more elegant than muscley.  He puts on a red plaid shirt for our interview. He makes me a good cup of coffee. The living room is covered in baby paraphernalia. We sit in what could be loosely described as a den – grey comfy armchairs, books, hardwood floors, the large dog, a Mastador, lies by the fireplace.

Douglas is warm and friendly and fidgets unconsciously. I wonder if this is nervousness, but the Douglas’s – Cameron, Michael and Kirk aren’t really nervous people. He’s easy company and easy on the eye. Before long we are laughing.  He didn’t see me in the Uber and thought that was me in the surgical mask. He was trying to work out if I was a very kind person with a cold that I didn’t want him to catch or I was trying to protect myself from Douglas dust.

He’s just written a memoir, Long Way Home. It’s quite the page turner. It has a great rhythm, pace, graphically drawn characters as he describes relationships that fall apart, the misguided tough love of his father, his drug dependency and drug dealing, misplaced Hollywood glamour, and his eight years in various prisons.  Prison soon lost its gangster rap allure.  He got into brutal fights, witnessed rape and savagery and for the first few years had the edge taken off with smuggled in Oxycontin and Zanex.  When this was discovered it led to many months in solitary which in turn led him to rethink his whole being.  To survive prison you had to be strong, if you got into fights you had to win them.  You needed respect.  His grandfather Kirk, on hearing that he had won fights said, ‘That’s my boy.’

I tell him he inherited his grandfather’s writing skills – Kirk Douglas has written many books but Rag n Bone Man, his first memoir is compulsive, a macho Jackie Collins.

“That’s a great compliment,” he says. He’s always been close to granddad Kirk. “I have breakfast with him every week. I take my daughter over there every weekend to spend time with him and his wife Anne. Grandfather, grandson and great granddaughter all have birthdays in the same week in December.  Kirk will be 103 (on December 9), Cameron will be 41 (December 13) and Lua Izzy will be 2 (December 17).

Was it cathartic for him to write this book? Did you have a burning to tell your story?

“That didn’t come in till later. Initially, oddly enough it was my father’s idea.  He was quite pushy about it. I had a hard time understanding that because my family had always been very private and I tried to follow suit, but once I started putting pen to paper, I tried to understand where my father was coming from. I came to a couple of conclusions. One, he wanted to give me the opportunity to look back over my life and have a better understanding of where things went wrong…”

Things went really wrong.

A Douglas firstborn to one of Hollywood’s First families, acting royalty and he managed to mess it up royally. He didn’t take himself seriously, he didn’t take his work as an actor or DJ seriously, just used the latter to hang out in nightclubs and score drugs. His father had lots of money and Cameron had a sense of entitlement and then his father would cut him off if he was behaving disappointingly, which is ultimately, he reasons, why he became a drug dealer. His father refused to pay for his apartment and he was on the streets – well, a hotel. With no college education but a sense of privilege, he was not going to pump gas.

He had experimented with drinks and drugs from the age of 13 and by 17 he was taking crystal meth and then graduated to liquid cocaine.  And finally, heroin, shooting up 5 or 6 times a day.

He doesn’t pull the pity card though. “I can’t go back and change the past. Obviously, I would do some things differently, but what I can do is take those experiences and turn them into something useful. I think it was a selfless act of love on the part of my mother and father and the rest of my family for giving me their blessing to write this book.”

Certainly, his parents come off as troubled human beings. At one point he says he was always in awe of his father but never close to him. His father’s liberal use of tough love, cutting him off and cutting him out, seemed to propel him into danger and loneliness.  His father hired heavies to try and kidnap him to take him to rehab.  Yet now he is learning to play golf so he can bond with him further.  His father hired lawyers that were out of their depths and he ended up getting an extra 3 years added to his sentence.  His father seemed lost on just how to deal with him.  There was always closeness followed by estrangement .Sometimes extremely harsh, sometimes loving He writes “My dynamic with dad is seething frustration on his part and wounded sensitivity on mine…. “ His father invited him to New York for Thanksgiving and he git high and was several hours late – Douglas Sr had his doorman say they had left already but h was upstairs with the children too furious to see his oldest son

“That’s where it got complex for him because on the one hand if you are kind, it makes you feel you are helping feed the addiction… it’s a no win situation.”

And he didn’t win. “Well, not in the short term but maybe in the long term.”

Not counting his stretches in juvenile hall, the highlight of which was a brief affair with a woman called Liz a few years his senior.  He was in prison for close to 8 years – 7 years and 9 months. He is still friends with many of the people he bonded with while he was there.

“I have really close friends that I speak to. Not often, but often enough to touch base.  I am loyal and the bonds that you form when you are in a situation like that – in prison – are very strong. You go through a lot together, you get to know individuals really well and you see them in all types of circumstances because you see them every day and I feel grateful for that.”

The big dog comes over, nuzzles him and lies back down again.

“A lot of guys, when they go to prison they get forgotten. Their families forget about them. I was blessed that my family never gave up on me and in the end that played a huge part in helping me make the evolution I made.”

He now lives clean – drug and alcohol free. His partner Viviane is a yoga teacher. They met in their wild days – she was a Brazilian model and party animal, she is now a yogi.  She reached out to him in prison.  By the time they started seeing each other they had both changed their lives around.

It seems strange that he became closer to his family when he was in prison and locked away from them than when he was living a drug addled, drug dealing life in New York and LA, with unsuitable friends that he remained loyal to. His uncle, Eric Douglas, to whom he was always being compared, was a lost soul who felt he could never live up to the achievements of his father Kirk and brother Michael. He tried acting and stand up comedy. I saw one of his shows at the Edinburgh Festival. All the jokes that worked were about Kirk and Michael and there were only half a dozen of us in the audience.

Turning into Uncle Eric was another hideous spectre that loomed. Michael Douglas though, seemed to go through many evaluations of his own life.  When his son was in prison he somehow found it easier to form a loving relationship.  In 2010 other inmates read the tabloids and told Cameron that they felt sorry about his dad’s stage 4 throat cancer.  It was very difficult for Cameron to see his father, this larger than life man, shrunken from cancer treatment, but nonetheless on a crusade to help his son.

“He was very supportive. He actually played a major part in shifting a particular law in prison. I lost my family visits for many years. I hadn’t seen my family for 2 years and I had 2 more years to go but my father received an award for playing Liberace and during his acceptance speech he said that the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) won’t allow me to see my son and it’s been almost 2 years. About a month after that I got called to my counsellors office and he suggested I make a formal request to the warden to get a visit with your mother and father. I did and it was granted. And about a month after that one of the wardens told me, ‘I want you to know that we’re implementing the new rule that says if an inmate is having his visits revoked for an extensive period and we feel like it’s undue, then we are going to give it back early. You are the first one. You are the role model.”

“My dad did that. I’m sure it’s benefitted a lot of families.”

I’m not sure if I see a tear in his eye or if it’s an extra sparkle. In his book he says that after going through the all the shenanigans – he was set up, fooled and caught as a drug dealer, first condemned to a shorter sentence then a longer one for not ratting on his drug dealing friends, he lost life as he knew it, and then his father had cancer. He couldn’t cry.

“I’m a very emotional person. Doesn’t take a lot to make me cry so that was alarming. A friend of mine in prison said ‘There’s no shame in crying,’ but I just couldn’t. just something inside of me. going back to acting has been very helpful with that. As I got closer to my release date, I started thinking what I wanted to do with my life. Acting is something that’s in my blood and I’d been doing it most of my life, even though not professionally. After I was released but still in a halfway house, I threw myself into a theatre company. Doing the work in those classes brought the emotion to the surface and it was very therapeutic.”

Was it like the acting classes they have in The Kominsky Method? (Award winning Netflix show that features his father Michael Douglas as a failed actor turned tutor who loves a good emotional workout with his pupils).

“Yes, it was similar to that. In fact, my acting teacher taught my father many years ago. I found it so helpful on a therapeutic level, getting in touch with these emotions that I’d stuffed down deep inside of me.  I had some time in juvenile hall but it’s a different ball game when you are in prison.”

Looking back it was easy to see ever since, as a teenager, when he was sent to a strict boarding school while his parents were divorcing, he was always on one of those unstoppable moving walkways.

“In juvenile hall I was well on my way to prison but I didn’t realize it.”

Why didn’t he stop acting out, shooting up?

“Probably I was scared.”

The catharsis would all be so neat if prison set him free and recreated a good relationship with his father but when he came out of prison and was in the halfway house his father rejected him again.  What was going on there?

“My father had gotten to a point in our relationship where he thought I wasn’t going to make it, so he started detaching.  My father is a very pragmatic man but he didn’t come to this point lightly.  For the majority of my life I had been carrying on so coming home from a long stint in a high security prison, I think he was a little circumspect about what results he was going to get and that’s understandable.  Catherine actually played a real role in motivating my father, at least initially, to open back up to me and then it has just been showing not telling.  Since I have come home I have been working my ass off (he is back acting and starts in an independent film in a couple of weeks) I have a fire and desire inside me that is enormous.  I have got a lot to make up for.”

And people to make up to?

“To myself.  If it turns out this whole prison experience and all the nonsense leading up to it was all for nothing I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.  I have to know in my heart that it was for a purpose.  I am on a quest of proving to myself that one day I look back and be truly grateful for having gone through it all.”

You feel for him in the book.  The less self pitying he is the more you root for him.  The turning point in the book is when he is making a movie in Ireland about mushrooms and had smuggled in enough drugs to last for a couple of weeks.  The guy who was looking after his pet rabbit was supposed to send him more.

“I never saw that cute little bunny rabbit again or that friend either.”

Back to the story.  He has this idea he can find drugs in Germany.  He is suffering horrendous detoxing symptoms and misses his flight back  He gets sacked from the movie and has to make the desperate trans-Atlantic flight back vomiting, shaking and all the other cold turkey symptoms.  You feel the desperation of all that.

“It was an extremely low point of my life, so low that I turned to what got me into prison.  I had the opportunity to pivot and change course but I didn’t.  I had already gone through most of the detoxing but I wasn’t willing to let go of my addiction.”

That is when he came back to Los Angeles and his father had decided not to pay the lease on his rental.  He gave conditions that he had to separate from the woman he was with.  He didn’t like conditions.

“Again, it was a time where I had an opportunity to make some changes but I didn’t.”

In the book you really feel for Erin, she looks after him, she is more than an assistant less than a girlfriend at the start anyway.  They almost get married so she can visit him in jail.  What happened to her?

He flinches slightly, “She is doing well, she lives on the East Coast.”

Is she in a relationship?

“I don’t know.  We were in touch because she inherited my dogs, one passed away while I was in prison, the other a few days ago so we spoke about that.”

Junior was a black labrador and they were devoted to one another.  He had his sperm frozen. He was interested in breeding him, even creating a new breed  because he was so loving and so smart. He wanted him to mate with a Boerboel  to create the first Boerbador

“One thing I prided myself on, I was always able to take good care and raise good dogs.  My father still has one of Junior’s children, Maxi, who is 15.”

When he was in prison and Erin was sole parent to Junior, Junior got cancer.  He blames Erin for not taking him to the vet before he was riddled with tumors. He was able to talk to him on the phone as he was dying.  It was then that his relationship with Erin didn’t continue in the same way.

Junior died and he wasn’t there for him, his grandmother died and they were close, he was unable to be there or even attend the funeral. He was able to phone her but she could no longer talk – he listened to her breathe.

He takes a breath, “Right now I am really focusing on a couple of screenplays that I am writing and the indie film called The Runner.  I play a jaded detective who will get the job done by any means necessary.  I am looking forward to digging in, getting in front of the camera and hoping it leads to more.  I am a work horse.  My life is very simple by design these days.   It revolves around my family and building a career for myself; nice and simple.  Life is good.”

Is he planning on more children?

“I am not opposed to it.”

I wonder how his relationship with Viviane is different.  There are many relationships or flings with women in his book, all of them, in different ways, were mother figures to him.

“That’s true, in different ways.  Viviane is a great mother and she does take great care of me.  She is a yogi and she really believes in that life and practices it.  It’s positive and powerful, I love being immersed in that philosophy, that energy.  She is a great influence on me.”

Does he do yoga?

“She is a yoga instructor so I take advantage of that.  She gives me private  lessons.”

Like Sting and Trudie?

“Possibly,” he chuckles.

Do they go tantric?

“I would say I am at the basic stages of yoga.  I had started my evolution in prison.  I had been on a rock hard routine, I think routines are helpful.  I don’t work out as much as I did in prison.  It eats a lot of your time and it takes your focus off where you are, it was integral to my life there.  Now I am not so worried about being as strong as possible, it’s just about being in good shape and having a clear mind.”

I notice something that looks like feathers inked on his chest, is it a phoenix?

“It’s a butterfly.”

The tattoos are mostly from prison.  He also has one of his grandfather’s and father’s faces. Two that he didn’t get in prison on his wrists are in the process of being removed.

“They don’t have any meaning for me anymore.  When I see butterflies I think of freedom.”

Another thing that represents freedom to him is going out with his granddad for breakfast.

“He still walks and is sharp and has a great sense of humour.  They still travel up to Santa Barbara one weekend a month.”

They really do look alike.

“That’s nice of you to say.  I hear that more these days that I look more like him than my father.”

Is that a beautiful thing or a cross to bear?

“It’s a cross I am grateful to bear.”

His grandfather has been married to Anne for 65 years.  She doesn’t like to give her age.  She told me she always lied about it but certain records have her age as 100.  She is certainly strong, she stayed with him while he had various affairs saying as long as he was honest and she was the number one he could do what he wanted.

“I don’t know much about those particulars, but whatever they decided between them seems to work.  They love each other very much.”

He changes the subject.

“I want to get involved in prison reform in this country as somebody who has had first hand experience, it is meant to punish and crush you and years of that kind of treatment doesn’t turn out a great individual.  The government owes it to the American people to turn out men and women who are reformed.”

On the one hand, he couldn’t wait to get out of prison and on the other he knew it would be very hard.

“As my release date started to get closer guys would say, ‘It will be a difficult adjustment. You have been here a while and the time you have done has been a little more extreme.’ And I would say, ‘You guys are crazy, this is where I don’t belong. I am going to slide back into life like I never missed a day.’ But in reality it was a very difficult adjustment.”

He came out to find there were many new brands of breakfast cereal and everyone had smart phones.

“I will never forget the first time I stepped onto a subway after coming home from prison.  Everyone on the platform was staring at something, it seemed like I was in the Twilight Zone.  I do have one now and I love the amazing new cereals which I eat at night.  I spent 29 years of my life trying to figure out who I was, where I fit in, how I like to express myself and then 8 years trying to figure out who I was in that environment, how I could express myself and making some changes.  I came out and tried to find out who I was again, where I fit in and how I wanted to express myself.”

He was released from prison in August 2016.  He had a female lawyer with benefits, Meg Salib,  wrote a memoir which his hasn’t read, about their sexual relationship.  He writes that the forbidden seemed to turn her on, she even liked to have phone sex when she knew all the calls were being recorded.  He doesn’t seem to pursue women; they pursue him  Maybe it’s in his genes.

Towards the end of his sentence Viviane Thibes visited him in prison and their relationship seemed to move fast when he got out.  Before long she was pregnant.  Was that because he felt an urgency to make an imprint on the planet?

“Maybe subconsciously.  Initially when coming home I wanted to do everything right away because I had lost so much time.  We were together fully while I was in prison, she was there waiting for me with my mother, my brothers and sisters and we have been together ever since.  I think it was difficult for her.  I am trying to please everyone and yet the person who was closest to you often gets what everybody else doesn’t get.  To be perfectly honest it was a difficult time but we are both survivors and now, life is really starting to come together.”

He says he is finally starting to become friends with his father, and have the kind of relationship he always wanted.  Has his father finished his pragmatic detachment?

“I think so, it just took some time which is understandable.  We enjoy each others company.”

And on cue, Michael texts him.  They are going to grab a bite to eat.

“I am not particularly religious but I like that saying, ‘Let go, let God.’ It means you make your best effort and let it go and see where it lands.  I don’t have to walk on eggshells with him anymore, I have nothing to hide.  I have made some serious mistakes but I have paid for them.  Now it’s just about proving to myself what kind of life I can put together.”

He and his mother, Diandra, enjoyed a complicated relationship. For a while growing up he thought of himself as the man of the house, for that reason he had to love her and protect and he also hated her for that.

“It was an interesting dynamic.  I love my mother a lot and I felt very protective of her.  There are things that she has done that I don’t necessarily agree with.”

His mother was certainly beautiful – he writes that she cultivated drama with men

Diandra Luker (Douglas) had twin boys through a surrogate with hedge fund manager Zach Hampton Bacon III, Hawk and Hudson and she later adopted a girl, Imara.  All of them visited their brother prison even though often the prisons were over 600 miles away, they made the prison pilgrimage.  In her younger life I am not sure she comes over so well.  Always chasing a man, and with a taste for exotic pets like a Savannah cat and a monkey and quite often making uninformed decisions with terrible consequences. How did his mother feel about the book?

“Everybody took their ego out of the equation with the understanding that perhaps it could have a greater effect than if I worried about how they looked here and there.  I don’t think I paint anybody except myself in a bad light.”

One person that comes off very well is Catherine Zeta-Jones.

“Catherine and I have always gotten along fantastically.  We get along as friends but she has been very inclusive with me, with her children and was a major motivating factor in getting my father to open up to me.”

Does he think she helped with the thought love, making it more about love and less about tough?

“Maybe.  I see Carys and Dylan fairly often.  Dylan is at Brown and he was just in a performance and was fantastic.  They both wrote to me and came to see me in prison and my mother brought her kids to visit me as well. (Diandra had twin boys with the help of a surrogate and later adopted a daughter.)”

These days he doesn’t mind being compared to Uncle Eric.

“I would like to think I am like him, he had amazing qualities, a huge heart, and was talented as a comedian.  But he was tormented, always beating up on himself.  A lot of comedians have that dark sensibility.  He is at peace now and he had a struggle with the family and that was probably what I experienced with the family.”

So many demons to live up to and not live up to.  Could he be as famous and talented as his father and grandfather and could he be as less troubled as Eric?

“I’ve never really seen it that way.”

Famous parents are a bit like communism.  It seems like a great idea but it can never work.

“That’s not true.  Carys and Dylan are amazing kids, my father and Catherine have done an amazing job.”

Do you think his father had some kind of epiphany and made a conscious effort to do things differently? Or the chemistry with Catherine was different?

“A bit of everything.  Wisdom comes with age and experience.  As he got a little older his life was different so he was able to do things differently. And what is most important that he and I have a good time together now.  We like to watch sports together on TV most of the time, but we do go to games.  He loves golf, I don’t, but I am starting to learn in an effort to find things to do with my father.  It’s nice to find a sport you can play through your whole life and he gives me a lot of guidance with acting.  The whole process; auditions, introductions, everything.  He is very supportive which is the best part.”

He exchanges a knowing look with the Mastador, they know about loyalty, they know about support.

 

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Elisabeth Moss (London Sunday Times Magazine, September 1, 2019)

Elisabeth Moss and Chrissy Iley
Elisabeth Moss and Chrissy Iley

I’m waiting for Elisabeth Moss in the bar of the Four Seasons hotel Beverley Hills. I’ve actually waited a long time to meet her and suddenly I wonder is she the person I hope she will be? The intelligent, sensitive, feminist who wove her way all the epic television series -her character Peggy in Mad Men starts off as a secretary and ends up a boss, through to Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Attwood vision of a dystopian future where women are slaves and wombs for hire. And she is the subversive insider.

The series hits all of the feminist marks. Browbeaten women will overcome, so on trend that Kylie Kardashian threw a Handmaid’s Tale themed party for her friend where all the women wore the red capes and white bonnets.

Before Handmaid’s, Moss was in the other great American series, The West Wing. There’s got to be something right about a woman who chooses what are largely considered the top 3 series of television’s golden age.

She has won the Emmy, the Globe and the Critics Choice Award for The Handmaid’s Tale, the SAG Award for Mad Men, the Globe and Critics Choice for Top of the Lake and the Producers Guild of America award for the Handmaid’s Tale.

When she plays Offred in Handmaid’s she is mesmerising. She fills the screen with an expression and inhabits the character. Her acting is considered and intelligent. She makes something unbelievable totally believable. Even when she is not saying anything onscreen, she is emotionally porous. You feel it all with her.

I’m at a corner table and Moss arrives –  a white T shirt, cut off denim shorts, a reversible bomber jacket with palm tree motif. She says she couldn’t decide what to wear as she’s in vacay mode. Her hair is blonder and thicker than you’d expect and her eyes have some crazy powerful inner sparkle.

We talk about how it’s not easy to find one outfit for hanging out by the pool, doing interviews and going to a fitting for an awards ceremony all in one day (It was the MTV Award for Handmaid’s Tale, which she won). Then she alights on my cat diary. I’d been sitting transferring events from my hardbacked diary into my phone. She picks it up, exploring each hand painted cat. It turns out she’s a cat woman. Or maybe THE cat woman. When she shows me her ginger girls Lucy, bright red, named after Lucille Ball and Ethel, pale blonde ginger, we coo and then she shows me the picture that would break the internet. Ethel wearing a Handmaid’s tale outfit, the red cape, the bonnet, designed by the Handmaid’s costumer designer Anne Crabtree. This revelation puts me in a kind of trance of admiration and ecstasy. How can I get one for my Lola?

This works on so many levels. A cat with claws being forced into the ultimate submissive outfit. Feisty and volatile, wearing a bonnet.  The paradox speaks to us all. And with this I realise Moss is everything I hope she’d be.

“Obviously I wouldn’t be a cat lady if I didn’t have pictures. My cat sitter just sent me a couple of videos.” We look at the pale ginger little tiny faced girl and super confident red ginger Lucy. “They’re my babies. I love them.”

She’s just coming up in The Kitchen – set in 70’s New York in Hell’s Kitchen when 3 mob husbands go to jail, their 3 wives take over.  She co-stars with Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish and it’s written and directed by Andrea Berloff, the Straight Outta Compton writer. It’s thrilling with a killer soundtrack. Moss is a person who chooses her projects cleverly.

Her character Clare has the most interesting arc. She starts off as the woman who always gets beaten up and later channels that into becoming a killer. Once again, there’s that theme of victim to self-empowerment that we all love to watch.

“I’ve never played an assassin or a hit woman, so it was definitely new and interesting. I thought it was a very compelling storyline. The idea of this woman who was so abused and such a “victim” and so interesting to try to understand her instinct of taking her own life back in an extreme way and thinking I’m actually going to own this.”

She had movie assassin training by actor Domhall Gleason with whom her character falls in love. “This isn’t a crazy character arc of all of a sudden she’s a hit woman. Even when she’s abused, she’s not meek. Maybe because of the violence she’s received, she can accept acting violent towards someone else.  Of course, she’s had a lot of emotional pain and we learn that she lost a baby when she was abused.”

Her characters are always losing babies or giving them up – Peggy, June/Offred, Robin in Top of the Lake and now Clare.

“Aren’t they? It’s a theme and so weird. Since I was 19 when one of the first films I did, the Virgin, a tiny independent film in which I play a woman who is raped while she’s unconscious, gets pregnant and thinks it’s the second coming. And Peggy in Mad Men of course gave her baby away. June lost two of them. It’s really weird. I don’t know what it is.”

Once could say there’s no such thing as coincidence. Is she really saying I keep losing these movie babies because I have to have a real one?

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s more that I seem to be drawn to a character that has conflict and it’s the ultimate conflict for a woman. You bond with your child, it presents great conflict and drama, the idea of losing that child. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing but it’s a theme I’ve been aware of for a while. I always try my hardest to keep hold of those babies.” She shakes her head.

She’s ordered Greek yoghurt and honey. It looks good. She invites me to taste it even though I’m wearing bright red gooey lipstick which will make the yoghurt pink. She doesn’t care.

Does she have a really close bond with her mother? “Yes, pretty much so. Maybe it’s manifesting that. We are very close and not in a ‘best friends’ kind of way. You know how some people say I’m best friends with my mom. No, that’s not us. She’s still my mom and I’m her daughter. We’re very, very close and she’s been incredible.

If I ever have a baby though, I’m going to hold onto that thing for dear f***ing life. I’ll have it chained to me. It’ll be a 50 year old kid and I’ll be ‘no, you’re staying with me.’”

Don’t you think the child might rebel? “Probably but I don’t care. I know what happens when you let them out of your sight.”

Did her mother ever let her out of her sight? “Yes, she was great. I moved to New York when I was 19 which now as I’m 36 seems so young, but at 19 you don’t think you’re young at all. I look back and think my God, she let me go to New York at 19. I suppose I was always considered a mature person. You sometimes need somebody to believe in you and not doubt you. A lot of people don’t have that kind of support.”

She started her acting career at seventeen on the West Wing where she played Zoe (President Bartlett’s/Martin Sheen’s daughter). I’ve never met a person who didn’t love The West Wing. Or Mad Men. Or Handmaid’s Tale. How did she pick these compelling women in these pioneering series?

“My guiding principal for picking anything is the writing, whether it’s a film, television or play it’s always the writing. If it’s not well written there’s nothing you can do, no matter how good the director is or the actor is. So that’s always been the biggest guiding principle and this coincided with what is now called the golden age of television. No one can plan something. I was seventeen, I got cast in the West Wing. That and The Sopranos were one of the shows that started the golden age. And then I got Mad Men.”

It’s hard to imagine that former age where it was all about the movies or all about the stage and television actors were dismissed. Now anyone can do anything but mostly it’s the TV actors who rule.

“I did a play the Heidi Chronicles, written by Wendy Wasserstein in the eighties and there’s a line in the play that comes from a television actor. It goes Meryl Streep would never do television.  And one of the biggest posters on Sunset Boulevard is for Meryl in Big Little Lies, along with some of the other biggest movie stars (Kidman, Kravitz, Witherspoon). So that’s the end of that. The line that used to exist between film and television. I’ve lived through it. It was a gradual fading but there’s no line anymore. It’s done. And that’s a wonderful thing because now there’s so many great opportunities in all fields.”

Does she feel that woman are more powerful in the industry than they were 10/20/30 years ago? In the years of the kitchen where they turned from wives to mob leaders.

“Absolutely, but that’s not to say they are equal yet. I was reading some numbers on Instagram on the percentage of women who are behind the camera and it’s still really low but it’s not equal yet. But it’s a hundred times better.”

As well as acting the lead role in Handmaid’s, she also produces the show, something she takes very seriously –  it’s all-encompassing. Checking casts, checking scripts, checking edits. It’s a role which doesn’t stop when the series does because there’s pre and post production. She’s also involved in the hiring process.

“There are women directors but they need to be hired. When we start looking at directors for Handmaid’s tale which we do at the beginning of each season, we have this incredible grid that’s sent to us. It’s mostly women because we try to hire mostly female directors. There are so many out there that are talented and we don’t have space for them all. It’s the same with cinematographers. They are out there. I think there’s an awakening and a realisation of the inequality and a necessity rising in people for people to fix that which is good.”

Big Little Lies and Handmaids have been pioneers in this respect.

“We have a 50% female hire this year. Over 50% of female directors. We have a male DP and a female DP.”

At this point, a tall tanned blonde arrives and hugs her. It turns out she’s a rep for Dior and she’s going to Paris with her mother for a Dior couture show. “What a dream come true to take my mother to the Dior couture show in Paris. That’s definitely like a wow, I never thought I’d get to do that.”

Her black canvas bag is this season’s Dior. “They gave me the bag. When I go to shops it’s much less expensive places. I’m a huge Chicago Cubs fan, 4th generation. I was looking at Cubs outfits for cats the other day.”

She grew up in Los Angeles.  Her mother Linda is a harmonica player, maybe even THE harmonica player who has played with blues superstars like BB King. “She’s really good. She started when she was 15 in Chicago.”

Her father Ron manages musicians. She has one brother. As a child she wanted to be a dancer. As a young teen, she went to New York to study ballet at the School of American Ballet. She home schooled and graduated aged 16. Always wise for her years, she realised that by now her dancing career would be over. As it stands an actress and producer she is one of the queens of the golden age of television.

Her parents are both Scientologists. I’m not sure how serious she is about that religion. She drinks Moscow Mules and Rose wine, both of which are frowned upon by Scientology.

Her role in Handmaid’s Tale has often been described as being part of a scary cult and she’s often asked the questions of how this relates to being part of the scary cult of Scientology and her Scientology beliefs.   She thinks it directly relates. “Religious freedom and tolerance and understanding the truth and equal rights for every race, religion and creed are extremely important to me.”

She has a way of saying things simply that are profound and so to the point they feel powerful and heartfelt.”

Her upbringing wasn’t in any way starry or privileged or deprived or oppressed, yet her roles have spoken more about feminism than any current pundit.

“I think there’s something about my generation where feminism woke back up. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties there was no concept that something like Roe vs Wade could be reversed. I didn’t even know you could do that. I didn’t even know they could take that away. So, there’s something about the work that I do and gravitate towards that’s important to me and important to my generation and it’s coincided into this perfect storm.”

We foray into worldwide abortion rights being reduced, how women have gained a little power in one direction and then it’s grabbed away. She nods. “It’s weird, right.”

I wonder how much of The Kitchen is based on reality. “It’s based on a comic book, but I don’t know how much the comic book was based on reality. I know there was an Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen and an Italian Mob and they were both extremely violent. But the three women, I don’t think so. For me this story wasn’t just about three women who become best friends and everything ends happily ever after. They’re on top of the world of crime. They had conflicts. Women don’t always get along. It doesn’t end happily for everyone. They become more powerful but there are challenges that come with power. They are three very different women from completely different backgrounds, linked only because their partners are in the mob and led by a necessity to make money and take care of their children. That doesn’t mean everything’s going to be perfect and it doesn’t mean there won’t be a reckoning.”

Although her character Clare is tinged with tragedy, she is the one that gets the hot guy who understands her – Domhall Gleason.

“He’s a fantastic actor who I have admired for a long time. We got the most incredible cast of supporting actors (including Margo Martindale (Sneaky Pete) and superstar rapper turned actor Common).

Being a feminist does not mean that all women love women. It means there’s conflict and competition. That’s why All About Eve is one of the most enduring movies of all time. It was made into a movie in 1950 and it starred Bette Davis, then in her forties. A woman in a lead role over forty is very rare today today.

Moss corrects, “I don’t know. We’ve got Meryl, Diane Keaton, Ellen Burstyn. All About Eve was great writing, great performance.  We don’t remember all the shitty movies they made at that time.”

Does she think more interesting female roles are written now or is it just her who happens to get them all?

“I do think they are being written. I think the industry has realised that women go and see things and we are getting more and more opportunities to put women at the forefront. We are a huge audience and we want to see ourselves represented.”

That’s why it works to have three women stars of The Kitchen. We can find ourselves in one of them for sure. What does she watch?

“I watch everything. I’m always looking for new things. I just watched Fleabag and Phoebe Waller Bridge is genius. She’s literally the second coming. I’ve also enjoyed After Life with Ricky Gervais, The Office was one of my favourite shows. Fleabag’s probably the most significant one.”

She lives in New York – Upper East Side. Came back to LA briefly to film Mad Men. As well as losing babies in every role she does, she seems to drink whisky.”

“I think it’s easy to recognise whisky as alcohol in TV and film. A Moscow Mule is less obvious.” We wonder if she should order Moscow Mules now, but she decides that it might make her fall asleep during her fitting. She’s a little bit on East Coast jetlag.

“I used to live in the East Village for about 13 years. Then I moved because I got a little bit older and I thought it’s too noisy and there are too many bars. I need to go uptown with children and dogs.”

Did she think she wanted children and dogs? “No.” At this time she did get married and unmarried to Saturday Night Live actor/comedian Fred Armison. They met in October 2008, married in October 2009 and in September 2010 filed for divorce.

Did it feel that it all happened in five minutes?

“Probably, but it does seem a long time ago.” Her answers are small but heartfelt. There’s no defensiveness. There’s no weird atmosphere. I’d read that she was so busy acting and producing, she didn’t have any time for dating and then she was dating but deciding not to name the person.

“Well that’s true but I now think who cares? His name is John. We’ve been together for over a year and he’s by the pool right now.  In a way you want to preserve your privacy but in another way I don’t care. I love him, I’m playing it by ear, he’s lovely and I’m happy.” And they have two ginger fur daughters together.  Does he at least have red hair?

“No, that would be amazing. But their actual daddy is a street cat in Brooklyn.”

There was a tabloid frenzy linking Moss to Tom Cruise. According to OK Magazine US edition, he wants to marry her and have babies.

“Not as far as I know. It would be awful for me and my boyfriend. I’m sure he’s perfectly nice but I’ve never met him.”

I wonder if the Tom Cruise rumour came about because they’re both Scientologists? “I have literally never met him.”

I’m glad.

So many women of all ages love her, in part because she’s been a vulnerable power taker, a transformer. Somehow that doesn’t fit with becoming a Tom Cruise girlfriend.

“I always try to make my characters end up being heroines and representing feminism. I always try and make them real, whether it’s representing a woman in the workplace or a mother. I never think that’s why I identify with them. I think they’re just like you and I – not special, not perfect. We are not birds that are caged and cannot fly. Nobody is 100% good all of the time. We don’t have special powers. We’re women and we’re human. But real women who are not perfect can find their strength, whether that’s getting out of a bad relationship, telling your boss you want a raise or marching on the capital in a red costume.”

In a way, the red capes are part of a new wave or superhero costumes. “Yes. When I put that on, I feel proud. It represents something important to me. I feel there’s a responsibility in that costume. It’s red. It represents blood, it represents fertility and it can also represent adultery. It’s evocative. There’s a good reason why Margaret Attwood made the Handmaid’s dress red. We feel something when we see that colour.”

She worries that her face is shining so she touches up with Charlotte Tilbury powder “the best,” and a slash of super red lip colour.

Attwood has written a new book so there will be another Handmaid series. “I hope so. I hope I’m involved. There’s a gap between the current Handmaid and the new book which means we can finish our story and do whatever we want with it and it won’t have an effect on the book that’s been written.”

At the end of series 2 there was a decision where June/Offred could escape but she went back to fight from the inside.  “There was no way she was gonna leave her daughter there and she has to be on the inside.”

Does she watch on a weekly basis? “As a producer I want to air one a week. As a viewer I love bingeing.” Is this her foray into producing? “No, I produced a film called Queen of Earth with Alex Ross Perry. Producing Handmaid’s is a big job. We’re going over who we’re hiring for season 4 and I’ve got 20 hours of cuts I need to make on episode 11, 12 and 13. It’s a round the year job because I’ve got to be in pre and post production.”

Working and juggling so much may mean that her red cape does indeed have super-powers. “I love working, I love my job, I love what I do. I don’t consider it a job. It’s my vocation. I feel very grateful that I have the opportunity to do it. Not a lot of people get the opportunity to do what they love and make a living.

Up next, she’s in a remake of the horror film The Invisible Man. “It’s the lead but it’s not what you think. It’s a story of female empowerment, not an invisible woman but a woman going from victimised position to a powerful one. You can spend years on television doing that (like Peggy). I’m born and bred in television and I love the longform exploration. I don’t know if the tighter turnaround is easier or more difficult. It’s just you know exactly where you’re going to end up and it’s nice to be able to plot that – whole arc from beginning to end. In a series you don’t know that.”

We look again at Ethel in her outfit looking vulnerable and fierce. “I’m interested in exploring vulnerability and the duality in characters. Most people have both.”

She says this looking vulnerable and fierce and that’s exactly why so many people relate to Moss.

HER SMELL is out in the UK on Sept 9.and The Kitchen is out Sept 20

 

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k.d. Lang (London Sunday Times Magazine, June 16, 2019)

Chrissy Iley and k.d. Lang
It’s hard to believe that in the 90s k.d. Lang was the world’s most famous lesbian. Back then a butch woman popstar was such a contradiction and such a revelation. Of course, the world has moved on to a very trans and gender fluid place and lesbian storylines in movies and television passed from acceptability to old hat.
     Back then Lang was a trailblazer for others who would come out later. Back then Ellen de Generes was closeted but unthreatening and Melissa Etheridge was just another country singer. 
     Lang was always a militant and a pioneer but then and now it’s about her voice. Erotic, soaring, soothing, the voice that Tony Bennett, her long-time collaborator said, “When she sings I can see angels.”
     Madonna described her as Elvis born again as a woman. The 1993 album Ingenue with its hits Constant Craving, Miss Chatelaine and Save Me was a landmark album. It went multi-platinum, won a Grammy and made her a star.  She catapulted into our consciousness by the Herb Ritts Vanity Fair cover image. Cindy Crawford in a camisole mock shaving Lang in shirt sleeves and pinstripe. It was provocative and brilliant and still remembered. It helped Ingenue become classic. Her writing partner Ben Mink said it was always supposed to be timeless in the vein of Gershwin or Weil.
     Last year, a re-mastered version of the album was re-released and this year there will be an Ingenue Redux tour in the UK.
   Lang now lives in Portland and when I arrive at the airport, I ask a woman selling vegan lipstick if she has heard of Lang’s street and how far away it is. She says rapturously “It’s a street where the buildings are beautiful because they are so strong and romantic.” Of course it is and it’s only half an hour away. 
   k.d. is abbreviated from Kathryn Dawn. I can never imagine that she could have been a Kathryn or a Dawn. She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old.
     She comes to let me into her building. She’s tall and wearing a mandarin collared navy shirt and trousers, sort of Buddhist pyjamas. Her loft space has wide oak shiny floors and smells of a particular incense that comes from Tibet, which she says is letting the deities know we’re here.
     The space is high ceilinged and large. I sit in a 1960’s style wooden recliner while she does a photo shoot on the roof. She makes me strong, fluffy coffee. Behind me is a space reserved for her Buddhist practice, in front a large oak table with a 1960s typewriter. To the side a piano. In the centre, cosy couches and in the other corner her bedroom space with a neatly made bed and a  compelling framed picture by Joel Peter Whitkins of a beautiful woman with a beautiful penis between her legs. But more of that later.
    Her hair, now flecked with grey remains in a punkish crop. She still cuts it herself.  She noticed that I am rapt by the picture.
     “It was a gift from Joel Peter Whitkins to Herb Ritts. I would always talk about it with Herb and say I have to have it and then unfortunately I did end up with it because after Herb’s passing, I bought it from his foundation.” The picture was created long before there was photo shop and long before today’s current trans trend.
    Lang was already friends with Ritts when the famous shaving picture was unleashed on the world. One picture that really changed everything.
     “It did. It was a powerful image. It was just after Ingenue came out and it really helped it gain momentum. The common denominator for that was Herb. We were all kind of hanging out at the time. We all had a great deal of trust in Herb and his ability to capture in a provocative yet classy, elegant way. It’s something I’m really proud of.”
    She doesn’t write many songs these days. She finds it difficult, although there was an album last year with singers Laura Veirs and Neko Case. It was a somewhat torturous experience because they were all used to driving their own music. None of them had ever “shared the steering wheel before.”
     She is happier now reinterpreting the songs of Ingenue and looks forward to touring the UK. She’s already done the Ingenue tour in America and Canada.
     “Touring has completely changed for me. I need to have a very legitimate and all-encompassing reason to go on stage these days (She’s gone full circle from flirting with fame, in the eye of the storm to introspection and quasi anonymity).
     “Ingenue Redux anniversary tour IS a good reason. I love that record. I loved that moment in my life that really pivoted everything for me and the UK has always been important, sort of where I started.”
     Certainly, it was where women for the first time threw their knickers at a woman onstage. “They’re good at throwing knickers, yes. The knicker throwing has waned considerably these days but maybe that’s a good thing.”
    There’s a quietness to her and a thoughtfulness.  She’s still flirting but flirting like an introvert.    
     “I like to flirt with everybody, boys, men, moms. I think it’s an integral complex part of what human beings are. It’s a kind of acknowledgment, a baseline acknowledgment of desire and being human. 
 
    How did she convert from extrovert to introvert?
     “A combination of things – age (she’s 57), my Buddhist practice and for someone who’s had the fame experience it’s easy not to love the limelight any more – but I do love to sing. I don’t think I have the same confidence as thinking of myself as an authority on anything to write. I don’t really feel like writing about relationships anymore or love. I feel like I’m interested in saying something on a much deeper level, but I don’t feel that I’m an authority on a much deeper level.”
   Everyone wants to know about love. “Yeah…that’s why we’re alive.”
    When she sings about love, people feel it whether they are gay, straight or trans. There’s knickers to be thrown at her yet.
     As we talk her legs are curled under her on the couch. Her bare feet that are strangely elegant and strong. She has long, piano players fingers. She is tall and square shouldered but she has lost weight from the last time I saw her a few years ago, although still heavier than her girl Elvis days of her twenties.
     “I definitely don’t see myself as a sex object, but I do know the allure of the singer.”
   Maybe she never felt comfortable as a sex object. “I think I was very cocky about it but it’s not my desire to use that vehicle anymore. I’m interested in connecting emotionally and spiritually with people. My priorities have shifted.”
    Is that because she’s in a stable relationship with Canadian Heather Edwards? (She doesn’t confirm her partners identity, but the Daily Mail and Page 6 did.) Edwards ex-husband is Canadian oil billionaire Murray Edwards.  
     Is that why she doesn’t want to flirt with the audience the same way? “There’s an aspect of that but I think it’s just not who I am now.”
   She likes birds and there are several bird ornaments and pictures.  She stops talking every so often and closes her eyes to hear the birds sing. She misses the birds in Los Angeles. She moved to Portland in 2012.
     “And then I fell in love with a Canadian so I’m also in Calgary where I’m basically just 3 hours from my mom, so it’s like returning home.”
     Her mother is 96 and in a wheelchair but she is “strong and funny and my relationship with her is so enriching. For years I was on the road thinking I should cook more, I should hang out with my mom more.”
   And now she actually does both. She came out to her mother in her teens when her mother questioned why she was so miserable. It was because her girlfriend got a boyfriend.  At the same time, she told her mom that three of her four children were gay.
          “It was kind of cruel to also out my brother and sister but that’s where it was at that moment. I actually knew I was gay when I was five because I had a crush on the swimming instructor. I am over developed and under developed at the same time.”
     Did she ever let the swimming instructor know? “No, I hope not! But she was hot and I was aware of who I was at a very early age for sure.”
    She grew up in a very small town, Consort Alberta – population 600. Everybody knew everybody.
“I think my dad might have had some gay tendencies as well.”
     They were close but he left and ran off with another woman when Lang was about 12. “In England they tend to over focus on my relationship with my father saying that his leaving is why I was gay.”  
     But Lang was already fully formed gay.  She has always been in tune with her sexuality. Scorpio’s are like that.  I wonder, though, how her relationship with femininity has changed. It’s certainly been a long time since anyone has seen her in a dress.
     “I think my relationship with femininity has been exactly the same all the time. What I don’t think has been clear is my relationship with society’s view of what femininity is. To me it’s an approach, an emotional, spiritual approach to living. It’s not necessarily the exterior of what gender looks like. As you know, we are full on basking in gender fluidity and non-binary stuff right now. I feel very happy to be a woman, but I approach it differently from the norm.”
   Does gender fluid mean that some days one feels masculine and some feminine? And non-binary one feels that you don’t want to be defined by either.
   “I don’t know. It’s moving so quickly things change day to day.”
   I talk her about 14-year old girls all wanting to look gender fluid. It’s almost a fashion thing.
  “I understand it but I don’t understand it intellectually.”
   Where Lang has always liked to flirt with the idea of looking mannish, that doesn’t mean she’s ever wanted to be a man. In the 90s she broke boundaries as the first lesbian pop star, now that in itself seems old fashioned. It’s all about the trans and the gender fluid and the androgynous. She corrects, “Androgynous is so antiquated at this point.”
     Androgynous was David Bowie. If anything, Lang looks more feminine now. She no longer wears the heavy workman boots on stage. She sings barefoot.
     “I felt they were a little heavy and they portray an aggressive thing. I like to sing from the heart, so it helps me to feel grounded and natural to sing barefoot. And I have the most stability when I’m barefoot.”
   Onstage she wears suits similar to those worn on the original tour but updated. A lot of her clothes including a cowgirl outfit with lots of fringe (featured on the cover of Absolute Torch and Twang in 1989) are at the National Music Centre in Calgary, Canada. They sit with the effects of other famous Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
    She did a version of Cohen’s Hallelujah. Did he like it?
     “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that.  We talked about Buddhism and finances as we both experienced a similar challenge with our business managers.”
     Cohen’s money was embezzled by his business manager and then he let go of everything anyway and became a Buddhist monk. Lang had to sell her house in LA because of a similar situation and downsize. 
     “Both my dogs passed away, my Buddhist teacher passed away so there was not too much reason to stay there. I had run out of money because it had been stolen. I didn’t want to downsize in LA.”
    Had she already broken up with her girlfriend Jamie Price? “No. I thought we were in a good place, but I wanted to move out of LA and she didn’t. that was all part of letting life in LA go. We are still good friends.”
    Is she good at being friends with her exes? “It depends if it’s a good relationship. I don’t necessarily believe in monogamy and I don’t believe in staying with someone for a long time. I believe in relationships and the fluidity of that is not constrained by social norms. It couldn’t stay the way it was. It shifted. Everything shifted and I needed to move on and we just made that decision”
     Was she seeing anyone else in Portland? “Nope.
      Is touring hard on relationships? “I hardly tour anymore. I’m not retiring, but I don’t have any plans for more music at this point.”
   Around the time of Ingenue, Madonna did not dismiss rumours that she and Lang were in a relationship and Lang didn’t dismiss it either. “We shared a publicist.” And she decided to put out those rumours so they could both sell records? “I don’t know the entire story. Maybe. Because I was kind of dating one of Madonna’s close friends, so we were in a circle. We hung out. The lesbian chic thing was something that both Madonna and I benefited from, but I didn’t know it was implied that we were actually doing it. But Madonna and I never did.”
    It’s easy to feel sad for first generation girl rock stars. They became stars as much for their looks as their music. It has has taken truck loads of botox, filler and stress  for these women to master a version of that look and still feel relevant in their fifties and sixties. Even those women who did have a great voice like Kate Bush and Annie Lennox don’t sing anymore. Lang never in any way traded on her allure to the opposite sex – she stayed in the game.
     “I knew at an early age that the physical promise wasn’t permanent. I studied men and how men’s portraits and men’s physicality increased as they got older. There’s a type of respect that you feel to men who get older. I tried to study this and understand it. Why in society it’s like that. Why in biology it is. I don’t have the answers, but I was certainly aware of it and I wanted to take the interest in my physicality away from people and put it squarely on an internal impact that my music might have.”
     Older men can stay good looking – they’re called silver foxes, whereas older women are dismissed for not being foxy anymore.
     “That’s the way we’ve constructed our society and both genders are to blame for that.”
     We wonder if men’s skin looks better because they never wear make-up. Lang’s skin is fine lined but soft and youthful with a natural pink blush.  She’s never worn make up. Maybe that’s the key to it. 
     There is a sheet of paper in the typewriter. “I do write on it sometimes. I like the graphic, but it feels like manual labour.”
    Is that how she sees writing now? Manual labour? “Yes.”
    She typed the lyrics of Constant Craving on fax paper and she still has that paper. Only a few minutes rifling around in a draw and she shows it to me. She’s so organised that she knows where everything is.
    “That’s just because I got rid of a lot of stuff when I downsized.”
     The print on the paper has faded into shadows, yet the lines are still there. These days she’s writing “very very very small amounts”.
     What will she do? “I will look after my mom, hang with my partner and my partners son and I will live my life. And I’ll cook things.”
     Maybe she’ll open a restaurant or a coffee shop. She made extremely good coffee. “Nope, sorry. I make a coffee because we have a purpose. You wanted fluffy and strong and you got fluffy and strong.”
 
k.d. lang’s Ingénue Redux tour comes to the UK in July
k.d. Lang and Chrissy Iley
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Judy Kramer (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 31, 2019)

Judy Kramer is the big eyed, pretty blonde in the corner of the restaurant already waiting for me. She manages to look unassuming in a bright purple ostrich feather jacket. She is the super producer creator of Mamma Mia the stage show and the movies. She has been described as “the greatest impressario of the 21stcentury.” In the year to the end of last March, Kramer, Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba shared dividends of £1.3 million. 
     She is unexpectedly accessible. Girly even, with chats of costume departments advising her to rub pencil on zips so they don’t stick. And then we talk about bras and horses. Not what you’d expect from the woman called “the greatest impresario of the 21st century.” Mamma Mia has been seen by 60 million people worldwide in 50 productions in 16 languages and has grossed over 2 billion dollars at the box office. It has achieved the status as fifth longest running musical in West End history and then there were the two wonderful Mamma Mia movies – the first one repositioning Meryl Streep as a musical comedy star.
     On April 6th 2019 it will be the 20th Anniversary of Mamma Mia.
     Kramer, who’s now 61, risked everything to make the musical happen. She worked as Tim Rice’s assistant on the musical Chess Premiere in 1986 when she met Ulvaeus and Andersson and spent many years trying to convince them their song lyrics had all the drama, the loss, the love, the tragedy and the triumph of a hit musical. She saw it. No one else did. Pretty steely.
     Doesn’t she think she should be called an Impressaria? “I see what you mean but in this day and age an actress is an actor. Perhaps I should start signing things Judy Kramer, Impressaria. There’s something very Victorian about it.”
    Did she have a master plan for making the two Swedish people with beards into increased legendary status? “There was no actual master plan, although, there was a plan to get a show on, to help the craft of writers, make people come to it and hope that it runs a while so you can pay your investors.” She has in fact produced 50 productions of Mamma Mia. It went global, it grossed 2 billion and then spawned 2 big studio movies.
     “I can analyse it by saying it was organic and had a certain amount of serendipity.”
     The stage show alone really has grossed 2 billion? She shrugs. “That’s the kind of figure that’s used when you’re putting comparables into market research.”
     There is no comparable. She knows that? “Well the 2 billion is shared and that’s the gross. But the movies have taken another billion. The first one took over 6 million at the box office and the second one 400 million.”
     It was only released in July 2018 and the DVD in November 2018 on so the figures should now be higher.
    “People always said it will never play Broadway, there will never be a film but it ran on Broadway for 12 years. Not a master plan. It became its own little industry. Well, a big industry.”
     And Kramer became not just a producer but a CEO, or as I like to sing to the tune of Super Trooper, a super producer. Does she remember the defining moment where she met Ulvaes and Andersson?
     “I met them in the early 80s when I was working on Chess. I guess I’ve known them half my life. I met them in 1982. They had stopped being Abba and I was working for Tim Rice as his production assistant. One of my first jobs was to collect Bjorn from the airport. I was booking orchestras and working for all three of them and that’s when I fell in love with the songs. But they’d moved away from Abba. They were doing something else. I’d worked on several musicals (Cats, Rocky Horror, My Fair Lady), all quite traditional. And there’s the thing with musicals. We often get the story right but not the music and the music right but not the story.
     “After Chess finished, I stayed in touch with Benny and Bjorn, mainly Bjorn because he moved to England and was living in Henley. Somehow, I or his wife Lena had persuaded him to buy a horse so I went to see the horse and him quite often. I’d drive to Henley, ride the horse and stay with the family. It was always in the background. The lyrics would be the source material. The idea was to tell a story using those songs as if it was an original musical. As if it was a Rogers and Hammerstein.”
     She shared her vision. The particular song Winner Takes It All she imagined it at the helm of the musical. The anchor. “On Broadway they call it “the 11 o’clock number”. I call it the Don’t Cry For Me Argentina moment because every musical has the big kind of end ballad that the actor or actress sings and I always felt that that song had the power. I love the lyrics and I’ve always felt that Abba songs have a female consciousness running throughout. Bjorn had written those lyrics for Agneta and Frida and they were very much a look inside a woman’s head. Winner Takes it All was the one I’d always wanted to sing to a boyfriend or to myself. It has the high emotional drama, the rollercoaster. It’s a big romantic split so I used to listen to it over and over because it ends up making me feel good. It hits you.”
    And that’s what an Abba song does. It makes you feel triumphant over bitterness. It gives you riches out of desperation. All those opposite emotions in a few minutes.
    “And that’s what I thought. Like an opera. I could hear how it would translate to musical theatre, to the stage. Somebody giving it their all, taking a big breath and going out with that song. And, of course, Meryl does that in the movie.”
     Mamma Mia reached another level once Meryl Streep signed on to the movie. “When her character sings that song to Piers Brosnan before her daughter’s wedding he said the hairs on the back of his neck went up. Of course, they were on a clifftop in Greece.  Meryl was always our first choice.”
     Was it hard to get her involved? “No, and that surprised Phyllida Lloyd who directed the stage show and the first movie. Early on we decided we weren’t going to be casting 35-year olds (to play a mother of a young woman). This character is a real woman with history and substance. I had seen Meryl in New York doing Mother Courage and I saw something in her portraying this woman with a tough life. She had a kind of a fight so I went to Meryl’s agent slightly under the radar because at the time the studio had to approve casting and they were “shouldn’t we go for the younger generation…?”” And just like that without any proclamations of feminism, without any complaints of older women don’t get cast in lead roles, just like that it was done. And Meryl’s career changed forever. Without Mamma Mia, there’d be no musical Meryl, no little number in this year’s Mary Poppins Returns, there’d be no Meryl in Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It added a whole new dimension to Streep’s already over accomplished career. (Streep had sung at the end of Postcards From The Edge in 1990, but before Mamma Mia she was not known as a singer and now no one can stop her.) And without Streep, there may not have been the numbers at the box office and a movie franchise that’s already in talks about a third movie.
     When the first Mamma Mia was made ten years ago, it was exactly that time where you would so often see a male lead in his fifties and wonder how could his wife be 25 and the mother of teenagers? 
     “Meryl had seen the show and she immediately said ‘yes I’m interested.’ When Meryl said yes we had T shirts made that said We Were There Before Meryl.”
     It was a female triumvurant. A female producer, director, writer.
     “It was unusual at the time although I think it’s no longer so unusual.” (Actually, it is. In the recently announced Golden Globes, everyone in the Best Director category is male.)
    “It’s about roles for strong women in two generations. That’s the genius of the story. Great roles for women.”
     Catherine Johnson wrote it and Phyllida Lloyd directed it. They were all in it from the beginning.
     “When the three of us got together in the 90s we were the original architects. Then we went to Meryl and Meryl liked the fact that we had not produced a hundred movies but we knew the essence of Mamma Mia and the architecture. And that was part of growing the legacy of these 3 women, creating the roles for women and we also became great friends.”
     However, they weren’t involved in the second movie Mamma Mia Here We Go Again, which was written by Ol Parker with Richard Curtis as advisor. It was also directed by Ol Parker. 
     “You had to think outside the box for a second movie and we’d all moved into different areas of our lives. A bit like a family where you’re all completely in each other’s pockets for years as we were, then you grow apart for different things, different relationships. There was a time where we’d open a show anywhere in the world and see each other at the parties. I talked to both of them of course about doing another film and they were up for the ideas being thrown around but it never worked which is a shame because it would have been great to keep the family together so to speak.”
     She says this with just a hint of nostalgia. “The lead singer found another band. I phoned Richard Curtis. It needed someone who could distance themselves and actually not be caught up in the past. In a way, everything does feedback very much to the original characters but I don’t think anyone would have been brave enough to kill off Meryl if they were on the inside track.”
    In Mamma Mia Here We Go Again it weaves from past to present. Streep’s character has died so only appears in the past sequences and the showstopper is Streep’s mother being played by Cher. It remains a feminist film. The head of the board of Universal Pictures is Donna Langley. “Another great woman who was part of the first film and is now the chairman of Universal. Rare that a woman runs a studio. We remain friends.”
    We order food, Swedish herrings in deference to Abba. It was 10 years between the first and second film. Fans on social media are demanding a third movie now. There’s plenty of Abba songs to be rediscovered but as of yet it’s not been signed off.
     “Even Piers said, “we can’t leave it another 10 years.” Although there is something about the 10 years that makes it like a good wine, matured and Cher is a very good actress, a very powerful one and she came on board especially.”
     Quite a coup. “Ah. Cher was – to have two of the biggest legends that are only a few years apart in age to play mother and daughter…. I think Meryl found it hilarious and so did Cher so that was a good start. And Cher had always liked Mamma Mia. I heard she went to the theatre on Broadway.”
    Perhaps she wanted to play the Streep part first time round? “I think she thought she could be that role and she is that role. She is the woman who’s done it on her own and has all those ingredients. She is the ultimate rock chick but that could so easily have had a different path.”
     “I had approached Cher for the first film in 2006 before we cast Christine Baranski. Phyllida and I flew to Malibu to meet Cher to talk about her playing Tanya.  At the time, she was a little sad not to have Cher but agrees she was much better to play Ruby, Streep’s mother. “It wasn’t the right time for her then. She said to me when we were filming “Things worked out didn’t they?” She loves playing Ruby and she loves singing Fernando and she got to choose Andy Garcia.”
     Really? She cast her own love interest? “We had a list and she definitely had approval and was very pleased with him. We’ve never had a problem with casting really. Pierce, all you had to say to him was Abba, Greek island and Meryl Streep and he was in and Andy Garcia heard duet and Cher. It’s empowering, Cher as the grandmother and gets Andy Garcia.
     “Cher’s look in the movie is more fairy godmother than grandmother. The platinum wig, the sequins, the make-up were all her decisions. it took her character to a whole other level.  I always wanted Cher. Ol Parker wrote it with her in mind. We had to have her, we had to raise the bar and we were delving into the back story of Donna Sheridan, who had to have a mother somewhere. She had done everything the opposite to her mother. She brought her daughter up on an island giving her safety and security whereas her own mother was probably slightly wayward. She would definitely have been at Studio 54 in the white dress suit with sparkling champagne. Cher’s great concern was that she didn’t want to be seen as a bad mother. No one says her character is bad, just not very hands on.”
     Now Kramer and Cher have become good friends with. I wonder if the purple ostrich jacket might even have been inspired by Cher?
     “Great friendships have always been formed on the back of this movie. In the film world, you make friends but you may not see them all the time. When everyone comes back it was like a big wedding weekend. I’ve become firm friends with Christine Baranski.
     When Cher first arrived on set, I think she felt nervous. She hadn’t done a film for a while but she tells the story about Ron Meyer who was her agent and now works at Universal and I’d called him and said any chance we can get Cher playing Meryl’s mother and I wondered how he pitched that to her. She said “he called and said, ‘Mamma Mia 2, you’re doing it’ and hung up”. So, she turned up and felt straight away the Mamma Mia factor. She came in when were shooting at Shepperton in the studio. It was a big party brewing and it was also the week we had Meryl. You know how Cher’s feisty. Well she’s fragile as well. Not in a physical way. I can relate to that because people always think I’m not shy because I do what I do. But I’m actually permanently going into rooms full of people and feeling shy.”
    Kramer lives in London, has horses in Warwickshire and an apartment in New York but will visit Cher in California. Cher was so inspired by her Mamma Mia experience she did an album Dancing Queen and gives Kramer a thank you. Kramer shrugs it off. “She just got inspired.” Still, it was Kramer who did the inspiring.
     We finish our herrings. Kramer is open yet discreet and that’s very charming. She’s soft and easy company, yet a risk taker. Later that night I’m at a showbizzy party where I meet a man who helmed Polydor Records, Abba’s record company in the 80s and 90s. He knew Kramer. He told me she risked everything to make Mamma Mia – her home and everything in it and it took her years.  He tells me at the time she was involved with Olympic medallist Alan Pascoe. 
    Of course, there have been various men in her life but the only man now is Hector the horse. She grew up loving horses, and show-jumping, although now she favours dressage mistakenly thinking it might have been easier. 
     “I’ve always had horses. I’ve got nine now. As a teen I worked as a groom. I met a horsey crowd but when I was 22 started working in theatre and now the horses have come back.” 
     She rolls with some big international riders, one of them being Nick Skelton (Olympic medallist in Rio).
     “And I became an Ambassador for British show jumping. I became friendly with Nick Skelton and we discussed buying show jumpers but they are very expensive now. But I did want to get back involved with horses. I was one of the first people to buy a racehorse from his son Dan and now I have four National Hunt racehorses. I love seeing them. I’m always tempted to ride them but it would be a risk. They are an area of my life which has got nothing to do with being a showbiz impressaria. I became fascinated by the racing world. It’s not what people think – that it’s about betting and horses that go very fast. It’s the psychology of the training. I love that world.”
    Her other horses include a retired mare called Rock Chick Supremo who had a fractured bone and was about to be put down but she’s now a brood mare. “She sits in a field and gets pregnant. These horses are looked after like it’s a Four Seasons spa. They have chiropractors, osteopaths, they are massaged all the time. 
     I wanted to get back into riding again. I thought dressage would be safe but I realise now it’s not…I bought a beautiful grey stallion, called Hector. I thought he can almost teach me, but in my first year of having him (in 2016) he bucked me off and I broke many bones down my right side. He thought he was being playful with me and I was probably being too friendly with him. Stallions are like men. Also, I’ve learnt never to wear perfume around him. It frightens him. He didn’t mean any harm. Anyway, I’m under his thumb.”
    She gets out her phone and shows me a picture of the beautiful horse, almost white with giant, soulful yet naughty eyes.
   “There’s a Warwickshire life, a London life and a New York life.” She enjoys having all these lives. One as an escape from the other and now there’s a new life in fashion. Elizabeth Emmanuel made her the outfit for the Mamma Mia Here We Go Again premiere. A white silk suit with embroidery. A Prince Charming outfit. He could have worn it on his horse.  Emmanuel has also made some exquisite fairytale military jackets (very on trend) as well as tons of white silk designs. 
    “She’s had a tough time.” Emmanuel was planning a fashion comeback but her backer dropped out so Kramer has been putting some money into her business. “My life is very full now. I love what’s happened with Mamma Mia. Generations of people have come to see it. I know Abba have never reformed as a band but because of the musicals they’ve never really gone away. Whole generations have been involved in the Mamma Mia family.” 
    Of course, it would be easy to think that everything Kramer turned her hand to was vastly successful but the Spice Girls musical written by Jennifer Saunders had a very short run and people didn’t warm to the Spice Girls songs as they did Abba. This year the Spice Girls are reuniting for a world tour. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. 
     “It was kind of a rough time for me.”
    What was it about the Spice musical that seemed different to Mamma Mia? Did she know from the start it wasn’t going to be successful?
     “No, you try your best, you don’t know, or maybe I knew too much. In the beginning I had a certain level of naivety that got me through. I believed there was something there. Obviously, the Spice Girls had a huge fan base but it wasn’t the story of them. It was another mother and daughter story really.”
    Is mother/daughter her thing? Is she the Impressaria with an extremely close or difficult relationship with her mother that she drew on?
     “No, I loved my mum very much. She passed in 2002. I was probably closer to my dad.  She didn’t see the films but she’d have been there for every show and my dad as well. Catherine Johnson came up with the mother/daughter idea for Mamma Mia and she is a single mum and now in fact she’s a grandmother.”
     Our conversation recoils back to Cher who Kramer thinks is a pioneer. Certainly difficult to have a daughter who ends up a son.
     “She’s had some tough times but she is a pioneer. In the 60s on television doing her show. She won’t stop until the wheels fall off. She feels like a young person. When we were planning the premiere of Mamma Mia I told her that the big premiere was in London and there might be a screening in Germany and she said ‘what about New York?’ I said I’m not sure about New York. It’s a big global event so we probably won’t go to New York the next day. She said, ‘what’s the problem? The old people won’t make it?’
    In all the different Kramer lives, a permanent man doesn’t seem to feature. “Men are the coolest people but we don’t necessarily want to live with them. That definitely applies to me.”
    Does she want to live with Hector? Does she want to move into his paddock?  “I do in a sense, although I think he’d rather move into mine. That’s how I feel about him.”
     While we’re at lunch the nominations for the Golden Globes come in. Mamma Mia is not on the shortlist. She pauses wondering what to think about it. Last time round Streep was nominated. It’s a given that good box office doesn’t guarantee awards. She thinks for a while. “I’m sad for Lily James. I wanted her to get a nomination. We were in the Vanity Fair top ten and actually I’m fine. it means I don’t have to worry about going to the event and not winning.”
   She knows getting the award is a process and not necessarily anything to do with talent. 
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Ben Whishaw (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 24, 2019)

Ben Whishaw and Chrissy Iley
Ben Whishaw and Chrissy Iley

Ben Whishaw is wearing a navy shirt, dark wool trousers and a fluffy knitted hat. It’s a strange combination of quirkiness and elegance – he’s a one off. Lush, dark curls. He’s all cheekbones and large eyes. The eyes look so intense. They could be the eyes of a very intelligent animal, but perhaps that’s just because you can imagine him so easily as Paddington Bear – he is the voice of Paddington.
He’s also brought a new quirkiness to the quiet genius that is Q in the Bond movies and he’s just fresh from picking up the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for his portrayal of Norman Scott opposite Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal. He was achingly good. Everyone thinks so.
Did he expect this double win? “No idea. You never know how these things are going to work out but it was very nice.”
Is it career changing to have a Golden Globe winning prefix to his name? “I don’t know if it changes anything but it feels nice. They make you feel great being the winner,” he smiles and sips on herbal tea.
We are in a photographic studio in East London where I’ve just seen him drape himself so elegantly and effortlessly over an old-fashioned gymnasium horse and a British flag.
Does he think that winning awards in Hollywood means he will be spending more time there? “I don’t feel it’s my world out there. I just sort of dropped in and it was a lovely thing. I would like to drop in more often. Maybe it opens doors. I guess we’ll see. I haven’t directly communicated with Norman Scott but I gather he was happy and he asked for a signed photo of me holding the award.”
He speaks of Scott affectionately. In the mini series which sees Scott involved with horses and dogs, relating to them perhaps more easily than people? “He definitely feels a kinship with animals. A security that maybe he didn’t have with people.”
He is in London rehearsing a play called Norma Jean Baker of Troy. It will open in New York early April. The director (Katie Mitchell) doesn’t fly so the rehearsals are all in London. He plays a man who likes to dress up as Marilyn and the opera singer Renee Fleming is his co-star. I find it quite odd that Mitchell won’t be coming to the first night of her own play. Whishaw accepts this and says, “She doesn’t have enough time in her schedules to take the boat. She goes to Europe a lot to work by train and Renee has crazy insane schedules to everything has been slotted about what Renee could do. Renee is very open and hardworking and really clever. It’s incredible she’s open to this weird and wonderful thing. We just got the costumes. I wear a dress that’s a replica of the one she wore in The Seven Year Itch – the white one where the wind comes up and they’ve given me bum, hips and breasts although I think they’re not as big as Marilyn’s they made it proportionate to my body. It’s a strange thing, I’m not playing Marilyn but a man who’s infatuated with her so much that he wants to dress up as her to be close to her and because he’s in mourning for the loss of her the play is set in the year she died. Apparently, there was a spate of copycat suicides that year.”
The play will open as the first play in a space called The Shed which is also an art gallery and music venue. It’s been written by the poet Anne Carson. Carson is a Canadian poet and professor of classics and has been described as the greatest poet since Robert Lowell.
He thinks nothing of one minute doing an independent play and then a blockbuster. He moves in and out of both extremes easily. He was last seen in the Disney epic Mary Poppins Returns. It’s what happens to the characters thirty years after the original movie. He played Mr Banks – the grown-up boy Michael, now the father of the family facing 1930s depression and the potential loss of his home after the actual loss of his wife. His children aren’t adjusting and the governess Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) has never been more needed.
“Mary Poppins was the first film I ever saw. My dad taped it off the telly and we had it on a Betamax tape. I watched it so many times the tape wore out.”
Is it possible to wear out a tape? Isn’t that a metaphor?
“It’s how I remember it.And now I play the grown-up boy who’s now the daddy of the family. His old nanny blows in because there’s been a lot of crisis in the family. Michael is struggling to cope and look after the children and run the household and pay for everything. That’s what motors the film. He’s about to lose the children’s home.”
I can see why they wanted him for that part. A man child, a 38- year old actor who can create the “perfect man with the struggle in his soul.”
“Well there’s nothing interesting about somebody who’s doing fine, is there?
Mary Poppins had a cousin called Topsy Turvy played by Meryl Streep. Did he get to hang out with Streep?
“No. I met her at the rehearsal and she was nice but I’m so completely left speechless when I’m in the same room as her.”
Ah yes, the introvert, extrovert. The actor who once told me he’s afraid of meeting people.
“Do you never feel that speechlessness come on you? Even though she seemed to be the nicest person, I was very timid and shy around her.”
Whishaw has an unusual but mesmerising charm. I wanted to give him my childhood Paddington Bear because it was special to me and his performance was special but my mother had thrown it away. He wasn’t disappointed by this, or at least he’s too charming to show it. He comes over quite other worldly, hyper sensitive but very soft and determined, full of contradictions like shy and actor.
“I haven’t got over my fear of meeting people. I love people but I’m just shy of meeting new people especially when they’re famous.”
Years have passed since Whishaw was fresh out of drama school and at 23 was acclaimed as one of the best ever Hamlets (the next Olivier) in the Trevor Nunn production. He played Hamlet as a teenager alienated from the world. Last year his portrayal of Norman Scott was arguably the best thing on TV. Clearly the judges at the Golden Globes agreed. He actually blushes when I mention this performance – so nuanced, so vulnerable, so creepy all at the same time.
“I’m pleased you found it all of those things. Did it make you laugh?”
Oh yes, and cry.
“He was a very sad man.” Scott loved his dogs. Whishaw loves cats. His father’s cat Bob died recently. He was only 6. He had to give his cats to his dad when he started working away from home a lot. They were a mother and daughter duo and the daughter Yana is now 18, the mother deceased.
“Yana got dragged under a car when she was 3 and her leg was ripped off. They had to stick it back on and ever since she looks fragile but she’s tough, almost indestructible.”
I wonder if he identifies with that. Looking fragile but actually quite strong.    He’s very excited to have the role that embodies the vulnerability and the feistiness of Marilyn Monroe. I see the qualities in him.
When he comes back from New York he will begin shooting the new Bond.  Of course, no one in a Bond movie can ever tell you in advance what it’s going to be like but I assume it’s a security issue.
“I think they’re probably trying to figure out what to do with the storyline. At least I know that y character is the same someone did tell me this time that there might be a scene with Q’s cats which you would be interested in.”
Have the cats been cast yet? “I don’t think so.” I immediately want to sort out an audition for my cat Roger (Moore). He would definitely have screen presence.
“And that would be a lovely connection named after a former Bond. Does he travel? Can he come to Pinewood? Can he cock an eyebrow?” Yes, he can. That’s why he’s called Roger Moore. “I’ll get onto Barbara Broccoli about it.”
Who is Mr Bond these days? “It’s still Daniel Craig, I think. They never tell you till the last minute.”
I tell him that I preferred Roger Moore’s Bond when they had film titles like Octopussy. The Craig Bond seems a little hard, a little rough diamond. His edges are the perfect contrast to Whishaw’s fluid Q.
He changes the subject back to Norma Jean. “Isn’t it good that I’m going to dress up as Norma Jean?” It is. I tell him I once went to an auction of Marilyn’s clothes and put in a bid for some pink marabou trimmed stilettoes but the winning bid exceeded mine by around £12,000.
“I would have loved to have had something of hers. She really was amazing. She had a lot going on. A lot of sadness on her plate, poor darling. To be a star in that star system and those men.”
If she had been born 50 years later, does he think she would have been part of the #metoo movement?
“I’m sure she would have. I’ve been listening to interviews with her. She doesn’t seem afraid of anything.”
Fearless and vulnerable. That’s another contradiction that could possibly describe both of them.
“Yes,” he says with a ‘cats got the cream’ expression. He loves contradiction. We talk about the contradiction in the song lyrics of Steven Sondheim.
He asks, “Do you know the song Losing My Mind (by Sondheim)?” He sings it. He can sing. All the great divas have sung it.
“I’ve just finished reading a book called Fragments. It’s bits of Marilyn’s diary, notes on hotel paper, poetry. She writes beautifully. Apparently, Arthur Miller was here with her when they were doing the film The Prince and the Showgirl and she opened his diary and read about how disappointed he was with her, how embarrassed he was being around his intellectual friends with her. Apparently, this was devastating to Marilyn.  All these men say how difficult she was. It makes you want to strangle them.”
Has he ever read anyone else’s diary? “No, I haven’t but she must have known what she was looking for to see what she feared. It’s like looking at someone’s phone and somehow, it’s easier to look in the phone or the diary than ask the person directly. Isn’t it the thing that you want to have it confirmed but it’s really self-destructive? But maybe you think I have the evidence that would release me from this thing but no, I’ve never checked anyone’s phone or diary. There’s something a bit desperate about that, isn’t there?”
Well, Whishaw is the master of sensitivity. He’d never want to be desperate. He’s just finished a film Little Joe, “about a genetically modified plant that takes over people’s brains.”
I wondered if he played the plant. He doesn’t. how does he choose his roles or do roles come to him if producer and directors think the part needs the Whishaw effect? – something simple made a little spooky, or something spooky made a little normal.
“Usually I want parts where the character is compelling to me but sometimes if I fall in love with the director and want to work with them so much, I’ll do it no matter what they ask. It was my love for the Austrian director Jessica Hausner that made me want to do this film. She did a film called Lourdes a few years ago about a woman with multiple sclerosis who is indeed cured when she goes to Lourdes. It’s about miracles and how they happen or did they? And with Little Joe you’re not actually sure if a disaster is going to happen, if the plant is manipulating people or people are just insane. It’s the same kind of question.
“I play a scientist who has created this plant – a very pretty plant actually.”
The thing about a Whishaw role I find, is it haunts you long after the movie has retired. The Lobster was one such movie. It was surreal and bizarre and black like fairy tale.
He liked doing the Lobster where he played Limping Man. it was a love story. His character was straight, or at least in a sexual way.
Whishaw has created an ever-widening niche for himself –

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Barry Humphries (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 17, 2019)

Barry Humphries and Chrissy Iley
Barry Humphries and Chrissy Iley

From the outside Barry Humphries home in north west London is unassuming. Inside, every inch of wall is lined with gorgeous pre-Raphaelite paintings, book cases heave with first editions. There are thousands of books. I wait for him in a pale blue sitting room with tones of hyacinth.
His wife Lizzie is there. She is tall and elegant and very funny. Before long she and I are showing each other our impersonations of Olivia Colman as we discuss her performance in The Favourite. Humphries joins us with, “It gives lesbian porn a bad name.”
He’s wearing a purple linen jacket, a green pullover and purple corduroy trousers but the corduroy is horizontal, in perfect keeping with the idea that Humphries likes to blend in, seem normal but is actually completely the other way. He defends Colman saying she was very good in the Night Manager. Lizzie and I chorus ‘but she’s the same in everything’. Humphries smiles. “So am I.”
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Humphries is the creator of many diverse personas – Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson and the ghost Sandy Stone.  Often they could say things that Humphries himself could not.  Humphries is a rare breed – a man who is altogether a man who is available and unavailable at once. He’s intimate, yet detached, kind and razor sharp, cutting.
We’re here to talk about his return to the London stage for Rob Brydon probes Barry Humphries Live On Stage. Did he know Brydon already?
“Yes I wrote to him and I said I admired his work so we met for dinner.”
So, it’s like a bromance? Will he rehearse this probing? No. It’s totally spontaneous,” he grimaces.
You wonder if it’s hard for Barry Humphries to be Barry Humphries. Last year he put on an intriguing show at the Barbican with the Australian chanteuse Meow Meow. It was a fascinating journey through songs from the Weimar Republic, composers who were banned by Hitler that Humphries had rediscovered as a child. He was whip smart and funny as himself.
“I’m getting confidence now to do things as myself. I’ve always preferred to be heavily disguised but a disguise I’ve never used is the disguise of myself.”
He’s just back from Australia and is still suffering from jetlag. Where do I live in LA he asks apropos of seemingly nothing, but the eyebrow is raised.
I am giving you a scoop,” he whispers. “Edna’s coming back. She’s in very good shape. She’s been measured for new frocks and 3 songs have been written.  She’s back there at the end of the year after opening in Australia.”
Edna did a retirement world tour a couple of years back where she put away her sequinned winged glasses for good.
“My first song for that show is written and it’s all about why Edna didn’t retire. It’s a wonderful song explaining to the audience why it was impossible to retire. It says there were too many people trying to copy me, including Barry Humphries and it was time they reacquainted themselves with the real thing. Too many clones.”
Edna got into trouble before she retired or maybe it was Barry Humphries because people were saying she was very anti-trans. Is it the same political situation in Australia?
“Oh, nothing has been more grotesquely interpreted. Edna carefully said she thought that men who had themselves castrated did not become women and that got taken the wrong way.”
Edna was still causing trouble even in her retirement.
“She was about as gone as Cher or Dame Nelly Melba of whom your younger readers will know nothing (Australian singer who did many retirement concerts).
It seems Humphries works tirelessly. He’s revising the comic strip Barry McKenzie, writing the new Edna show and the meantime he has the Palladium.
I remember going to an Edna show in Drury Lane and I caught a gladioli. “You catch gladioli like you catch Ebola. Right place right time you get it..” I laugh, he smiles.
“I like anyone who can make me and an audience laugh.”
He hopes his Palladium show will be a conversation about how comedy has changed, about what’s funny and what isn’t.
Does he think that the fashion has changed in his and Edna’s lifetime? “Not in a drastic way. More and more people want to be comedians. In my day not many people wanted to be a comedian as an ambition. It wasn’t profitable. But with television and all the other outlets and also fame attached to being a comedian, comedians are the new rock stars. Billy Connolly was the first rock star comedian.”
What will be some of his greatest comedy moments?
“I’m still deciding but there will be some scenes from the Marx Brothers, Steve Martin and Woody Allen. And I’d like to include some of my own early films. Lizzie says if she hears me laughing in another room, she knows I’m laughing at one of my own jokes. She can tell.”
He remembers going to his first comedy show.
“It was an amazing discovery when I went to The Tivoli with my parents. The Tivoli was a disreputable theatre in Melbourne which had variety shows but on this occasion my parents went because I was a fan of someone called Arthur Askey, a British comedian. To hear a man onstage making the whole audience laugh was a miracle to me. I thought I wonder how they do that and the seed was planted, little knowing that I might one day…”
In the past, Humphries has described Edna as being opinionated, acerbic and bolshy and did he even like her? “I like the effect she has on the audience. She makes them laugh.” Thus, Edna gave Humphries the gift he’d wanted as a child. And it must have been hard for him to give her up to be onstage as himself as he is much shyer.
The prep for Edna – the dresses, the wigs, the make-up, the dancing, the eight shows a week must have been very exhausting. And everyone’s always asking where does Humphries end and Edna begin.  Suddenly there was no circle. Edna was ended. But it seems he couldn’t live without her and her voice. She’s coming back later this year. There’s already a tour of Australia and US dates planned.
He is nostalgic about the comedians and the Australia in his youth.
“When they’d done every stage in England several times, when the audience could repeat the words of their comic routines they went to Melbourne to the Tivoli. They made jokes I didn’t understand and I noticed my parents exchanging guilty looks, must have been naughty jokes. Risque. Little did I know I would become a risqué comedian. A blue comic as they were called.
When I first got a gig at a return serviceman’s club in Sydney in the 1950s, they said to me ‘the audience likes blue material and at the age of 22 I was so naïve I wore my Sunday best blue three-piece suit. I thought the material was fabric.”
Humphries has had a 64 year career onstage. By now he knows the difference. It turns out he has quite a thing for Brydon.
“Every time I turn on the television Rob is there on the deck of a ship. He seems to live a wonderful life on board those ships (he does a commercial for P&O cruises). I am consumed with envy of Rob. Benevolent envy.”
As Humphries he’s extremely benevolent. As Edna less so. He cuts an impressive figure today – so colourful and energetic and still has the legs for Edna. Does he feel 85?
“No, I feel 52.” He likes to paint. He enjoys a good restaurant – especially one owned by a celebrity chef – and he has friendships with many luminaries including Prince Charles and Camilla.  He’s done countless world tours and has written two memoirs – My Life As Me and More Please, both achingly well written.  He has courted danger and controversy throughout.
I’ve always wondered though is it a political statement. Why is it that Edna never wears a bra?
“She’s never been embarrassed to say that she was blessed in many ways but not that way. She waited for something to appear but it never took place. She found the twinset helpful and that if she wore elaborate spectacles no-one’s eyes dropped south of the glasses. She’s never tried to be a sex object. She’s very relieved she’s not known as that. They’re a miserable lot, the sex objects”
He is the master of being attached and detached all at the same time.  It’s been so long since he had a drink, he doesn’t really treat it as an issue anymore.
“It’s a nice thing but a life’s a life. For some people like me it’s off the menu. It just doesn’t work. I have it in the house for other people. I could give you an absinthe if you want one. I brought upon myself some horrible events.”
Did he find that Edna had taken away the voice of Barry Humphries so that’s why he found it so hard to return to the stage as himself? And maybe himself was never himself.
“It’s more like I find the voice for it. Whatever the thought it I think who would be best saying this? Me, him, her, it so I choose like a casting agent. When I saw The Favourite, I thought Edna would be very good in the Colman role.”
Edna a lesbian? “No. As she once said, she doesn’t even like the word. It leaves a nasty taste in her mouth.”
I remember her saying that. “It was one of her famous utterances.”
Does he ever think her humour was too cruel? “Nobody ever asked for their money back. she’s fundamentally caring.”
His parents were far from encouraging. I remember my mother saying ‘look at that comedian. It’s pathetic at his age but the comedian she was referring to was only about fifty. These days 85 is the new 50.”
Humphries was not there when his mother died. He was told she was in hospital but it was nothing serious. But contrary to the end she would say, ‘look at these lovely flowers Barry sent me’ but he had sent no flowers.
“I come from a family who have a great deal of prudiness about illness. If someone was very ill we’d say he hasn’t been very well lately, which means dying.”
Also, perhaps the family didn’t tell his mother she was gravely ill.
“That’s right. I had a vision of someone coming back to Australia after a long absence and going to the family home and finding it was occupied by Ukranians and then you say to your sister what’s happened to mum and dad? ‘oh, they died but we didn’t want to worry you.’
Does he forgive his parents?
“Yes, I sympathise with them. I agree with them wholeheartedly about everything that they said to me that offended me at the time. My parents were very nice. They had a hard time with me. Whenever I did a performance or asserted myself in any way at a family gathering my mother would say, ‘don’t look at Barry, he’s drawing attention to himself.’ I thought that would be a good name for a show. Barry Humphries draws attention to himself one more time. Maybe I’ll call my new show that. My mother had a series of phrases. They weren’t original but they were, on her lips, rather devastating. She timed it perfectly. She was a frustrated artist I think and they are dangerous people, frustrated artists. You know Hitler was a frustrated artist. She was very hard to please so I grew up with the assumption that women were impossible to please and some of them obliged me by conforming to this, by being impossible.”
Humphries has had four wives Brenda Wright, a dancer (1955-1957) when he was 21 and she was 19. It ended quickly. Of the marriage she has said, ‘there’s nothing about Barry Humphries that I want to remember. My marriage to him was a long time ago and thankfully every year takes me a little further away from it.’
Rosalind Tong (1957-1970) a dancer, artist Diane Millstead (1979-1989), mother of his two sons Oscar and Rupert and Lizzie Spender (actress and equestrian, daughter of the poet Stephen (1990 till now) He has two daughters, Tessa and Emily from his 3rd wife.
“Women are impossible but not Lizzie. She’s the exception. It took four marriages to find her.”
Perhaps he should have kept them as girlfriends and not actually married them.
“I was doing very well financially and I thought I’ve got to get rid of this money somehow.
Is that close to what happened?
“Yes, the Ukranians improved the family home greatly. Sometimes I think it would be funny to advertise the new show and then say to the audience coming in very sorry ladies and gentleman but Dame Edna has passed away. We didn’t want to worry you.”
Humphries is presented with a contraption and he grimaces. He says to his assistant who has just delivered it, “You had to do that in front of a journalist, didn’t you… So far the grim reaper has made very few inroads but my hearing has suffered.”
His hearing doesn’t seem to be any different with the contraption but I can hear a high-pitched squeaking. The hearing aid has done the opposite to aid and it’s reminding Humphries of all the restaurants he doesn’t like to go in because they’re too loud – “the Caprice is deafening.”
He once wanted to open a restaurant called The Oubliette, which he would fill with Shostakovich like music so no one would be able to talk at all.
“In the middle ages they used to chuck somebody in a hole and then they forget about them so the Oubliette was a restaurant where you are forgotten and the waiter never comes. I remember one time in the 1960’s when a cookery writer at The Express invited me to lunch at The Savoy. I could choose whatever I wanted and she would interview me about food so I ordered Oysters Zarina which are oysters with caviar on them and you dip them in cream. Must have cost a fortune. The chef came to the table and said, ‘you’re the first person to order Oyster Zarina since Ambassador Ribbentrop’.
He seems a little sheepish about being 85. There must be a sense of time running out.
“Is there a follow up to the CBE and if so, how long does it take?” Humphries is already a dame as Edna. Perhaps people might think a Sir would be superfluous.
“People have said it’s not strictly kosher, Edna’s damehood.”
What age does he feel? “I feel about 52.”
We discuss a man in Holland who tried to change the date on his birth certificate because he identified as 45 instead of 65. He wasn’t allowed. One can change one’s pronoun but not one’s age.”
After the trans-phobia, Humphries got into trouble because he was pro Brexit, anti-Brussels and now he is redefined as anti-Brexit.
“I think I have actually but I don’t have any interesting political views. What was lovely about being in Australia was they’ve never heard of Brexit. I was in Sydney writing and Lizzie was visiting her horses. We have a flat with a view of the harbour. I’m reviving Barry McKenzie the comic strip. I thought what would this character so popular in the sixties be doing now and I worked it out.” (it first appeared in Private Eye, now it’s destined for The Oldie.)
He’s come back to England because he wanted to see some Australian mates who are not in Australia any more.
“There are no Australians in Australia any more. Only Chinese.”
The Australians of his generation like Germain Greer and Clive James are very much part of the British heritage. “I wrote a clerihew about Clive James. Dear old Clive James is still alive. We know he’s not dead because he’s telling us about all the books he’s read. Germain is still alive. And I’m very glad. And Rolf Harris is still alive. I never liked his appearance.”
What does he fear? “Obscurity and ghosts. I’m very scared of ghosts. I believe in them and I’m very wary of them. I don’t like to sleep in haunted places and Australia’s very spooky. Ghosts are there. Explorers and senior citizens. I’ve promised to be one. There is a theatre in Adelaide called Her Majesties. They are building it and I promised to be a ghost there.
He once said of his children, ‘I think their abiding memories of their father are a man surrounded by suitcases. Now he says, ‘They’re all doing well. Two daughters in Melbourne, one a painter, the other an actor. My son Oscar is an art expert and dealer. My son Rupert co-wrote a video game called Red Dead Redemption and he’s hugely successful. All of these children of mine are mostly well behaved and don’t require any financial support. What more could you wish? Rupert has twins and I dote on them and Oscar has a daughter.”
“Edna heard that Barry Humphries was claiming to do an Edna act and a few terrible drag queens were doing Edna as Edna. She needed to set the record straight.”
I still think he just couldn’t let her go.
Rob Brydon probes Barry Humphries Live On Stage at the Palladium April 28th

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Roseanne Barr (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 10, 2019)

Chrissy Iley & Roseanne Barr
Chrissy Iley & Roseanne Barr
The story of Roseanne Barr is one of epic rise and epic fall and possible redemption. She is a provocateur, fierce, funny, an outsider. Her television sitcom Roseanne ran from 1988–1997. It was a staple of American culture, won Emmy’s and Globes. It was revived by ABC and in 2018 it was the most watched show in America. Last May, in the middle of the night – 2 am she Tweeted. This Tweet was deemed innapropriate by her bosses at ABC, who immediately fired her and cancelled the show and within 48 hours had forced her to give up all rights to the show which was based on her own life.
  The Tweet was ‘Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby’ in reference to Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor in the Obama administration. At the time, the network said Barr’s tweet was “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.” The following month, the network decided to bring back the show but without Barr, and title it The Conners.
  Going forward The Tweet is now usually described as a racist Tweet. That was not its intention as Barr didn’t know that Jarrett was black and no one seemed to know that Barr was Jewish and the Tweet was really about Iran/Israel. Racism was never her intention. 
  Her friend of 20 years, Rabbi Shmuley Botech tried to help. They did a Podcast together. He says, “she said that she wanted to engage in penance. She made a mistake. She took full responsibility. She shouldn’t have written that Tweet but she was judged very harshly. Her whole life dismantled, so I reached out to her. 
  We studied the Torah together for the last 20 years. Jewish values state three things when you make an error. No. 1 own up to it, No.2 apologise unconditionally and no. 3 make restitution in some form of tangible action. We did the podcast and she said ‘I absolutely want to engage in penance. It breaks my heart that people think I’m a racist. I’ve African American children in my family. I’m humiliated.’ She was sobbing.
  Since the Tweet that changed her life, Barr went to her mother’s in Utah to have what she describes as “a nervous breakdown. seeing herself so vulnerable was shocking.
  We meet her in her office/studio in El Segundo. On the way there, the Uber driver tells me he is a fan and points out that Bill Maher is applauded when he makes racist Tweets. It seems unfair. Is comedy about cruelty? Barr tells me it wasn’t like that. 
  She is first and foremost a Jewish woman who has fought Anti-Semitism for most of her life. Growing up in the Mormon Salt Lake City was harsh. She has said in the past “You weren’t supposed to think there. First of all it was frowned upon to be a girl, and second of all to be a fat, dark-haired girl who had no waist, and third to be a loudmouthed, short, fat, dark girl.”
  Of course, these days she’s not fat, she has a waist, looks trim and has long blonde hair. She’s young looking for 66. Various surgeries have been well documented but it’s not about that. There’s something vibrant in her spirit. She tells me about the Tweet.
  “I was dreaming and I woke up and I thought this is the really great thing that I’ll Tweet. I was appalled I was not allowed to explain it.”
  The Tweet stems from the Obama regime, foreign policy on Iran and Israel. Her explanation in grander terms has included visits with Rabbi Botech to Israel, meeting politicians from the left and right and talks about anti-Semitism. 
  “I signed the rights for my whole life’s work away,” she says gravely. “I thought I had to do that. I thought this is what it’s going to take so I did it. Just the other day the Hollywood Reporter changed the Tweet again. They are on a tear against me and have been for a long time. They got my ex-husband (Tom Arnold) to review one of my shows.” Arnold is one of 3 ex-husbands. She’s friendly with the others but not him. “They’ve tried to silence me and humiliate me since I came to Hollywood.”
  Her two sons Buck and Jake work with her at her studio. Jake makes me a perfect cup of coffee. Roseanne has started smoking and he doesn’t like the smell even though he smokes. He has special smoking clothes. She’s not doing any booze or pills. Let her smoke.
  We circle back to the Uber driver and his Bill Maher point. “Bill Maher doesn’t get a quarter of the ratings I got and because he’s an arm of the Democrat party he gets away with it and he gave more than a million dollars to the Democrats. There is sexism but I’m not sure that men can get away with a lot anymore because everyone’s got their #metoo issues nailed, but now they just send in women to say the same shit men say and they think it’s feminism. It’s ain’t. It’s disgusting.”
  Rabbi Botech says, “We now live in the divided States of America. Roseanne was perceived to be a pro Trump person and that automatically means she has to be a racist. Her show was ethnically diverse and politically diverse. Half the people like Trump, half the people hate Trump and that’s real America. Other sitcoms they’re all liberal or they’re all Conservative. This show had different political strands and they still cancelled it. My opinion is ABC should have said ‘you’ve done something that seems very offensive. We’re going to dock your pay for a month and donate it to an African American educational charity. Which she did anyway. She’s always donated to charities. Instead they moved to destroy her. Her show, it bears her name, it’s based on her life.”
  It’s true. Roseanne loves Trump. Her politics though have always been provocative, standing up for the minorities, whoever they may be. In 2012 she formed the Peace and Freedom party. Before that she was Green and before that she hated George Bush.
  As I’m talking to Roseanne in a pink fluffy sweater, she’s not what I expected – harsh and combative. She’s hypnotic, yes, but loveable. She’s still reeling from signing away the rights of her life. 
  “My life, my kids, but they (the network) told me if I do one more thing they don’t like they’ll remove my reruns for ever. And I said could you define what the one more thing is and they won’t. it could be that I say the word shit. It could be whatever they want. It’s a total Stalinist censorship. I’m known for free speech and also bringing free speech into a family context with the conversations had on my show. They don’t want none of that no more. They only want pliable servants. I’m not that. I’m not a slave.”
  We discuss stage one, the aftershock. “I had a complete nervous breakdown.” She couldn’t get out of bed. “Right.” She couldn’t speak. “Right. I couldn’t think either. They gave me 48 hours to sign away the rights to my show or I’d be sued because I ruined the season. They cancelled the show before one sponsor pulled out which is unheard of, unprecedented. They wanted to get rid of me. My boyfriend (Johnny Argent has been her partner since 2003. They met through a writing competition she hosted on her site) said it’s because I was bad for the hate business. Because I brought people together under one roof who disagreed about the President, but they moved past it and still got along. One thing changed in that game – it’s the philosophy based on the hatred of an outsider. It’s called anti- Semitism but it’s also anti-intellectualism and anti-free speech.
  My show had the most progressive storylines ever on television. If you say one positive thing about President Trump, the new progressives will destroy the most progressive show on TV. I knew it was going to happen. They tried to kill me the first day I went back to work.”
  Literally or metaphorically? “Everything. Physically, mentally and spiritually, in every way. It was a mistake to go back there. I’ve made mistakes many times in my life.”
  Part of Barr’s love for Trump is because he supports Israel but she also thinks he’s a “genius”. Now she feels the most opinionated woman on TV is not entitled to some opinions.
  “Americans know next to nothing about the Iran deal and the Obama administration and what they did with the Iran deal to put Israel and the Jewish people in an existential crisis around the world. The government in Iran was like the movie Planet of the Apes. We’d already said that for weeks.” 
  It has been reported that someone called ABC which resulted in Barr’s removal. Barr alleges that it was in fact Michelle Obama who called the President of ABC who fired her. She said, ‘this Tweet is unforgiveable’. That’s what I was told and I tend to believe it because the woman who fired me is now working with the Obama’s at Netflix.
  They wanted to take a Jew down. They wanted to take down a Zionist because they think that Zionists are the problem with everything in the world and a lot of people in this country think like them that’s why I was flattered when Schmuley called and said, ‘let’s teach Torah’. I have a lot of Rabbi friends because one of my passions in life is to talk about the Torah. When I sent that Tweet, I had this feeling in my head that God gave me this idea.” 
  But it was in the middle of the night. “Yes, and I was also in an inebriated condition. I’d gone to bed at 11.00, sent the Tweet at 2.00, was on Ambien. It was a very stupid thing.”
  I took Ambien and it made me sleep eat. “It did me – 2 pounds of cheese every morning.”
  But it also made her sleep Tweet. “I wished I hadn’t done it and I don’t take Ambien no more. It made me think in an impaired way and I’d also had a couple of beers. I should have written it backwards. It came out dyslexic. It should have been ‘Valerie Jarrett’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood have now allowed Iran’s government to remain as in the movie Planet of the Apes’. That was the conversation. After a 30-year career of championing civil rights, it all ended. They hate powerful women and they hate powerful, deplorable women and I do consider myself deplorable. Deplorable is the greatest thing that Hillary ever called us because it empowered a revolution, we are deplorable to her kind. Of course, all working class people are deplorable to her because it was working class people that elected Trump.”
  According to Rabbi Botech, Barr is now in the second phase after the Tweet.
  “The first was extreme remorse and heartfelt apology. That podcast was listened to by hundreds of thousands of people, but regardless of the degree to which she apologised, people still didn’t forgive her, she started becoming more defiant. She said ‘Schmuley, I’ve apologised and it’s got me nowhere. People are not in the mood to forgive. My friends tell me you can’t apologise in this culture. It’s like confession.’”
  Can she forgive? “I’m not going to forgive.” Our mutual Rabbi friend might suggest that that’s hard to carry around. “It’s not hard to carry around it’s wonderful, it gives me great fuel. Schmuley and I disagree on that. If you forgive the unforgiveable, you’re not a moral person.”
  Reading the Torah is something Barr has done all her life. She and Botech met when he came on her talk show to promote his book Kosher Sex. She let him know that she wanted her daughters to marry Jews and he selected three Jewish boys for them to try out. “I found nice Jewish boys and we filmed it. It was like the Jewish Bachelor.”
  It didn’t work out for them.
  “They were nice guys but he didn’t go with the looks.”
  Her daughters are married now. One of them did end up with a Jewish guy. “The other two are Jewish now.” They converted? “No, they just by osmosis became Jews. When I first met Schmuley I thought he was very interesting. We did a debate on pornography with Larry Flint the three of us. We respect each other’s opinions and he’s one of the few men that listens to women.”
  Does her boyfriend listen to women? “He’s a good one. He’s a hippie. Vegetarian and all that. I am too mostly. He’s not crazy about me smoking,” she says, lighting up another but feeling somewhat self-conscious she opens the door and cool air wafts in.
  Her entire career has been built on provocation. In the early seventies she married Bill Pentland, a hotel clerk. They moved to Denver, lived in a trailer park and she had three kids. As a child she’d learnt that the only way to survive was to be fierce and funny. She started performing at local comedy clubs. Eventually she got her break on The Tonight Show where her humour offended the audience until they gasped with laughter.
  A few days after her divorce from Pentland in 1990, she married Tom Arnold, even took his name. she describes that period as the worst time of her life and “a horrible dysfunctional relationship.” They posed for Vanity Fair naked and mud wrestling. Perhaps a metaphor for that relationship.
  In 1995 she married Ben Thomas, had her youngest son Buck, divorced in 2002. 
  She is emphatic she has never been a racist, whatever she’s been.
  “Jew haters are calling Jews racist. Let’s be real. Does racist mean by silenced by the left? They want to throw it around so much. Of course, I’ve apologised because this was an insensitive comment, but really its damage was in the way it was perceived. I can’t be responsible for the way people perceive things. People have always done this to me. They don’t get me. I have a lot of fans. First of all, the only people who called me in Hollywood were black people. White people in Hollywood don’t know about racism. Let them say ‘Roseanne called black people monkeys’. Let them do it if that’s the spin they want. I had a nervous breakdown because of how I was mentally abused. It was really freaky. They lined up to abuse me and kick me in the teeth. They are not good people.”
  Another blow was when they decided to continue the series, calling it The Conners but without Roseanne. Roseanne had died of a drug overdose by using other people’s prescriptions to get drugs.
  Rabbi Botech says, “When The Conners came out, I was very upset about how they dealt with her death. A grim ending of a beloved character that has been a staple of the American culture for 20 years. It’s a blue-collar show. It’s an insult to the working class that they’re all trading prescription drugs.
  Barr continues, “They think because they killed me it’s OK for them to use me, use the memory of me. Still mention me. It’s still my show but they stole it. They are going to do it to other comics. I’m just the first.”
  Isn’t that the nature of the comic – to get a reaction? To make people laugh, you have to make people unsettled.
  “I don’t just like to make people laugh. I like to piss them off and make them think too. I like to provoke them. I’m a provocateur. I knew they were trying to censor comics ever since Obama signed the NDAA into law. I Tweeted the next day ‘he’s just killed comedy’. It’s like the PC police. A PC police state and they have no compunction about destroying innocent people every day. It’s about mind control. Everyone in America is under mind control from television except for my show, that’s why they got rid of it.”
  Does she think she’ll ever have another show? “No, I’m totally done. People have approached me. People say ‘go on this channel. They’re not about the ratings’ but I’m a champion of ratings.”
  Does she ever think she’ll be President Barr? “People are saying that too. Part of why I love Trump is that he took so many of my ideas from my 2012 campaign. I’m about to put out my speech to show it.”
  “He’s welcome to those ideas. Nobody owns good ideas. People are always stealing my ideas. Everything on television is some kind of theft from me. They don’t credit particularly women my age here. You know, if you’re not fuckable it’s no good. Not that I ever was. I’m one of the few women who’s made it on looks and talent in Hollywood.”
  “I tried to sleep my way to the top but there were no takers. I would have but that wasn’t open to me.”
  No one ever #metoo’d her. “My friend Mike Tyson the boxer called it #youtoo. It’s a witch hunt.”
  How does she feel about women who claim to be abused 20 years previously but didn’t say anything about it at the time?
  “That’s because they’re ho’s. if you didn’t say no and just stayed there to get along, you’re a ho. Men are ho’s too. There’s a total ho mentality. What am I going to get for trading sexual favours? Not that I’ve got anything against ho’s. Not real ho’s.”
  While she was having her nervous breakdown, Rabbi Botech called her. “He said, ‘we can’t let them destroy you because you’re the strongest voice for American Jews in Israel. It woke me up. I had my fight back. I just went with him to Israel. In Israel they can talk, talk out differences, talk to each other. I was invited to speak by the left-wing Labour party. No one is all good or all bad. I don’t like what the Obama administration did to Israel and Jews worldwide.”
  Did her love or Torah come from the idea that Torah was for the boys, not for the girls? Did she ever have a Yentl thing going on? 
  “Yeah, totally Yentl. I got that movie although I like calling it Lentil.” I really want to sing Papa Can You Hear Me but I’m bad at singing so I restrain myself. “That’s another joy of my life – singing. I’m doing it more and I’m loving it.”
  When I tell her I was recently thrown out of a restaurant for bad singing, she says, “singing badly is still hilarious.” She gives me her DVD Rockin’ With Roseanne (fun filled kid tunes with loads of singing and dancing). 
  Becoming a grandmother changed her, softened her. She loves singing. She loves kids. She loves the Torah. She loves growing things in her home in Hawaii, cooking soups and selling them in the shop (carrot and ginger is a favourite). “My life is so peaceful. I’m not angry anymore. I use my anger to write. It’s a good battery but I don’t live it and that’s a good switch. I don’t let it bleed into my real life.”
  Do blondes have more fun? “I love my blonde hair. I’m going to let it grow to my waist. I’m never cutting it again. It’s a whole new attitude. My friend said to me once when I was unhappily married…” To which husband? “oh, to all of them eventually. My friend said ‘time to dump the ape and go blonde’. We always called men apes in Utah. I’m in touch with the ex-husbands, all but one. I don’t speak to Tom Arnold.”
  She has children with these ex-husbands and now grandchildren. Often the grandchild/grandparent relationship is stronger. “Yes, we understand each other because we have a common enemy. I really do love children and young people. It opens up a whole new wrinkle in your brain and you have a longer view of the world. And they’re what you leave behind.”
  Does she ever think about that – dying? “No – I won’t be there. It don’t matter.”
  Not doing her sitcom doesn’t meant to say she’s not working. “I’ve got my own channel. I’m working on content for that. When I fell back into writing the show for a 10thseason it was just like riding a bike. I turned my back brain on. They didn’t take that away. They killed me off but that was just stage one. Stage two is over (her breakdown). I’m at stage three now – their pain. The karmic boomerang. I can’t allow them to win. I’m not that kind of a person. 
  Did you ever read that book about circus freaks? The parents shot the kids up with drugs when they were in the uterus so that they would be born with two heads. I’ve also thought about a movie called Sitcom and everything would be based on real things that I lived through. They’re hilarious now a million years have passed. They weren’t funny at the time. I was talking to Mel Gibson about a movie based on the Torah. I would love to write that with Mel. He’s a very good director.”
  So much for him being a Jew hater. “He’s a very layered structure of a human being. He’s unstoppable. Been there, done that. Here’s my talent motherfuckers.”
  She thinks President Trump is a very layered man.
  “He’s a real deep thinker.” That’s now how he comes across. “Well that’s his Trump puppet. He’s got a Trump puppet and he’s somewhere else. Like here’s a shiny object. It’s too complicated. I’ve met him several times. And don’t forget you can’t judge anyone for how they Tweet on Twitter.”
  We agree that Prozac makes one quiet. She has taken anti-depressants of course. There isn’t anything she hasn’t done. “They dull your rage. Most people don’t like angry women. And Prozac makes you just numb but sometimes you need that, get through the trauma. This trauma I’ve faced it head on and I haven’t done that before. I didn’t face it alone. I let people in to help me like my boyfriend and my mom. My mom took really good care of me for 3 months until I got back on my feet. We’ve been on good terms for about 20 years now but this time she was just wonderful and I felt a lot of love from people I hadn’t let in, so more now than ever before I let the love in.”
  Does she think because of that people want to help her? “I don’t know. I think they might have identified with getting screwed.”
  She really has found a kind of strength from being vulnerable, from letting people in. It’s magnetic. She’s allowing herself to be empathic whereas before she closed walls like armour. She’s already spent almost a year in purdour. The last time she radically offended, it took years. I called it the star mangled banner incident. It’s when she grabbed her crotch and spat ata nationally aired baseball game in July 1990 at the playing of The Star Spangled Banner. She was called disgraceful by then President Bush.
  “That’s when I pissed off the right and now I’ve pissed off the left. It took about fifteen years but they got over it.”
  Did she ever want to be liked? A really long pause. “Well yeah. I’m human but I didn’t want to be liked by the wrong people. I wanted to be liked by the right people and noticed by the wrong people.”
  Why was it so different when you allowed your mother to support you? “I realise that’s what I wanted my whole life but I never felt I got it.”
  Did she push people away? “Yeah. I left men unless I needed them and I needed to change that. I’d already kind of changed that since becoming a grandmother. That was fading. Life can change.”
  Do you mean this is the final metamorphosis? “I hope not my final. I think now I’m gonna figure out what God wants for me. But I never do anything unless I think God wants me to do it.”
  Does she think God wanted her to shut people out? “No. he wanted me to expand my radius of love. That’s what he wants for everybody.”
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Richard Gere (London Sunday Times Magazine, February 10, 2019)

I’d flown to New York from LA to meet Richard Gere. He is in his first ever TV series – the BBC’s Mother, Father, Son – a complicated tale of families and how to survive them set with Gere as a self-made man, a billionaire newspaper owner and influencer – by that I don’t mean he’s got a lot of followers on Instagram – I mean shortbread with the Prime Minister.
  Gere himself lives in upstate New York but has chosen to meet me at a simple but chic Italian eaterie in Chelsea in the city. It’s booked under my name to preserve his anonymity.
  It’s pouring with rain. I’m in a sopping Fedora and distinctive golden brocade coat. There had been a lot of weather which had resulted in hefty delays and a diversion to Minneapolis so the 16 hours of travel and then the Nat West Bank calling me at 4am east coast time, had all resulted in extreme exhaustion and sleep deprivation so when I turned ap 45 seconds early for our table it was because I needed caffeine. The chic but simple restaurant said I could sit at the bar- not the table till noon that was their policy. I said I didn’t want to sit at the bar for 15 seconds. I wanted a large espresso before my guest arrives – but too late he’s here. 
  Dressed for the rain. Collar up, cap on looking as inconspicuous as a still sexy 69 year old A-Lister can manage. I didn’t want him to know I was the hysterical caffeine deprived woman. It was noon. They showed me to my table. I took off my conspicuous coat and pretended that I hadn’t been that woman. He sits down and looks at me quizzically. He’s got a great quizzical look that looks right through you.
  He’s wearing his trademark rimless glasses. His platinum hair flattened by the rain and the cap but it’s still full. He’s still the man from the poster of An Officer and A Gentleman except he’s not wearing the tight, white trousers. He’s still the man from Pretty Woman but without the expensive looking suit. He’s more pared down, relaxed, grey pants. Simple as he would say, but not ordinary. 
  Of course, he knew it was me. Why was I so upset? Now I was embarrassed. He told me not to be as he ordered a jasmine tea.
  “The American Indians bred horses which were essentially quarter horses. They had great stamina great speed, great agility but their greatest attribute is that they calm down quickly. They bred this horse so that you could ride him hard, work him hard but then calm him down because thoroughbreds stay hyper all the time so maybe you’re a little too thoroughbred.
  Oh my God. Smooth or what?
  He lives with his 17 year old dog, his son Homer (19) from his ex-wife Carey Lowell and new wife Alejandra Silva (35), an activist and her son Albert (6). They’re going to have their first baby any minute. 
  When I asked Jeff Goldblum recently how he felt about having babies after the age of 60, he told me that he went to therapy to work out those issues. Did Gere worry about being an older parent? He looks at me like I’m mad.
  “Not at all.” Some people might be worried though. “No…” he shakes his head. If he was ever a worrier he’s not now. Nothing seems to bother him including what people think of him. I tell him I’m surprised that he even turned up for an interview at all. In the past the press have savaged him. I read a lot of celebrity press cuttings constantly – for research -I’ve never seen any as bizarre as his. And cruel. Around 30 years ago there was an urban myth about his sexual proclivities. It ran and ran until about ten years ago . The rumours were so ridiculous I’m not sure how they ever made it legally to print. Then there were other rumours about his unstable and unloving marriage to Cindy Crawford in the early 90s
  He must have felt pushed into a corner. He took out an ad in the New York Times stating that the marriage to Crawford was a happy one and they were both heterosexual only to divorce 6 months later in 1995. Once again, something that met with criticism. Allegations that could not have happened in the me too / diversity era of now.
  A few years ago, he said, “If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake I’d think no, I’m actually a giraffe. Those kinds of things hurt people around you more than they hurt you because they hurt for you.”
  Soon after this he stopped making Hollywood studio movies, favouring independent movies and some of the most acclaimed work of his career like 2016’s Norman and his Globe nominated Arbitrage. Mother, Father, Son is his first ever TV series. How did that compare to working on a movie?
  “It was like doing 4 indie movies back to back, but the same one.” Was it not interesting and challenging for him to develop the character over 8 episodes? “No, I don’t think I’ll do this again to tell you the truth. It’s 6 months of shooting (in the UK). It’s too long.”
  Is that because his character Max is quite harsh? He didn’t want to be around him. He jumps to Max’s defence.
  “I don’t think he’s harsh. He’s a man who’s clear about what he wants and what he’s doing. People who work for him like him. He’s fair and he cares about them. He’s just not a typical guy. The cast is great. As good as any I’ve worked with. Billy Howle (who plays his son) is a superstar. I was so impressed with him as a person and an actor.”
  Helen McRory plays his ex-wife and he found her “terrific” although he’s never seen her in her much-loved role in Peaky Blinders. He continues to tell me that Max is not hard but he had a hard life, grew up in his father’s steel factory in Pennsylvania and his father wanted to make him a tougher character.
  “This series is a deep and honest exploration of journalism, publicity, the potentially dark mix of bad politics.”
  Does he think journalism is dark? “It doesn’t have to be. It’s certainly very competitive. I’m old enough to remember when news was not expected to make money. It was a service and people who worked in that area felt that they were doing something that was profound, telling the truth. Now they’re all rivals and the press in the UK is particularly difficult. As I said I don’t care. I’ve been around this a long time.”
  Was he always like this? Not caring. “The things I have control over I care about but things I don’t have control over, why bother?” I tell him that reading the toxicity in his press clippings gave me chills. “Honey, I don’t care.” It was a nice, warm ‘honey’, not a patronising ‘honey’. What about your mother/father?
  Did his mother and father inform his character Max?
  “Tell the truth, it was probably the location. My parents grew up not far from where the character grew up. beyond that I had a very different mother and father (Gere was born in Philadelphia. His mother Doris was a housewife. His father Homer (97) was in insurance agent. Gere was the second child of five. 
  Did he have the kind of father who wanted to instil discipline – make him tough?
  “Not at all. I don’t know if Max is about discipline. It’s about you have a number of years on this planet, make something of it. I think all of us feel that way about our kids, not you’ve got to do it this way or that way.” 
  The conversation circles back to his new baby. Gere doesn’t really show emotions like excitement, anger. He pares it all down but you can tell he is excited about it. It’s a boy, right? “Nobody knows because we haven’t told anybody.”
  Homer, named after his grandfather is in a gap year between high school and college. Is he artistic or science biased? “He’s very sweet, very sensitive, very smart. He’s smarter than me, stronger than me, faster than me, taller than me, better than me. He’s great. I love him.”
  Soon there will be a family of five. At the moment they are four. How is that family dynamic. Who rules? “Who do you think rules?” Probably your wife. “Probably.” Is that because he doesn’t have arguments? “No, it’s because she’s smarter than us.”
  One thing they’re not arguing about is what to watch on TV. “I don’t watch much television. I like the Sopranos and Game of Thrones. I like to watch the news. I like to know what’s going on.” Doesn’t that depend on what news channel he is watching? American TV news comes with a bias depending on what channel it’s on.
  “It’s not really that hard. First of all, don’t believe anything Trump says. The opposite of what he says is going to be the truth. It’s pretty easy. I have a very full life and honestly, TV is not high on my priority list.”
  Would he do more TV if it didn’t take 6 months out of his life? “It depends on the script. The selling point on this for me was the script and this script is fabulous. They had to send me 6 episodes before I would commit to it. I don’t think there are bad guys here. They are all living and breathing and working through their issues. It’s very well written like that. It gives you a dream space. I’ve never met a person who is simple so the more time you spend with someone the more levels you’re going to find and certainly having 8 hours with these people you’re going to know layers of their being and their dreams.”
  How was it working for the BBC? Were they cheap? “I never experienced them as a corporation, just as a production. It was the same as making an independent movie.”
  It’s been 11 years since Nights in Rodante (2008), his last studio movie which was huge box office ($84 million) but critically panned. These das he’s not been attracted to studio movies at all. 
  “I make the same kind of movies I’ve always made but the studios don’t make them anymore but they make them independently.”
  By this I think he means the studios make movies ruled by CGI aimed at the teenage male market. I read at one point that the studios had been asked not to use Gere because their money-making Chinese counterparts didn’t want him in China because of his pro Dalai Lama, anti-China politics?
  “No, it’s more complex than that. China has a system for foreign films that can play in China. Chinese distributors want to have the big blockbuster CGI movies. Successful box office movies. That’s the highest priority. I don’t make those kind of movies so whatever their issues are with me politically – and they have issues with me – it’s irrelevant because it doesn’t change the kind of movies I make and has no effect on me whatsoever because I don’t make movies they would be buying.”
  He’s putting lots of black pepper and rock salt into the olive oil and we’re dipping our bread in. We order ravioli with butternut squash and walnuts. I ask for extra cheese. Gere advises I won’t need it. He’s of the ‘less is more, simple is best’ school of thought and I’m ‘bring me more cheese’. He is of course right. Our pasta is good. “Delicate but filling.”
  Gere tells me, “I’m not in the city that much. Mostly I’m in the country.” He has a hotel in Bedford, upstate New York.
  “It was fun to take a building that was falling apart and that’s been various inns and rooming houses. It was built in the 1760s when the British burnt down most of Bedford but not that. There are 8 rooms and a yoga loft.” 
  He’s not intending to branch out to a chain of hotels or being a hotelier as a back up career. Not that he knows what he’s got coming up work wise.
  “I went through a period of making back to back difficult films which I loved. I’m reading things. I’ll see what touches me.”
  Perhaps the arrival of the new baby means it’s a good time not to be working? “Life is work so one is always working but maybe not working with a camera in your face. The pressure of having a camera in your face every day it’s not natural and it takes a bit of getting used to. It takes a lot out of anybody.” 
  And now he wants to be a hands-on daddy? “Oh yes. I’m there.”
  In an interview he gave many years ago he said, “I reacted to fame like an animal, I ran and hid from it.” Does he remember that?
  “Sure. I don’t think many people are built to be scrutinised over and over again all day long, except maybe Trump. I think what maybe problematic with him is the extreme narcissism. He’s a train wreck so you want to watch a train wreck. That’s what he trades in.”
  Why does he think people were so compelled to watch him to make him want to run like an animal? He was never visibly a train wreck. Maybe the idea was to goad him into causing one to happen? 
  “It doesn’t matter. These are small things now. I see them in a different perspective to how I saw them then. Then it was with a young man’s energy. I’ve been around for a long time so I’ve seen a lot and these things don’t throw me anymore. My reaction was to have the animal response of fleeing. Now I just work. People don’t realise that but what an actor does is work, not play. It is creative but the concentration is hard, the hours are hard, it’s taxing emotionally and psychologically. You have to be continually breaking through stupid stuff to find the honesty. It’s not easy work and I love it because it uses every bit of me. My heart, my soul, whatever I’ve got.”
  I’m relaxed enough to mop up my sauce with my bread while I just feel happy to admire the man sitting opposite me. However much he downplays it, he’s still a striking presence. Was he pleased or horrified to be trapped in the sexiest man alive peg? 
  “I’m not trapped, not pegged. Other people may be, but not me. I just work, that’s what I do.”
  Nothing I’ve said or done seems to irritate him even though I have been irritating. Did he work on being so calm? “I was fortunate early on. I was searching, a natural human process to make sense of it all. I had the instinct to search for an answer and I was very fortunate that I was able to find Buddhism and find great teachers. I’m very fortunate that I’m able to devote my life to these daily teachings. If you do the practise you get the results.”
  He is the living proof. “No, I’m not. The Dalai Lama is. But I’m doing good. It’s not a magic trick. It’s doing the work. There is no other thing for us to do in this lifetime than work on ourselves.”
  His life affirming audience with the Dalai Lama was “maybe 35 years ago”. How was it? “Everyone’s expectation is you’re meeting the Dalai Lama. He’s going to go ‘everything’s going to be alright.’ It doesn’t work that way. I was so impressed by his utter simplicity and skill in dealing with me. He got into the deep layers of who I was but not in a Shamanistic or magical way, just simply. One can feel the hard-won wisdom, the way you would with a great college professor. They’ve worked on themselves. And the other side is about open-hearted compassion and empathy. It’s not just about feeling altruistic.”
  Empathy is a skill set. “Empathy can be primitive. Babies have it. If one starts crying, they all start crying. One laughs, they all do that. But that doesn’t take you very far. Wisdom starts to kick in and you start to feel ‘my emotions aren’t much different than the emotions of this person’. What am I going to do with that? I’m going to make a commitment that I’m going to remove the suffering from that person and develop myself to the point where my ego is quite small. Then I really know how to help someone else. It becomes spontaneous.”
  For instance, when I arrived in this restaurant exasperated, panicking, angry, embarrassed, anxious, he became like the therapy dog I met in Minneapolis airport. Bella the golden retriever was on hand to calm stressed, delayed passengers. He’s taken my anxiousness away and I’m left feeling something mystical.
  How did an interview over lunch with Richard Gere become neo nirvana? “It makes it easier, doesn’t it? Just let it go.” I’m seeing him now with a sign above his head. ‘Pet Me’. “How nice…The Dalai Llama gets up at 3.30 every day and works his mind.
  I get up at 4.30/5.00 to work on my mind.”
  Shall we have dessert? “I am a dessert person but I don’t usually have any for lunch.” Nonetheless, I order a Tiramisu to share. “I have to pick up my wife so I can’t be late.”
  He met Alejandra four and a half years ago in Italy. Was it one of those instant love at first sights? “Instant from my side. I instantly became happy just looking at her. It was one of those powerful things.” Has this ever happened to him before? “Yes – I’ve been married three times – but it didn’t happen with the kind of power this one was. But I do remember the first time I met each of my wives. I’m very lucky.”
  And even though things may not have ended well with Crawford and Lowell, he doesn’t hold onto any toxicity. He simply says, “I’m very lucky.”
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