Lesley-Anne Down on filming with Patrick Swayze

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Lesley-Anne Down, who turns 70 today, was a stark contrast to Patrick Swayze, her co-star in the hit 1985 U.S. Civil War miniseries ‘North and South’. In interviews for Canadian TV Guide, the enormously likeable but very intense young American actor told me back then, ‘The only thing that will make my career last is if I always deliver one hundred percent.’ The English actress, famous for the 1970s British series  ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, confirmed the actor’s high energy and drive drily: ‘Oh, very, yes.’

Equally charming and personable, she said, ‘I don’t know how long he’s been in this industry but I’ve been in it for 21 years. Mine’s faded, or rather, not faded, I just want to use a lot of energy on other things now.’ Did that mean she had no driving need to be a huge star? ‘I don’t know that I’ve lost that need, she said, ‘but I think it has its proper place.’

Swayze spent more than six months filming on location in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and South Carolina, often in sweltering conditions. Down was back and forth from January to June. Still, it was a lot different from ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ not least because the British show used video and the American series was on film. ‘The hours also are very different,’ she said. ‘On “Upstairs, Downstairs”, we used to stroll into work at one o’clock, have tea, eat buns, play cricket, do about an hour’s worth of work and all pootle off at five o’clock. Then we had two days in the studio every two weeks to record it. This is totally different. Totally.’

Down confessed that she knew nothing about the Civil War or American history in general. ‘You know what we learned about in English schools,’ she said. ‘Ancient Greece, a lot of Roman history going up to medieval times. You don’t even get on to the first or second world wars. We tend to concentrate on our end of the world so I had absulutely no idea and I still haven’t. I’ve no idea who was fighting whom. I’d come on the set and say, now, who are the good guys and who are the baddies?’

Most of her scenes were with Swayze and David Carradine, who played her abusive husband, and she said she got along with both of them very well. She took the part, she said, because ‘I read the scripts and enjoyed them. ‘I’m afraid I’ve chosen things in my life that have turned out to be total rubbish,’ she said. ‘I’ve chosen other things that have turned out to be rather good and I’ve done them all for very different reasons but basically the only reason I choose to do something is because I think I might enjoy to watch it when it finally comes on the telly. I can’t judge art, I’m afraid. All I can do is say, will people watch it or won’t they? Am I entertaining someone? I have no idea about this one because I have not seen it yet. I’ve seen bits and pieces when I’ve been looping. I think it holds up remarkably. I think people will enjoy it.’

Down went on to make many more film and TV appearances. Of her movies up to the time we spoke, she said ‘The Sphinx’ was ‘rubbish’ and the only thing she recalled distinctly about ‘The Betsy’ was that ‘I was doing another day’s filming with Tommy Lee Jones in a New York hotel room and he was already doing “The Eyes of Laura Mars”. We all took an hour’s break because it came over the radio that Elvis Presley had died.’

She said she liked what she had done for British television: ‘I did a thing called “The One and Only Phyllis Dixey”  (left) about a stripper set during World War Two. I thought it was an interesting piece and said something that was sort of different to most television. I did another TV thing called “Unity” about one of the Mitford girls. ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (with Sean Connery) I thought was quite a nice film.’

Like most beautiful actresses, she had encountered the casting couch early in her career and, as she had appeared recently on the David Letterman show, I asked if she thought he really was a chauvinist: ‘I will not speak about him personally,’ she said, ‘but I do have to say that it doesn’t actually matter what country you’re talking about. I find the majority of those so-called chat-show hosts to be male chauvinists. They get anybody on their show who does not look like the back of a bus and is reasonably successuful and there is always the odd comment trying to put them down. Don’t put it like it happens only to me – it’s happened to a lot actresses that I’ve seen. They do not allow you, the press even, to be pretty, talented and successful and intelligent. Or even half-way intelligent. You’ve got to have one of those things missing for them to be nice to you.’

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James B. Sikking, the mad hatter on ‘Hill Street Blues’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – ‘Hill Street Blues’, the American cop show that was a hit for most of the Eighties, had one of the best casts in television. Of them, James B. Sikking had probably the toughest job playing jut-jawed, pipe-smokimg Howard Hunter, commander of Hill Street’s Emergency Action Team.

Sikking, who turns 90 today, understood that Hunter was a cardboard character used mostly on the show to seque from one scene to another. ‘He’s what I call a coat holder,’ he told me. ‘He’s holding somebody else’s coat while they’re doing the scene. He’s mad as a hatter but from his point of view he’s absolutely correct.’

As such, he was a very difficult character to write. ‘With fourteen regular characters plus guest stars, under the stress and strain of a weekly television series, the last one you really have time to devote to as a writer is the complicated character,’ Sikking said when I interviewed him for Canadian TV Guide in 1983. 

When the actor asked the writers to give his part greater dimension, they tended to say, ‘Look, let’s just keep him the way he is because he’s a wonderful twit and people love him that way.’ Sikking said, ‘My response is, OK, I can understand that. I’m still employed in a horrendous economy. I’ve got a job and I’m delighted to have it. But perhaps maybe once or twice a year you could challenge Howard’s humanity, strip him of his defences. Obviously, a man who walks around in a uniform with a flak jacket and a .357 Magnum, handcuffs, combat boots and all of that, is dealing with some kind of basic personal insecurity. I say, let’s now and then take all that crap away and put him in the grinder.’

That happened a few times during the show’s long run and Sikking was nominated for an Emmy Award. He had already earned scores of acting credits over twenty-five years and went on to appear in many more including movies such as ‘Star Trek: The Search for Spock’ and ‘Soul Man’ with a regular role in the TV series ‘Doogie Hauser M.D.’ playing Doogie’s father.

There was another reason Sikking wanted Hunter to be more real. ‘What all actors suffer from is that, first of all, we are children,’ he said. ‘We all suffer from rejection. We want  to be loved. I know Carroll O’Connor (who played Archie Bunker in ‘All in the Family’) very well and when you play roles like ours, after a while there’s something inside that tells you, “But I want you to love me and understand why I’m crazy or a bigot.” I fall into that trap. People go, oh, you’re such an ass. I’ve got children. I don’t want them walking around hearing, oh, your dad’s an ass. So you are seduced by trying to explain to people why you are that way.’

Still, Sikking took it all in stride. ‘Acting is very important to me. I take it very seriously. I just don’t take myself seriously,’ he said. ‘That’s a bunch of horse manure. I find that inordinate self-interest in an actor is self-defeating. You lose touch with what we are all seeking as performers and that is to get out of ourselves and not be self-indulgent.’

As disarming as Howard Hunter was armed, Sikking was drolly disdainful of the business. ‘In relation to what’s important in the world, actors get a disproportionate amount of attention and money – which I am delighted to have,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a sense of guilt about it. I mean, I don’t send the money back or anything like that. I just think it’s a dumb way to run the world, that’s all.’

Before he joined ‘Hill Street Blues’, he had a feature role in the space thriller ‘Outland’ starring Sean Connery whom he admired greatly. ‘Now, there’s a wonderful actor,’ he said. ‘None of his best films made any money. Sean is a terrific actor but he just made a lot of money doing crap. I hope that happens to me, quite honestly.’

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Gregory Peck on Abraham Lincoln: ‘A secular saint’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, who was born 215 years ago today. In 1982, he fulfilled a dream when he portrayed the U.S. president in the TV mini-series ‘The Blue and the Gray’ and his comments then reverberate in today’s political climate in America.

‘I have admired Abraham Lincoln since I was a boy,’ he told me. ‘I learned the Gettysburg Address when I was 12 and recited it in school. I first read Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” in university at Berkeley and I was totally absorbed by it.’

Over the years, he accumulated more than two hundred books about Lincoln and many items from the man’s life. ‘That doesn’t make me a top-of-the-line collector of Lincolniana; I’m somewhere in the middle,’ he said. ‘But, often, when I have a moment at any time of the day or night, I’ll reach for one of my Lincoln books, open it anywhere and have a visit with him. He is my ideal.’

During a lengthy interview for Canadian TV Guide at Peck’s lovely home in the Holmby Hills in L.A., he said he’d always wanted to play Lincoln and recite the Gettysburg Address, which Lincoln delivered in Pennsylvania on Nov. 19 1863, four months after the Union army defeated Confederate forces in the Battle of Gettysburg, the deadliest battle in the conflict that ran from April 1861 to May 1865

Peck spoke at length – unhesitating and in great detail with no resort to a book or notes – about Lincoln and his admiration for the man. After I transcribed my recording of our conversation, I asked him if the magazine could run his comments under his name, to which he agreed. He later sent me a note of thanks for giving him his first byline.

He said, ‘Abraham Lincoln is the American hero. He is what we think we are, or would like to be, in terms of character, shrewdness, intelligence, compassion and humour. He is the greatest American of all time. 

‘The Civil War was the most critical event in U.S. history and the most tragic. With the deaths of more than 620,000, it was a horrific slaughter of young men at a time when the total U.S. population was around thirty-four million.

‘It was a terrible sacrifice and Lincoln bore the responsibility for it. We’ll never know but, in my mind, it was Lincoln – with his intuition, his talent, his logic, his character and his vision – who took on the full responsibility for that conflict, because he was able to see ahead that if he did not, if someone did not, then the United States might split into two or four or six countries. We might have had the equivalent of the Balkan states on this continent.

‘Lincoln worked on his Gettysburg address for a couple of weeks before he went there. It’s a myth that he scribbled it on the back of an envelope on the train. He had worked on it several times at the White House knowing he had that engagement. In fact, he went to Gettysburg that day, Nov. 19, 1863, with a purpose in mind: not merely to dedicate the cemetery where men from the terrible battle of the previous July were buried but to restate for the North and for the South what the war was all about.

‘The issue was not slavery although morally Lincoln was against it. He often said that if he could preserve the Union all-free, he’d preserve it; if he could preserve it all-slave, he’d preserve it; if he could preserve it half-free and half-slave, he’d preserve it. Preserving the Union was the primary objective of his administration, and of his life.’

Peck was pleased with ‘The Blue and the Gray’ and most happy to have played his hero. ‘It seemed that I would never have the chance to play him until this came along,’ he said. ‘It was for television, which I had never done before, and it was a cameo appearance, not a lead. But it was a good script. I went over Lincoln’s five scenes a few times and I thought it would be nice to do. At least once in my life I’ll be on film somewhere as Abraham Lincoln.’

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How an NHL match led Norman Jewison to make ‘Rollerball’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – ‘Rollerball’, Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison’s only film set in the future, also is his most action-packed and violent and it was inspired by an experience at a National Hockey League (NHL) game.  Continue reading

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Why Norman Jewison quit Hollywood to work in Europe

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – ‘What do you do?’ asked Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. ‘I make movies,’ said Norman Jewison. The former U.S. attorney general, brother of a slain American president, and the Canadian director ,who was building a successful career in Hollywood making studio feature films with big stars, met by chance in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1967. Continue reading

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What movies meant to director Norman Jewison


By Ray Bennett

LONDON – ’It kinda scares me,’ Norman Jewison said when I asked him in 2011 about the digital revolution in movies and the future of cinema. ‘Everything I see today is so mixed with violence and action. It’s moving so fast that I don’t know how significant the story is. When I was growing up, film was the literature of my generation. All of a sudden, I can see something else happening. It started with the video cameras and the fact that anybody can make a film now. The quality is good enough. It’s not very artistic. The video image, the television image, is different from film. I don’t think that matters to this generation.’ Continue reading

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Cary Grant, smooth as silk … on the surface.

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – When Cary Grant, born this day 120 years ago, died in 1986, Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel wrote, ‘Some distant day, audiences may come to agree that he was not merely the greatest movie star of his generation but the medium’s sublest and slyest actor.’

That was clouded with rehashes of the private torments of Archibald Leach, the deprived working-class kid from Bristol, England, who grew up to be Cary grant. His marriages and affairs; his alleged tightness with a dollar; his experiments with LSD and the long-rumoured suggestion of homosexuality were paraded in books, tabloids and talk-shows. Continue reading

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How Ben Kingsley dealt with instant fame after ‘Gandhi’


By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Ben Kingsley, who turns 80 today, had spent fifteen years on the English stage with occasional small screen roles when Richard Attenborough changed his life by casting him in the title role of his epic feature film ‘Gandhi’ in 1982.

Two years later, over a pleasant lunch in Hill’s Restaurant in Stratford-upon-Avon, he told me how he had adjusted to instant fame after being named best actor at the Academy Awards and the British Academy Film Awards.  Continue reading

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Norman Lear told me, ‘I hate the word satire’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – American TV producer Norman Lear was heralded as a leading light in political satire but he did not believe it. ‘I hate the word satire,’ he told me, ‘because I don’t know that the level of our work on television is true satire.’

I spoke to Lear, who died on Dec. 5 aged 101, in 1992 when he was executive producer of a series called ‘The Powers That Be’ about a hapless U.S. senator played by John  Forsythe (pictured). It lasted for twenty-one episodes unlike his previous hits such as ‘All in the Family’, ‘The Jeffersons’ and ‘Maude’. Continue reading

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Randy Newman at 80: Part One – songwriter

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Randy Newman, who turns 80 today, has Academy Awards, Grammy Awards and Emmy Awards and he is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s also a very funny man. He told me that he thought once of being a television comedy writer and he would make a great one – his work on ‘The Three Amigos’ with Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels is proof of that – but TV’s loss is music’s gain. Continue reading

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