Back in 2013, I embarked on a mad quest to write a biography of Nicol Williamson. That quest is finally over and the book is now on sale on Amazon.
Playwright and theatre director Peter Gill worked as an assistant on the original production of Inadmissible Evidence, the play which made Williamson famous; later, he directed the star as Malvolio in Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He calls Beware of the Actor! “A welcome and well researched account of the life and work of perhaps the greatest British actor of his generation.”
Leslie Megahey was, at separate times, editor of both the BBC's major arts documentary strands, Omnibus and Arena, winning a BAFTA for his work on the latter. He's probably the only person to have interviewed J.R.R. Tolkien, Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa. Megahey directed Williamson in the feature film The Hour of the Pig and subsequently in the one-man show Jack - A Night on the Town with John Barrymore. He had this to say about Beware of the Actor!: “Startlingly honest, balefully funny at times, and respectful of the huge talent that inspired it, this is an extraordinarily rich and detailed biography. Nicol was the most unforgettable character I knew and worked with, and this account vividly illuminates his genius and his demons.”
Other contributors to the book include Nicol's son, Luke Williamson; his first wife, Jill Townsend; actors Elaine Bromka, Michael Culver, Penny Fuller, Ian Hogg, Glenda Jackson, Jane Lapotaire, Paul Moriarty, Steffan Rhodri, Clive Swift and David Warner; directors Robert Bierman, the late Jack Gold, Piers Haggard, Terry Hands, Robert Knights, Richard Lester, Peter Dan Levin, John Tydeman, Walter Murch; and many more.
I'll be posting more about the book in the near future but, for the time being, here's the introduction:
By 1969, Nicol Williamson seemed to have the world in the palm of his hand. Five years earlier, he had literally become famous overnight – on the 9th of September, 1964, to be precise. His leading role as burnt-out solicitor Bill Maitland in John Osborne’s play Inadmissible Evidence at the Royal Court theatre is still acknowledged to be one of the longest and most difficult ever written. A number of more famous actors had declined the part, perhaps because its difficulty made failure seem a far more likely prospect than success. Nicol had held the audience spellbound for three hours, immediately attracting a surge of press interest as a result and becoming an instant celebrity. His performance would be one of the most talked about in the history of 20th-century theatre.
Perhaps even more impressive than the reviews he received and the awards he won throughout the ‘60s were the plaudits from theatrical heavyweights; Osborne proclaimed him ‘the best actor since Marlon Brando’, Samuel Beckett credited him with ‘a touch of genius’, and Laurence Olivier was reported to have considered Nicol his only serious rival. He astonished his contemporaries in the film world by turning down many lucrative offers, choosing instead to take Inadmissible Evidence to America. He finally began accepting leading roles in films at the end of the decade, making a number of intelligent, challenging pictures that made little impact at the box office. Still, it didn’t seem to matter – in 1969, he stormed the Roundhouse like a Shakespearean rock star playing a new kind of Hamlet, vital, alive and decisive, in an interpretation which remains influential to this day. The following year he became the first actor invited to perform at the White House. By this point, it was not unusual for him to be labelled ‘the world’s greatest actor’.
Even greater things were expected of Nicol in the years to come, and he was closely followed by the press. Being not averse to a pint, a punch-up, a backstage tryst or a provocative remark, Nicol made good copy. Indeed, stories about him are still numerous, many of which have passed into theatrical lore. He famously walked off in the middle of a performance on more than one occasion and was equally notorious for having struck his fellow actors on stage – once with a hefty slap in the face, another time with the flat of a sword. He had even punched a powerful Broadway producer early in his career but still somehow managed to go on to play more leading roles on Broadway than any other English actor. Less of a womanizer than many of his contemporaries, he could nevertheless count Marianne Faithfull and Sarah Miles among his conquests. It is scarcely surprising, then, that Nicol has often been painted as a heavy-drinking hell-raiser but, although he certainly had that side to him, he was a far more complex man than this suggests. Some found him to be morose and misanthropic by nature, but his mood could change suddenly and with little warning. Displays of belligerence or generosity were equally likely. He was also a talented singer and pianist, a writer of poetry, autobiographical prose pieces, screenplays, songs and one published novel.
Most of all, he was an actor of unique and mysterious power – as the playwright and theatre director Peter Gill said, ‘… he was enormously gifted – the most unusual actor I’ve ever seen in my life… There he was – lanky, ranging, awful sort of yellow hair, not a pleasant voice, Birmingham-Scottish, and yet he was a riveting actor, very funny, he spoke marvellously. Nobody was as good as Nicol Williamson in the right part…’
Few could have foreseen that Nicol’s career had already reached its peak as the ‘70s dawned. His stage appearances would become increasingly sporadic and his film work seemed to gradually dwindle away, although there would still be the occasional triumph on the way down. On stage in the mid-‘70s he played Coriolanus, Macbeth and Malvolio, as well as Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya – performances which remain vivid memories to those lucky enough to have seen them. He was marvellous on film as a twitchy, neurotic Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, as a funny and moving sidekick to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood in Robin and Marian and, of course, in his most eccentric performance as Merlin in John Boorman’s Excalibur. However, compared to many of his contemporaries, he was far from prolific. As an admirer who had first seen Nicol in his late ‘60s films The Bofors Gun and The Reckoning on television during the late ‘80s, I found it difficult to understand why he was by that time only being glimpsed occasionally in throwaway roles in Hollywood movies like Black Widow and Exorcist III. Something had clearly gone wrong, but what?
When Nicol died at the end of 2011, he had not made a film for fourteen years or acted on a stage for ten. Meanwhile, fellow actors of his generation like John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen had gone on to hugely successful careers despite having taken considerably longer to make a name for themselves. Nicol Williamson, on the other hand, had faded away until he had disappeared altogether, god knew where.
When the press got wind of Nicol’s death five weeks after the event, the majority of the obituary writers had to rely chiefly on a piece written about Nicol by Kenneth Tynan for The New Yorker some forty years previously (a piece which itself contained certain inaccuracies). There seemed to be a remarkable lack of information about his more recent activities. According to the obituarists, the actor had been living in Amsterdam, but he had in fact sold his house there several years earlier and settled in the village of Lindos on the Greek island of Rhodes. There was also division on Nicol’s age at the time of his death, some saying he had been 73, and others 75. The reasons for his absence from the world of acting for so many years remained a mystery, although rumours suggested a number of possibilities: the booze had got the better of him; he was so difficult that he was considered unemployable; he had developed severe stage fright; he had become disillusioned with acting and simply retired.
It seemed to me that Nicol’s journey might very well be a story worth telling, and certainly no-one had done so before. Like so many other admirers of his talents, I wondered what were the true reasons for the decline of his career and his subsequent disappearance and particularly whether his fearsome reputation was the result of a few minor incidents blown up out of proportion or was genuinely deserved.
In researching this biography, I visited numerous archives and interviewed or corresponded with over 50 people who had been friends or colleagues of Nicol’s to try to discover what proportion of what I had heard and read could possibly be true. I made some surprising discoveries, such as the fact that Nicol had been married not once but twice, although very few people knew about his second wife. Despite the fact that in his lifetime Nicol seemed to have inspired almost as much enmity as affection, it was clear that most people who had known him had something they urgently wanted to say on the subject of Nicol Williamson, perhaps because they too were trying to resolve something in their own minds, in many cases about their own relationships with him. Even those who did not much care for him personally greatly admired his talent and were keen to be heard. In the four years it has taken to write this book, I have been on a fascinating, moving, bemusing and always thought-provoking mission.
Nicol Williamson led what is usually referred to as a ‘colourful life’. By the time I sat down to write these chapters, I knew this was a wholly inadequate description for his skills and passions, triumphs and flaws, humour, enthusiasms and dark days; in short, for the intermittent but unforgettable genius of this extraordinary man.
