Madame Depardieu and the

Beautiful Strangers

ANTONIA QUIRKE

For Ilana Bryant, best girl in New Jersey

‘You live in a dream and the dream is a cage,’

Said the girl, ‘And the bars nestle closer with age

Your shadow burned white by invisible fire

You will learn how it rankles to die of desire

As you long for the beautiful stranger,’

Said the vanishing beautiful stranger

PETE ATKIN AND CLIVE JAMES,

Beware of the Beautiful Stranger

‘You have to have a little faith in people’

MARIEL HEMINGWAY, Manhattan

Table of Contents

Epigraph

PART ONE: Mademoiselle Depardieu

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

PART TWO: Perforated Screening Mechanism

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

PART THREE: Kinerotiquana

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Antonia Quirke

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE Mademoiselle Depardieu

1

First I was a sperm and an egg, and then I was an embryo, and then I got born. After that I was a baby and then I was a toddler. This is coming really easily! Then I was ten lying in bed listening to the unmistakable cadences of a man and a woman arguing downstairs. I lay there harrowed by the growing conviction that the voices didn't belong to the radio but to my parents, and trying to will a snatch of music to prove that it wasn't. But it wasn't likely to be the radio at this time of night, and we didn't have a television in those days. The muffled fight went on, and on, until it was no longer bearable. I got up and crept down the stairs towards the living room, where my parents were curled up together watching a man and a woman arguing on the eight-inch black-and-white which they sometimes borrowed from next door when something especially good was on. I can remember the luxury of my relief. I can also remember how the two of them looked altered by the shifting light, made younger by it. And instead of being sent back upstairs I was invited on to the sofa to watch with them. It was a film, a famous film, with a title so romantic it seemed to contain all the scale of adult life: A Streetcar Named Desire.

(Forgive my presumptuousness in telling you all this, by the way, but if I don't I'm going to lose my husband.)

I had never seen a movie before. Not one. I had lived ten years absolutely untroubled by the knowledge of such things. I suppose I'm a bit stupid, really. ‘That's Marlon Brando,’ my father said. ‘He's the best actor in the world.’ I watched, delighted to be up late, being initiated into the privileges of adulthood, studying this Marlon Brando, this actor, who was now at the centre of a brawl. Some men put Brando under a shower, the women fled upstairs, and Brando began to cry. He walked outside the house in his wet T-shirt, and I saw him – like Blanche Dubois sees him when she first comes to the Kowalskis' apartment in Elysian Fields, like audiences first saw him, tormenting Jessica Tandy in the original Streetcar in the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1947, like Tennessee Williams first saw him, in his original stage direction: Animal joy in his being is implicit in all of his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and the taking of it, not with weak indulgence dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens.

I saw and I saw and I still see. I like to revisit all my favourite bits of his face, to tour them. The folds over the corners of his eyes which make it seem as if a force is pressing down on him, as if he's subject to a doubled gravity. There's a kind of thumbprint on his brow where something powerful has marked him. The Golden Gate mouth too beautiful not to be disgusted by the ugliness of the human speech it must form. The curve where his jawbone meets his neck, seemingly the locus of all the strength in his head. The T-shirt torn so that it hangs off one shoulder like an emperor's toga. Brando was calling upstairs like a tomcat: ‘Stella!! STELLA!!!’ The thunderclap volume of his voice had the power to hurt.

‘What's the matter?’ my father was suddenly saying. And something did seem to be going wrong with me. Air was coming in but it wasn't going out. Brando sank to his knees before Stella, burying his face in her thighs. Everything was beginning to shut down on me. My breathing had become an alarming fish-pant. ‘Don't ever leave me, baby! Don't ever leave me!’ the best actor in the world was murmuring, semi-audible under my breathing. My parents had forgotten the film and ferried me to the kitchen table where my father quizzed me about things I might have eaten. Maybe I'd had a peanut-stuffed lobster stashed under my pillow? I couldn't muster the breath to reply. Time was beginning to thicken and deepen. I could see very clearly the fur coat of dust on our never-used fondue set. My mother gave up trying to open the airways in my throat with a spoon and called an ambulance. It was all happening very far away – I was dying, peacefully. And like a stone in the shoe of my peace was the fear that was beginning to harden into a certainty, that although dying wasn't so bad I would not be able to bear the humiliation of having my mother know why I had died. And she knew perfectly well. She understood precisely why I was gasping like a dog on a summer's day while next door in New Orleans Marlon Brando was smashing crockery. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had stopped hyperventilating and had to listen, suffused with shame, as my parents tried to talk their way round what had happened. Everybody was standing about lying their heads off. But what would the ambulance men have said if they'd known the truth? ‘Marlon Brando, Mrs Quirke? Do you think that was wise? We've had two Montgomery Clifts and a McQueen tonight already.’

This was the formative incident of my childhood. We lived in a tiny hill village in the South of France where every Saturday old Claude would lead his donkey Napoleon up the winding rocky path to the village square, laden with dusty old reels of film. The loveable village blacksmith, Rémi, would set up his projector facing the whitewashed wall of the church, Claude would feed in those magical strips of colour and light, and everyone would abandon their baking and games of pétanque and come rushing into the square agog with excitement to see the wondrous spectacles: Police Academy 6, Porky's, Evil Dead 2, Conan the Destroyer and Turner & Hooch.

I had been banned from the magical screenings in the square since I seemed so overwhelmed by the power of these ‘movies’. Yet old Claude took pity on me and allowed me to climb up his ancient olive tree from whose branches –

Alright. It wasn't the formative incident of my childhood. Life isn't so neatly patterned. But the first time I saw Marlon Brando, I nearly died.

2

Some time afterwards you could have found me standing outside Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford with my elder brother Saul and my younger brother Ben, all three of us holding up the books we had just bought with our pocket money so my mother could take a picture. Ben's book was called Where Do I Come From? and Saul's was called What is Happening to Me? My book was called Who Am I? Who am I? I'm a girl who loves actors.

We lived next door to the writer Jan Morris, and one day my mother said to me, ‘Antonia, listen, I've got something to tell you. James from next door is now Jan. So if you see him wearing a dress, tell her how pretty it is.’ And I thought: Isn't that nice? Anything to do with sex was nice. Sex had our respect. The defining struggle of my father's life had been between the Catholic priesthood and my mother. Sex had fought with God, as an equal, until they could both see each other's point of view. The children were the winners. And so we liked sex. As a nurse, my mother tended to turn everything into biology. ‘That bit at the top,’ she would say, when Ben and I were in the bath, ‘is Ben's foreskin. And those are his testicles!’ Bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. At fancy dress parties Saul and Ben and I went naked as Adam, Cain and Eve, saving on the price of costumes. We carried an enormous brown-and-yellow-striped home-knitted snake that was otherwise used as a draught-excluder. When we grew too old to go as Adam and Eve, we attended parties as Pollution, dressed in black and trailing empty cans of tuna while our new brothers and sisters nakedly paraded the snake. We were eco-friendly. The stickers in our car said ‘Nurses Against the Bomb’ and ‘Goats Rule’.

When my father became a psychologist, we moved to Manchester and lived in a modest house with campaigning students as lodgers, and the children kept coming: Patrick, Suzannah, Luke and Molly. ‘Do you know what Mum and Dad are?’ Suzannah asked me and my friend Mischa, as the three of us whiled away an afternoon inserting Crayolas into our vaginas. ‘What?’ ‘Perverts, that's what they are.’ ‘Perverts,’ I whispered to myself, rather liking the sound of it. Mischa's glamorous Australian mother Jill wrote the questions for University Challenge among piles of textbooks in her kitchen. It was not a happy house. Jill drank, and kept a bitter eye on Mischa's father Bruce, who came and went in a chocolate Jaguar, supposedly dealing antiques from the boot but mostly parked around the corner with the woman from Thresher's.

Right off the bat, my mother wasn't keen on Mischa, having caught me leaning up against a bureau inhaling on a pencil and saying to Ben: ‘You are a cold-hearted prick who wants to see me hanging from a tree in the garden.’ I had been possessed by the glamour of adultery. The atmosphere at Mischa's was always one of potential murder. The phenomenal scale of the arguments. The range and randomness of the information spilled, the strength-regathering silences in between. When she wasn't working, Jill sat stiffly in an armchair in the study, her dark hair falling to her waist in one solid piece like a bin-bag. There she would relay the drama down the telephone to Bamber Gascoigne.

‘Oh, thank Christ,’ she said when Gascoigne picked up at the other end. ‘Bamber – he's here! But he's pissed.’ Bruce, sober, handed her a glass of water and some aspirin. Jill looked up at him and spoke, low, into the phone. ‘He's making me take some pills. I don't know what they are.’

On Tuesdays I rushed from my convent school to join Mischa and Jill watching Johnny Weissmuller being Tarzan on the television. Weissmuller would come down a tree like a Greek statue and rush off in his flank-flashing pants to meet people at the escarpment, a place we mysteriously never saw.

‘Those shorts look like they just about cover his scrotum,’ I noted.

‘Christ,’ said Jill in her boozy voice, ‘you Quirkes with your goats, and your Song of the Volga Boatman.’

It was at Mischa's that I saw my first videos. One was called My French Lover and involved a man and a woman carrying a big plastic doll with a moustache into a bedroom and then getting under the sheets and laughing like maniacs. I seem to have blanked the rest. When I told my parents about this, I was banned from visiting number fifteen again. I slipped off in the rain to tell Mischa but she was calm, like someone used to having the ends of things spelled out and then revoked on a daily basis. ‘Je reviens,’ I said, a line I'd picked up watching Emmanuelle with Jill.

3

Because Mischa and I weren't allowed to see each other we kept in touch by writing letters that Ben would deliver. Mischa had become very beautiful and began first to sign off as Marilyn Monroe and then to write as her. I responded as James Dean, and the two doomed stars began an affair. This grew into a very serious correspondence which required a great deal of biographical knowledge. I had a stack of Dean biographies and books of photos of him. (It never occurred to me to watch any of his films.) But Mischa was a couple of years older than me and when she went to try her luck as a trainee teacher in Tokyo, she wrote to me as herself rather than Monroe, as if Marilyn had dumped Jimmy – which offended Dean. He wrote to her from the set of Giant throughout those fraught early months of 1955. He was bewildered, hurt, jealous of Joe DiMaggio and suspicious that she might be forming an attachment with a playwright on the New York scene. But nothing came back from Tokyo, just chatter about food and friends. Was that what drove him to such near-suicidal recklessness? He burned her old letters. He'd be dead within the year.

4

I got four C's and an E in my GCSEs and failed the rest. But because I spent most of the next year recovering from an operation on my hip I didn't have to go to school and just sat in my room reading. I got four A's at A level. I convalesced in the arms of Antony Sher's Year of the King (about his Richard III for the RSC) and Simon Callow's Being an Actor and Stanislavski's Building a Character, and back to Year of the King, flicking ahead to my favourite bits, which were always about what Sher said to Roger Allam at the Arden Hotel bar. Nothing more comforting than that sense of the extended family which actors thrive in. Year of the King is just about the happiest book I've ever read, the most soothing, which is not what Sher meant at all, but there you go: actors' first neurosis is that acting is just too much fun to be art. I wanted to be in the Arden Hotel bar with Roger Allam.

So I decided I was going to be an actress and auditioned at the Contact Youth Theatre for a play called Don Juan Comes Back From the War and got the part of a bisexual dress designer who dates Don Juan after meeting him in a café in 1920s Vienna, gets dumped, strips and throws plates at his head. I petitioned my mother to hire me a sunbed so I could appear on stage with the tan I felt the part required, but she flatly refused. ‘You are what you are,’ she said.

On stage, I felt I had mainlined into acting. The aperture opened wide and I saw the abyss. ‘Listen, you bastard,’ I had to say, fetching a photo of the Don out of a drawer. ‘Our child is gone. That's right. Gone. Vanished. And I can never have another. Who was it I reminded you of, hmmmmmmm? Go on. Tell me. Who was the bitch?’ I took a needle, poked holes through the photograph's eyes, lashed out furiously at a table, and thinking what the hell, I can do anything picked up a chair and broke its back off by smashing it against the floor, and then leaned up against the wall, panting.

I got a glimpse of what I would be like as an actress: a nightmare. Acting was shocking. It was more than just the power of having other people look at me, or the power of being another person. It was the utter freedom and violence and irresponsibility available. Don't think I'm saying that the performance was any good whatsoever – I just thought: I could easily spend my life in the service of this feeling. I'd come off stage weeping uncontrollably and sink into a kind of post-coital woolliness that lasted until we got to the pub where none of the rest of the stage-school cast would speak to me because, presumably, they all found me completely terrifying.

My family came and were stunned by my noise and rage as I clomped around on the stage balling up my fists like someone who'd been well and truly screwed over. In the car on the way home, my father turned round and said, ‘I'll never believe you again.’ And for a moment I had an instinctive feeling – something more than just the inculcated social instinct that being an actor is a bit silly – that if I kept this up I would be permanently releasing a sort of person that I might not like. When the next play was cast, my mother pointed out the ad in the local paper, but I said I didn't want to do it. I would have liked to have called this book ‘I've Been Marvellous: Seventy Magical Years at the Top’, or simply ‘QUIRKE: The Autobiography’, but I'm not allowed to. I forgot about being an actress and never thought of it again.

5

Let's start with a whole man. Let's lay down a brief marker, an ideal to measure the rest by. Who should it be, this person who, if the movies were asked what a man was, they could reply with? Someone with a bigger heart than Brando. More longevity than De Niro. Less neurosis than Cary Grant. Let's not use Steve McQueen or Gregory Peck or Al Pacino or Denzel Washington or Valentino. Let's use Robert Mitchum as our marker. Why? Because of all actors he explains himself the most, needs analysis the least. He tells you, more than anyone else, that a body is what a soul looks like, that the way you speak and move is all there is and nothing more need be said. You don't explain it, you just love it. In Mitchum's case, the eyebrows like droplets sliding off a windshield and the genius for standing still, as if he is both moving and staying put at the same time. The way his gaze comes at you through the second set of transparent eyelids he seems to have, like a crocodile. The upswing in his voice as if he's continually stopping himself from drifting off. The mysterious depth of experience implied by so many of his gestures as if he is laughing at the smallness of movies compared to life, which goes back forever. All great movie stars know that they will bore you in the end. Avoiding being boring drove Brando nuts. But the anxiety of being boring never crossed Mitchum's mind. The virus of boring-anxiety – which all actors carry – never made it past his antibodies. He is the undiseased. And, having read more pages on Mitchum than I have on anyone in this book, I've learned two things: 1) I have nothing whatsoever to say about him, and 2) nobody else does. So let Robert Mitchum, like a post driven into the ground to stake a claim over a landscape, be our marker. I like being silenced by him. He shuts me up like the right answer. He simplifies everything for me until I can think ah, Bob Mitchum, so that's what a ‘man’ is, is it? Got it. And what an amazing thing! Just look at that. Aren't they amazing, these ‘men’? And so many of them! It's raining bloody men! Let me tell you about a few others …

6

After my A levels I got a job selling insurance at Scottish Amicable in Manchester where every day I was convulsed by psychosomatic illness. But the job was useful because it enabled me to pay for all the drugs which my boyfriend and his friends liked to take.

‘What are you talking about? What are you on?’ my mother asked one day across the kitchen table.

‘Ecstasy!’ I beamed, happy to inform.

It was 1989 in Manchester and, had I but known it, my boyfriend was very cool. I had seduced him by the length of my jumper. I hadn't seen my own hands in eighteen months. He was a musician called Mark who looked a bit like Peter Firth in Letter to Brezhnev, I thought, and I adored him. I loved him. There was nothing else. But when he suggested that we should go to bed together, I was baffled. It was as if he had suggested that we move to South America, or that we weren't English at all, but French. Or aliens. A bizarre and totally irrelevant suggestion. Sex was abstract and ever present but it never actually happened. Like maths. I was horrified by the voice-over on Betty Blue which insisted that the principals had been ‘screwing for a week’.

‘Screwing for a week! Screwing! Screwing? Screwing! Skerreww-ing! For a week?. Can you imagine?’

‘Yes,’ said Mark.

I would roll around the floor of the Hacienda in a three-hundred-person embrace while Mark talked record deals with an old man who used to hang around called Tony Wilson. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Shaun. You too, Manni,’ I would say at five o'clock in the morning out of my tree on ecstasy and speed before removing Mark's hand from my thigh. Just what kind of girl did he think I was? What was he on?

Eventually, I acceded to Mark's request. ‘Tonight, on the 12th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, became a woman,’ I thought tremulously to myself. Or had I? A couple of days later I thought: ‘Tonight, on the 14th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, almost certainly became a woman.’ The day after that I thought: ‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’ and proudly munched my way through half a packet of Anadin. I was immensely lucky to have Mark as my first boyfriend. My first love. He had great talent as a musician and the dedication to back it up. He was as sincere and grave as any prince in an Oscar Wilde fairy story and bought me a ring whose inscription, love you baby blue, obliquely thanked Beatrice Dalle for her help in binding us together. In his blue and serious gaze I was wide open. I was invisible, I had no secrets to conceal. That's young love. Not because it's the first time but simply because you are young, before Life thins into that pointed little thing, A Life. Before time turns your life into a one-woman show.

On the strength of my convalescence-assisted A levels, I got a place at UCL to read English, which gave Scottish Amicable the excuse to sack me they had long been looking for. As I descended in the lift from the fourteenth floor for the last time, the nausea and palsy which had gripped me for a year unclenched themselves floor by floor until I arrived at reception and walked out into Piccadilly a new person. The only truly strange thing that has ever happened to me. It was like I'd been sacked into reality. Everything around me suddenly came into its full life. The traffic sounded out, the shadows of sandstone buildings on dusty concrete became delicately blue, sunlit Georgian granite sprang into heat, the Pennines showed up, windy and bright and in focus thirty miles away, and I felt for the first time, in the nicest way, like I was on my own. I have never felt more well than I did at that moment. In this lofty mood I was reluctant to take money off my parents for university and told them that I had won a ‘special grant’ to cover my costs in London, which I hadn't. I wanted to do it on my own, like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. The afternoon I arrived I managed to get a job at Habitat on Tottenham Court Road for six days a week, and at a pub in the evenings, leaving me absolutely no time for lectures or tutorials, but I reckoned I could work around this if I chose only those courses where you don't have to do any thinking (like Phonetics) and stole all the books I needed from the Waterstone's on Gower Street.

‘How's college?’ my father would ask at Christmas and Easter, then at the Christmas and Easter after that, and I'd think: Don't ask me.

But I couldn't go back. Midway through my first year, Mark's band had got to Number 3 in the charts with a dance hit that went ‘If there ain't no love then there ain't no use’. When they went on Top of the Pops I stood at the back of the studio smiling a false smile with the other girlfriends and watched him on stage working his keyboard as soothingly as if he were peeling an apple, knowing like you know there are dead flies in the cutlery drawer that I was not built to be a popstar's girlfriend, with girlfriendly skills. While I could hardly grasp the idea that something as infinite and boundless as he and I could have an end, I knew that knowing that meant that somewhere it had already ended. Lessons, by definition, are always too late. In the furniture department at Habitat I listened to couples arguing on sofas with their eyes squeezed tightly shut in frustration and watched the streams of students pass the windows, wondering how to enter their lives.

One day I was walking from Maple Street down to Oxford Circus to buy strawberries from the stall that used to trade outside the chapel on Tottenham Court Road when I realised that a man had been following me for the past ten minutes, so I turned on him and demanded an explanation. He had a red flick like Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful.

‘How else am I going to meet you if I don't follow you?’ he said.

I simply could not discover the flaw in this logic. I was so completely stumped for an answer that I went home with him to his flat near Russell Square where his flatmate shared his bed as if this were a ménage à presque trois. The thing about being innocent is that you can never be quite sure what constitutes seediness and what doesn't. I thought: Russell Square! This is where Ted Hughes used to live when he was first going out with Sylvia Plath! It seemed to open the city for me, unlock the British Museum, and all the print shops on Coptic Street, and the tall white sycamore-shaded houses of Bloomsbury, and the pale yellow Peabody Trust flats blooming among them, and the little square off High Holborn with its bronze of Gandhi sitting cross-legged; and beyond, all the pubs on Theobalds Road outside which young lawyers in their first suits anxiously smoked, looking pressed for time, and then the Regency terraces of the Gray's Inn Road and the flops of Euston. I had been asked home by somebody and – lo and behold, so to speak – I was home. London. So I kept going home with people. And Mark turned up one day to find he had been deceived. It was the usual sad end to first love. You don't leave them for anyone, you leave them for everyone, and it was as messy as hell. The violence of breaking up was infinitely more surprising and disorientating than losing one's virginity. Mark floored it down the M6 to splinter my door, but somewhere under my own hysterics I was reassured that love was all it was cracked up to be. Telling you this makes me feel old, but it's true.

In my third year an American entered the Man in the Moon in Camden where I worked and told me that he was looking for a place to live. ‘I've run into some trouble back home,’ he said in a Texan accent. He was the first American I had ever met and seemed almost supernaturally exotic. I brought him home in much the way that Elliot brings home ET.

‘Who is he?’ my flatmate Susie said.

‘He's an American!’

‘But who is he?’

‘He's an American!’

When I got home from the pub, I would get into bed with Wilson and ask about his life in Salado, Texas. His voice was a McConaugheyan velvet coat. He wasn't a man, I now saw. He was just a kid like me. A handsome Texan boy with a twist of a harelip that turned my heart over. In the mornings he would physically open my eyes to wake me. He got a job as a binman and started bringing back gifts for me from work, like out-of-date pancake mix. So I made out-of-date pancakes, and delicious they were too. But I didn't know what to do with the other salvage, like the little wheels off discarded roller-skates: I cleaned and polished them and put them on the mantelpiece as one might arrange an exhibition of totems of a collapsed society. I couldn't understand why he cried so much throughout that autumn until he eventually told me about his trouble back home. He had shot a man dead for two hundred dollars: ‘I didn't think it meant I would never be able to go back,’ he said. It was so dark I couldn't see his face.

‘After I did it, I went up and looked at the body, even though they'd told me not to. He had this small tattoo on his arm. Of a Swiss chalet.’

If it was just acting, it was just acting. And if it were true, then he couldn't be any more unhappy than he already was. The city closed in, black and orange at four o'clock, a world of buses wheezing through puddles, a world covered in leaf mulch or car-shit which seemed as bleary and smeared as if you were seeing it through an uncleanable windscreen, the conditions of life such that you could do nothing but shrivel under them, never quite clean, never quite dry, and all scrawled over with an illegible graffiti of fear, about money, for Wilson, and of guilt about Mark, who had burned everything I had given him in the front garden of my parents' house. Being sacked from both Habitat and the Man in the Moon allowed me to get a job in a travel agency where the more regular hours let me make it home to Wilson before his binman's bedtime. He feared sheep and had to be reassured of their absence from Hampstead Heath.

‘Sheep'll watch ya,’ he said. ‘It'll always watch ya, like it watches everything.’

Bonfire Night shook him something terrible. The smell of the fires in the parks around Muswell Hill, the blackened sparklers on the pavements, the bins full of charred fireworks and ash, the way it seemed to extend for a month of random bangs and shrieks – a season of burning – threw him into prayer. He knelt at the foot of the bed in the posture of the child on the bookmark I had received at my First Holy Communion and gave himself up to a terror of hellfire, craving God's forgiveness. It stunned me. I wanted him to leave, to get away from me, but I knew that I would pay if I asked him to go. I loved him. Yet I had no margin. I envied God the many mansions of His house. It was easy for Him to forgive and accommodate Wilson, yet He never would. At the end of every day, Wilson opened the curtains and looked up at the starless winter sky, and actually – out loud – thanked his lucky stars that he'd found me. I betrayed him then by wishing him away, much worse than I had ever betrayed Mark. I was learning another lesson – that not everybody grew up accustomed to love, and those that hadn't couldn't defend themselves from those that had. But Wilson was a ship going down in a black and cold city, and I wanted only to escape the vortex of his sinking.

By February, he had stopped talking entirely, merely dribbling a yo-yo up and down for hours on end. At the travel agent's I sold round-the-world tickets to students in my year who looked at me like they recognised me but weren't quite sure how. It made me feel like a ghost. By April, Wilson started to talk again and told the Anabaptists in whose basement off the Archway Road we lived that he was a professional gigolo. They wanted us out. Doing my exams was like writing cheques I knew were going to bounce. On a spring day, while I was basing my Chaucer paper around the one couplet I could remember – ‘And as thou art a fightul lord and juge / Ne yeve us neither mercy ne refuge’ – Wilson had a fight with one of the Anabaptists and cleared out for good, leaving his passport behind in the pocket of his one good winter coat.

7

The single greatest performance by a British actor in the 1990s was by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's Naked, as (say the following very fast from the back of your nose, like John Lennon) a cheeky fucking manky Mancy monkeh called Johnny, a hyper-articulate autodidact ignoramus – are you following me, love? – who flees the north and ends up dropping off the radar enfuckingtirely in London, because it's just such a great warm welcoming fucking carnival out on the streets in the Big Shitty, knoworrimean, that he practically perishes from stuffing himself with the free poxy fucking marzipan the pearly kings and queens are giving out, are you with me, love? Peachy fucking creamy.

Johnny talks like this all the time. He takes a linguaphiliac delight in polysyllables and goes at everyone like a razorblade with his half-baked conspiracy theories and his patchy understanding of Nostradamus and the Book of Revelation and Chaos Theory – a performance which is forensically accurate about a certain type of smart-arse Mancunian educated at a time when comprehensives still did The Odyssey and Paradise Lost. I knew this Johnny. I had met about six of him. Undefeatable in argument, destructive, self-destructive, too clever by three-quarters, both frightening and irresistible to women. And Thewlis's creation was a note-perfect capturing of a type no one had ever captured before, a type whose essence was that you could never capture him, whose whole raison d'être was to evade capture. This was news, a new species for the zoo, grabbed from the world so gleaming and fresh that the rest of the film and indeed the rest of Mike Leigh's work – which we all regarded as the acme of realism – looked like a cartoon.

Thewlis's Johnny has those beautiful wrist-bones which you want to grab to stop his even more beautiful hands from slapping you. His voice quarries out every bit of music contained in the Manchester accent. The mouth beneath the ratty overbite is incapable of anything but sarcasm or supersincerity. That fast, straight-backed walk, like a cursor gliding along a line, looks like the walk of someone walking out on you. And all of these – hands, voice, mouth, walk – are fuelled by that peculiar youthful delusion: integrity. Only when you're young are you so hounded and harried by the fear of being fake, as if a single lie will curse you forever. The God of Integrity wants you to keep running, to never do anything twice, to worship the present tense, to reject comfort as a Siren. He is a cold god who would only really be happy if everyone were on their own, and only the young dream of him. But Thewlis is ten years older than Holden Caulfield, and Johnny is ten years deeper into hell, drowning in north London, in Bounds Green and Southgate and Edmonton, among those tall houses whose white stucco looks like icing in a Richard Curtis movie and like armour plating in Naked. It wasn't wishable-away, this performance, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Thewlis turned the film into a horror flick for the lower middle classes. He scared the living daylights out of me.

8

Two days before the end of my final term, I was stopped by a Modern English Language tutor on the stairs of the department after finding I had failed my degree. He asked, a little hurt, why I had never been to one of his lectures in three years or, indeed, to anyone's lectures or classes whatsoever.

‘Is it drugs?’

‘Well, no. I just haven't washed my hair for a while. I've been a bit all over the place.’

‘You're sure it's not drugs? It's always drugs. Sure? Well, why didn't you come and see me? Everyone else does – the place is swimming in doctors' notes. It's exams.’

I figured what the hell and told him everything, including how I'd been sacked from the travel agent's for absent-mindedly selling forty tickets to Glastonbury on a coach that didn't exist, and he looked at me, still very kindly, and said that if I'd come and told him about all this a month ago he could probably have bumped me up to a Pass, though some of my papers had been truly terrible, he said, really, for shame. ‘You just wrote “no time to finish!” at the bottom of all these blank pages.’

Through the window of his room, where he had ushered me, you couldn't quite see the Waterstone's where I had stolen the books. I told him about that too. He nodded and said nothing, leaning forward in his chair with his hands latticed on his knees, occasionally unfolding them to hand me a tissue and looking down at my feet, dirty in their sandals, so that I could cry unwatched.

‘It's too late to do anything about all the paperbacks. But since you've clearly never opened the textbooks, you can simply put them back, can't you?’ he said, as gently as Denholm Elliott chiding Helena Bonham Carter to be a better person in A Room with a View. ‘What are you planning on doing now? Isn't there anything you're interested in doing? Something you particularly like?’

I couldn't stop crying long enough to reply. Where was Wilson? Who was going to protect him?

‘Nothing you like? Nothing you love doing?’

‘I like the movies …’ I said, uselessly.

He asked if I'd be interested in a work placement on a local paper where he knew the deputy editor. I said I didn't think I'd make a very good journalist, but he looked so pained I immediately changed tack and agreed, putting on a face that I hoped suggested I was worthy of redemption. Later that week I did what he advised about the books, like a tooth fairy – one that leaves Bauer's Grammatical and Lexical Variance in a heavy bag by the lift. As I made my way out of the shop, an assistant pursued me with the bag.

‘But I don't want it!’ I said.

‘Well, neither do we, to be honest. We have trouble giving this stuff away in the holidays.’

So I went round to Foyles and left it there instead.

9

From the top, then. Very, very fine, dry blond hair which conforms to the shape of his head and, as he has aged, looks like a wig or the helmet-like hair you clip onto a Lego man. Good hair for a David Lynch. A forehead which is still miraculously smooth, the skin very tight to it, the bone very tangible, the first great curve of his head a section of a sphere. His whole face is full of spheres. The eyebrows are faint and fall away. The bridge of the nose is where there has been an impact of pain. There are two, not deep, vertical lines which, taken with the declining eyebrows, make him look harrowed. The curve of the eyeballs is very visible under his eyelids – his face has started to become beautiful. And unusual. He cannot seem to open his eyes very wide, as if the eyelids have too far to travel back up the curve of the eyeballs. The eyes themselves are ethnically unplaceable, a speckled pale blue. Under them are deep pre-Raphaelite shadows (which in time have become real pouches). These shadows are immensely beautiful. And now you begin to see just how exquisite the face is. The nose is incredibly fine and straight, a nose which ladies in Beverly Hills might pick from a catalogue. The ears are sleek to his head: he looks like a bird. In the hollows beneath the cheekbones, like ripples playing on the underside of a bridge, lines of beauty continually form and reform. Everything about the face keeps getting finer – you feel you could crush his bones like a sparrow's bones. The outline of the lips is as sharp as the outline of a baby's lips. The cut in his top lip is like the V of a child-drawn seagull. There is a gap between his teeth which adds to the general feeling of sickness – again, you notice how beauty and sickness are bound together here in this pre-Raphaelite way. The lips are red, like the lips in a Tennyson horror poem. They might be poisonous. Take the head in your hands and turn it to a three-quarter profile. It's heart-shaped, and the line that runs from his forehead to his sharp chin, full of double curves, is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You're at a loss to say why – it's explicable by mathematics, no doubt – but that line looks like the definition of beauty. And everything is amazingly smooth and golden. A sick beauty, made of gold. The most beautiful: Christopher Walken.

10

My mother was confused about what I should wear on the first day of my work placement at the Camden New Journal, torn between recommending a formal skirt and blouse and actually wanting me to wear the uniform of, say, Alan Dershowitz's elaborately casual team of legal students in Reversal of Fortune. ‘It's time to get your shit together,’ she said down the phone, pleased, because she believed that working at a local paper meant that I was in effect working against the system. ‘It's your job to get the truth out there!’ she reminded me. ‘It's your job to sniff out the truth!’

Propriety won out, so I wore low blue court shoes, a white blouse with a sweetheart bow, carried a neat handbag, and was very nervous on the way to work. It is important to communicate the extent of my ignorance. Getting on the bus, I looked at the change in my hand and thought: What is money? What do banks do? Seeing the headline on someone's newspaper, I thought: What's the Cabinet, exactly? I know they're Major's advisors, but are they actually MPs?

Inside the Camden New Journal – and there was no one to stop me from walking on in, no one around very much at all – was a room with grey walls and no discernible floor, just layers of newspapers and food wrappers, cake boxes, sandwich cartons, cigarette sleeves, flattened Cup-a-Soups. There were several desks constructed out of piles of back editions on which cigarettes had been left to burn out: the desks were singed but had never ignited because the newspapers were damp. The room was a shrine to the cigarette. All around were styrofoam cups hedgehogged with butts, and the three-bar electric heater was encrusted with bits of charcoaled tobacco and frazzled stands of hair where people had stooped down to spark up. Through the frosted glass of a raised office I could make out someone sitting low in their chair with their head back, not moving. Asleep? The only other person in the room was a man of around forty with a floor-length yellow coat talking into the phone in a Liverpudlian accent under a poster of Ivor Cutler. He beckoned me over.

He was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He had fine wavy reddish-brown hair which curled beneath a long pointed chin. His pale skin was covered in sore-looking freckles and from his cracked lips dangled a dead roll-up. He looked like a fox in the late stages of heroin addiction, or someone kicked off the set of The Name of the Rose for being too credibly medieval. He looked like David Thewlis. Cradling the phone, he plopped the roll-up in a carton of milk, and smirked at my handbag.

‘Got everything you need in there? Got all your little pencils?’

He talked like David Thewlis. He rolled his chair to the side of his desk and sat back in it unashamedly – his shiny green trousers unfashionably high, tight into his crotch like jester's pants, squashing his cock up and tight to the side – and relished my shoes.

‘Oooh, how smashing – a lovely little pair of Start-rites!’ he said. ‘I'm Jim Hewson, the deputy editor – we spoke on the phone. And now here you are.’

There I was. On the lapel of his yellow coat was a little badge that said ‘Touch My Monkey’.

‘Bring your little pencils. We're going out.’

He took me first to a pub and then down to Kentish Town police station, where he heckled the officer giving a statement about a head being found in Regent's Canal. I was already very drunk and confused and became extremely paranoid when he started to goad the police about being in league with the local gangs. The police clearly hated him. There was bitterness and fear in that room.

‘Still trying to get arrested, are you, Jim?’ the officer threatened. ‘And you, Miss “Quirke”. You trying to get arrested now too?’

‘You're not going to arrest us, we're white,’ Jim sneered.

After that he walked me down to a pub in Holborn, striding for miles like a peacock while I ran to keep up, my feet blistering in my court shoes. The Princess Louise behind Gray's Inn was where Jim liked to dig his stories out of the local councillors who drank there after meetings. Again there was a little pulse of fear at his presence, disguised under uneasy bonhomie. When I got back from peeling off my bloodied tights in the loo, he was smilingly scoffing at a councillor: ‘You're fucking her, aren't you? That's why this is happening. He's fucking her. You dirty man. What happened to your tights?’

On the way back to Camden we stopped at yet another pub where he drank his dozenth double of the afternoon and regarded the jukebox selections with the stalest disgust: ‘Why the fuck do I ever drink in here when all they've got to listen to is Freddie Mercury and his harem of stockbrokers?’

I could not reply because I fancied him too much even to open my mouth.

11

Jim was a communist. Everyone at the Journal was a communist. But Jim would never agree with the other communists, which seemed to make him immensely popular among them. People would come round and get sidetracked into spending long, hero-worshipping hours by his desk while he was unbelievably rude about them to their faces. Among these people were a group called the Chartists whom Eric Gordon, the editor, expected every Friday for a serious discussion involving the whole office. Eric was a communist too and had travelled to China as a journalist in the 1960s to help out with the Cultural Revolution. When he had objected to what he was seeing, the authorities had put him and his wife and child under house arrest. For five years. In a room that measured ten feet by twelve. And he was still a communist.

On Fridays when the big hitters rolled up, everyone was expected to contribute. Jim, whose hair seen closer up now seemed the colour of curry powder, would dazzle the room while Eric listened through the frosted glass to his protégé, too knowledgeable and wise to condescend to mere pyrotechnics. These were terribly detailed, recondite conversations as abstruse as the discussions on scripture during which I had been equally silent throughout my childhood. There was still the vexed issue of the Twentieth Party Congress. There was serious present business to do with Central America. There was the question of getting Stalin's twenty million victims down to something more manageable, like twelve million. There was always 1917 and Trotsky. While Jim waltzed through the upper echelons of theory and practice, I kept my head down and watched his elegant freckled fingers draw their merciless distinctions. Only once did I ever score a success, when the subject had moved to the First World War.

‘I don't know, but John Reed always seemed right to me,’ I said. ‘The First World War was about prophets.’

Jim, who was not to know that I was only aware of this because I was a fan of Reds, flashed me a vulpine grin which sent me floating up Parkway that evening eight feet off the ground. I had won a smile from a man who knew how to repair the flaws in dialectical materialism.

12

Not Reds for Warren Beatty – what kind of book do you think this is? For Jack Nicholson! Warren Beatty … The man with the loveliest, slowest pulse in cinema versus an actor who is forever trying to hoodwink you that his heartbeat is faster than it actually is. The guy who always acts less handsome than he is versus the preener: you're always mentally cleaning up Nicholson's face and mentally trying to ruffle Beatty's. The vulnerable versus the unhurtable. The living versus the dead. Nicholson is the greatest actor since, let's say, the time between the Beatles' ninth LP and the birth of Zinedine Zidane, whose work is founded on a sense of humour. They're not terribly funny, those geniuses whose names end in ‘o’, are they? Here are ten more words to kill any smile – Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman. Serious business, great acting. Nicholson plays a small role in Reds as the playwright Eugene O'Neill being manipulated by Beatty's lover Diane Keaton into thinking he's seducing her. It's all rather sad and Chekhovian. She tells him that Beatty has gone away, leaving her to get on with her own things here in this beach house on Long Island.

‘What are they?’ he asks.

‘What?’ says Keaton.

‘The things that you have. That are yours. What are they?’

– this in his Nicholsonian way, turning over every word, holding it up to the light, inspecting it, and then judiciously pondering whether to place it, with great delicacy, in the world or just to, what the hell, smash it.

‘If you were mine,’ he goes on, ‘it would just be you and me. And it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.’

By this time you're pretty much rolling around on the floor clutching your ribs and screaming stop! stop! though there is nothing ostensibly there in his delivery except O'Neill's love, his courage in declaring himself, and the glimmer of an accusation against Keaton's way of life with Beatty.

But you're killing yourself, because everything Nicholson says is given its sense by how near or how far it is from the pure delight that makes up his soul. Not sniggering mischief, as people always say of him – delight. It's what makes him so tragicomic. Nothing he says isn't a fuse burning towards some dynamite-pile of hilarity. And he makes brilliant use of its absence, sparingly, and devastatingly, like in the two scenes in Five Easy Pieces (his best film) when he walks out on Karen Black. You think: My God, where's it gone? He reminds you of just how much you've got to lose, of how high the stakes are. Everything he does in his early films is to do with the frustration of this delight. You've got to be a comedian to be a tragicomedian. He'd be brilliant in Chekhov. Brilliant as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, the still-not-disillusioned doctor not a million miles from his not-quite-yet-disillusioned pianist in Five Easy Pieces.

It's so close, this delight. All you have to do is laugh and the world will be full of it. And in his early films Nicholson keeps trying to tickle the world and failing to make it laugh. Meanwhile, we're laughing our heads off. Even to know that delight, in a perfect world, would be the proper response to life is a simplicity beyond most of us. It's not something that any of those other great actors mentioned above seem to have worked out. Do you know how rare this is? This innocence? Why you keep thinking Jack is a boy? It makes him one in a million. It makes him able to tell the story of the loss of innocence which nobody, only great artists, can do. What an absolute privilege to watch the young Jack liven up Easy Rider (he's the only utopian in it!) and talk you through the fall in Five Easy Pieces and tell you what you're leaving behind in The Last Detail. Amazing, amazing. It's the heart of Nicholson – that his essential self remembers innocence, remembers, no matter how scuffed, a prelapsarian world. And that's why the revered and lauded three-time Oscar winner is very, very underrated. Yes, you heard me! Jack Nicholson is underrated.

13

10 October 1993

The elephants, who have not

been getting on with the new

rhino, slept through the exhibition

which was being held in

the elephant house at the zoo last

night (Monday) by an Israeli

artist who arrived in the country

only yesterday (Monday) before

returning to Tel Aviv tomorrow

(Wednesday).

‘No wonder you failed your fucking degree,’ Jim said. ‘Nobody cares when the artist is going back or what the rhino thinks. You want to know who was there and how long it's on for. See?’

‘Got it. Except – what's wrong with the rhino exactly?’ I wanted to keep him talking.

‘Even if the rhino's doing the elephant's wife, we don't want to read about it. That's not the fucking story. You've got to find the story.’

But I never could – two-hundred-word pieces unstoppably ballooned, like Rufus Sewell, into vast paunchy monsters, and then were brutally slimmed down again (like Rufus Sewell) by brisk sub-editors. And the Journal, for all its apparent slapdashness, was a very serious little operation, with a sinecure on the Local Newspaper of the Year Award. Eric knew what he was doing, always running the necessary campaigns and magnificently inclusive little obituaries of local burglars and tramps. So I was aware that it was something of a test when he sent me to talk to a woman who was staging a protest in Arlington Road about the poll tax. It was an important story and I had a sense that I might actually be sacked, and never see Jim again, if I couldn't find it.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Jim when I returned five hours later.

‘I think Mrs Norman's a bit paranoid,’ I said. ‘She thinks the FBI are watching her. But – it's actually quite interesting. There were two guys in a dark car watching the house the whole time I was there. Wearing ties. In this weather? It does seem a little strange. And get this – she keeps getting letters from the library asking her to return a book on J. Edgar Hoover. But she never took it out. So I wrote down the licence number in case you want to follow it up.’

I was demoted to theatre reviews.

14

‘What's the date, the first?’

‘Look at the paper. Oh, no, wait, of course it's the first – it was Halloween last night. What's the matter?’

‘River Phoenix is dead. It looks like an overdose.’

‘Poor kid. Deliberate or accidental? Bet it was coke. Coke and booze. Bet it's a John Bonham. What's the matter with you?’

What's the matter with me? Nothing. There was nothing to show that he was ever going to be great. In fact, you could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn't have been. But he wasn't Andrew McCarthy Jnr, or Ralph Macchio, or C. Thomas Howell either. He wasn't Björn Andrésen, the vision from Death in Venice, who was never going to be an actor. On the other hand, he wasn't Jean-Pierre Léaud. But he broke your heart. He was weak and soft and seemingly always in tears. In Running on Empty, a pretty good film which he made at the age of seventeen in 1988, he was the sort of teen dream that sends girls sobbing to their bedrooms, and yet there was nothing confected about him. He plays the son of parents on the run from the FBI, so he has to keep moving from town to town, leaving his friends and first girlfriends behind. It's an amazingly immature performance for one of his age, as they never say. It's so not mature. It's brilliant. When my little sister watched Titanic she was inconsolable for weeks. ‘There's no one like Jack!’ she would wail and I'd think yeah, kid, that's right. There is no one like Jack. They just made him up for money. But there is someone like River Phoenix, sweetheart. Phoenix is an open wound in Running on Empty, with clumsy hands and an uneasiness with his own new beauty (he'd been a chubby kid – Stand By Me), and a bloom of puberty still on his cheekbones. Large stretches of his performance look like perfect honesty, too natural to call naturalism. He was Romeo, and no one can ever get Romeo right, because by the time you've cast him the actor's got too old. Running on Empty isn't a good performance by an unfortunately doomed actor. It's a true moment caught in time. The moment when you feel more than you ever have or ever will again: the Romeo moment. There he was. And you can't pay an actor a higher compliment than that. He broke your heart. And the date was 31st October 1993.

15

On Mondays he would go down to the police station and then the Princess Louise, coming back late and maybe even sleeping in the office. On Tuesdays he would usually go down to Paddington Green CID to get stories there and spend the evening at a public meeting. On Wednesdays he was busy putting the paper to bed. Thursdays and Fridays – that was my chance. The long, long weekends he disappeared. If you'd have been there, you'd have wanted to be his friend or his lover, if only to turn his fire outwards from you. Jim was the first principled man I had ever met, my father apart, sardonic and fearless like Sydney Carton. He was the first man I had ever met. But I hardly ever saw him now, and had no real reasons to engage him in conversation. So I became more besotted. The sentence ‘Jim's putting the paper to bed’ could incapacitate me for an hour. Yet he was as oblivious of me as an actor on a screen, and one always falls for those who cannot return your gaze, the blithe, the unaware, the one across the lawn.

In the single-figure audiences at the pub theatres where I was sent to review plays and where the actors could detect my gaze, I yearned for Jim and for the remove of the big screen, where actors moved in innocence of my eyes. My first plan was to impress him with the commitment of my reviews. I found out a lot of statistics and waved them at him like breasts at the pub on Thursday.

‘Did you know that there are 38,000 members of Equity, and at any one time only 13,400 are actually in work? It's shocking.’

‘In what way shocking?’

‘It's union-bashing, isn't it? Listen, these are working people. If there are fifty fringe theatres in London and they've got a cast of, let's say, an average of six per play, then that's, uh, 300 people, and if the Equity minimum is £85 a week, then that's 300 people living on a pittance. Eighty-five pounds a week!’

‘That's more than twice what you earn, love.’

My other plan was simply to write such astonishingly unforgettable reviews – reviews you could poke your eye out on – that notice would simply have to be paid. They were skull-crackingly bad. But they looked quite good. About a monologue on Virginia Woolf I wrote: ‘“I am mad! I hear voices! Not only that, I write them down!” That is, I suggest, what the character wanted to say. But where in all of this is our delicious wine? Our great little knitter?’ The worse the plays the more free I felt to woo Jim with this unique voice. And so it became a kind of competition. The more terrible the plays were the more terrible the reviews were. It was a contest of terribility. I wafted my pen around like Isadora Duncan, desperate for a glance from him. And one day he did call me over.

‘Listen, Sally. You've got to stop writing these reviews or Eric's going to sack you. And if he does that, you're fucked.’

I could feel the wind from Naked tugging at me, trying to tear me off London and suck me up the Archway Road towards the motorway and the oubliettes of the North. I also thought: He's noticed me. I wanted him. I even want him now, as I write, a painful need, never since matched, to touch him, though he was like a jagged piece of corrugated iron which would cut you no matter how you held it.

16

Glyn Maxwell has written some fine poetry and some bewilderingly wonky plays, but when Jim found out that there would be free drinks after a production of a new Maxwell play at the Battersea Arts Centre he decided to tag along. As we were leaving the paper an ad-boy laughed at the idea of Battersea.

‘Your drinking's changed, mate,’ he said to Jim.

‘It's not my drinking that's changed. It's your non-drinking. You might have stopped; I'm just carrying on as normal.’

At the interval Jim said he was going to leave and I tailed after him to the box office where he was demanding his money back and the girl was refusing to give the refund. He loomed over her like one of the inquisitors in Dreyer's film of Joan of Arc.

‘I can only refund you if you found it offensive in some way,’ she said.

‘I found it offensive in every way. It was shit.’

‘I can't refund you for that. Did you think it was sexist?’

‘No, it was just fucking terrible, and I'm going now and I would like my money back.’

‘Did you think it demeaned any minority group?’ the girl said. She was trying to open a pathway to a compromise. ‘Did it offend you racially?’

‘It offended the entire fucking human race. Is that good enough?’

Jim's aggressiveness felt to me like something from an earlier time, when people were rougher and less touchy, when less offence was taken and given, when people were less proud of the masks that they wore. It seemed that Jim's aggressiveness almost relieved him of the burden of goodness – it was his good manners, doing you the courtesy of withholding nothing. Or perhaps I was making excuses for him. As he sailed down Lavender Hill in his yellow coat, leaving his disdained wake behind him, I hurried after, raising my voice to ask if this behaviour usually got him anywhere with women.

‘Yeah, lots – some fantastic ones, actually. Sometimes they let me fuck them. But usually they just want to tell me about their suicide attempts.’

What a horrible man! He crouched down to do up a shoelace and, since he was briefly my height, with his tongue half out of his mouth in a bite of concentration, I stepped forward and put my mouth around it.

17

And this was brave. This was acting. It sometimes seems as if a romantic history is the history of the removal of the need for courage. As you get older, you only need it for leaving. And even the braver of us – among whom I do not number myself – only use our courage two or three times in a life. It takes too much out of you, until you don't have enough to lose really to call it courage any more rather than heedlessness. So I stepped forward and lost my courage virginity. I would have two or three more to lose only. He reorganised his mouth and kissed me back as he straightened up.

And when we went back to his flat at the top of a tower block by Mornington Crescent, I was bouncing around like Zebedee, not only in the delight of possession but in the joy of having created it all myself. I did this! I thought as his puritanical flat revealed itself to me. I made this!, and this, and this hair, really the colour of rust right up close, and the taste of it too, and these collarbones and these elbows, and these ribs, and these grooves between his belly and his hip-bones, and even these jokes he's cracking causing me to look momentarily up, and these thighs and long shins – all of it magicked up by my courage. Anything I did, like this, and this, and that, and that again, I had brought into being!

Love runs through you and uses you as a device to get what it wants, and when you're in love you're simply keeping pace with it for a moment, briefly allowed to lope along at the front where everything that comes into view is new.

18

Let's get something straight. The most embarrassing film to like, if you're English, is Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson's failed-actor comedy with Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann. Even the BFI Classic on Withnail begins with much blushing and a statement that to admit to a liking for the film is to declare oneself unfit for adult company. Let's get another thing straight. If Kind Hearts and Coronets is not the funniest British film ever made, it's Withnail. If Kes is not the most touching British film ever made, it's Withnail. No film at all is as loved as Withnail, and if your hatred of students extends to dismissing that love then you're probably someone whose response to films stops at something like ‘intense admiration’. In fact, bugger Kind Hearts and Coronets, it is the funniest film in English. It's also a better film about the sixties than something like Blow-Up and, very indirectly (it's a subtle movie), an exceptional film about homosexuality.

The model for Withnail was a failed actor called Vivian MacKerrell whom Robinson knew. But Robinson is a failed actor too. He had parts in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and other bits and pieces before turning up, extraordinarily handsome, as the object of Isabelle Adjani's amour fou in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (great movie!). He's pretty good. He's really very good. All he gets to do is simply be there while Adjani's wave breaks over him. You'd have to see it, if you haven't already. But after that Robinson's phone wouldn't ring. So he became a writer and did The Killing Fields before Withnail and directing. Then he sort of failed as a director. He continues to sort of fail as a writer. Is there any profession in the world with as high a rate of failure as acting? As the movies as a whole? This is a book about successes (apart from me, obviously) and all the actors I mention share a common trait, because being successful is a trait – they're all one kind of person, whereas partial success or failure is various.

Why not Bruce Robinson? He had a beautiful wide mouth wittily ironised by the quotation-mark lines around it, enormous cool, even greater charisma, talent (see Adele H.), brains, training (RADA), star quality (if you'll excuse the cobwebs on those words), and he talked, well, the guy talked and still talks like the greatest talker in the English language.

‘Vivian was too smart to get a job – an intellectual, erudite man. He'd go to an audition to play a priest, read up all this cackle of theological bollocks and then say, “It's very strange you should be considering me for this part because before I became an actor I was considering the priesthood.” And they knew it was nonsense, so he'd never get the job.’

Just one of the quieter bits from a twenty-page interview he did in 1995. Not a great story, but what is that word ‘cackle’?

Another bit, reluctantly endorsing capital punishment for rapists of children:

‘Dead him, is my view.’

Concerning a Spielberg project about a psychic woman and a child killer, which never got off the ground:

‘It's as black as your hat. This woman bounces off the lino of hell.’

The lino of hell? ‘Black as your hat’ I'm pretty sure is a phrase. But nobody uses it any more. It's remembered or rescued language. What a great phrase anyway, black as your hat – I hope it comes back. But ‘the lino of hell’? ‘Dead him’? A ‘cackle’ of something? You know who he reminds me of? William Shakespeare, that's who. That's what Shakespeare used to do instinctively, that black as a hat, lino of hell thing. He'd make something up (‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’) and then let the groundlings know what he meant (‘making the green one red’).

I love Bruce Robinson, and all this is merely to remind you of what a great guy he is, this failed actor. Because it's not just the RADA boys who ‘only’ make a dozen films who are failed actors. It's not just the RADA boys who make no films at all who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who didn't get into RADA but still managed a lot of acting who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who were bloody good in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors. It's not even the boys who were OK in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors (like me). It's the boys, that is to say pretty much everyone in the world, who stand in front of the mirror one day, just once, casually, and think shame I'm no actor. They're the failed actors too. Most of this planet consists of failed actors.

So the parting scene at the end of Withnail and I, with its dramatisation of the sorting of the successful from the failed, I find as universal as Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac in Casablanca. The ‘I’ character is moving on, off to Manchester to play the lead in Journey's End. Withnail wants to walk him through Regent's Park to Euston, but it's raining cats and dogs and ‘I’ would rather have a quick clean break. He refuses the wine which Withnail presses on him and asks him to go back, and Withnail, perhaps realising for the first time that he will never play Hamlet (one of the film's motifs), turns to the wolves of the zoo, those same wolves which gave such comfort to Ted Hughes and his children after their mother killed herself, and gives them ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not …’ Then he turns back through the rain towards Camden, where, if he looked to the right he'd see Park Crescent, where Robert Donat left his milkman's cart in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and if he turned his head further he'd see the cul-de-sac of St Andrew's Place where Glenda Jackson gave Salome's Last Dance for Ken Russell. And then he'd walk past Chester Terrace where Bette Davis scared the kids in The Nanny and down which Robert Redford would drive in Spy Game: all the successful actors. I is a success. I is saved. I wanted to be I, but Jim was I, I thought.

19

Jeff Sawtell, the film critic of the Journal, was so much of a communist that he wore navy blue Cultural Revolution pyjamas all year round, adding only a scarf in winter. ‘If you like your brew in a mug,’ he said to my excited inquiry about Four Weddings and a Funeral, ‘then it won't be your cup of tea.’ One got the impression that Jeff thought Jean-Luc Godard was a lickspittle bourgeois dog. A liver disease was making him progressively weaker, however, and Eric had nowhere else to turn but to me. I was thrilled, a thrill vitiated only by the lingering suspicion I had learned reading Jeff that movie reviewing was a branch of Marxist socio-economic theory.

‘Will this do?’ I asked Jim, showing him my first ever review, of a Richard Gere movie called Mr Jones.

It read:

The screen persists in portraying the mentally ill as remarkably gifted on the side. Not only is Mr Jones a virtuoso pianist, he is also a whizzkid mathematician and mind-reader. This kind of publicity does mental health organizations like MIND no good whatsoever.

Umbraged social comment, that was the thing. Plus the MIND charity shop was three doors down from the Journal. I practically killed myself trying to work out why the incontestable Pulp Fiction was somehow despicably pro-capitalist. Also, you had to write something about guns – God knows what, but something about how a gun was in some way very similar to a camera. I knew it was in that kind of area. And there was nobody I could ask at the screening-rooms, where the atmosphere seemed strangely furtive and even shameful, as if one were in a municipal library where near-derelicts came to get out of the cold, and lovingly fold the newspaper into columns. Always, there would be four or five very old critics no longer attached, as far as one could see, to any particular publication, always in macs, always carrying little briefcases as blazons of busyness, grey and indeterminate as pigeons and vigilant over their rations of the free chocolate digestives, with which the pockets of their macs bulged. The husks of critics.

It was only to visit the screening-rooms that I left Jim's bed. There was the need to earn enough money not to be swallowed by London; and there was my lover telling me to stick a bottle of champagne on his tab at Liberties Bar on the High Street and get my arse round to the twenty-third floor. We didn't tell anyone at the Journal – although Eric, with his tactful omniscience, probably knew – and so we were wrapped up as close together as any adulterers. In bed, Jim always seemed doubly naked. It was the only place where he was divested of politics. Restored to his yellow coat, with a bottle of Teacher's, he was back on: ‘Have you ever noticed that the first screen on a cashpoint is actually pleading with you, saying PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD? Fucking beseeching you to spend your money?’ And I would attempt to reflect this kind of thing in my reviews of movies like The Little Mermaid.

I came to know the pleasant tattiness of the Soho screening-rooms; the bulk of Philip French of the Observer's trainers, which he wore as though to speed himself breathlessly down Wardour Street from one classic to another. I came to know the little inset ashtrays that still survived like a memory of fifties luxury in the seats' armrests. The yellow cashmere scarf that the Evening Standard's Alexander Walker would wear with its admirable implication that a film deserved the compliment of your having dressed for it. I came to realise that nobody had one of those pens with a light that you always assume movie critics use. And then back through the winter to Jim's flat to wait for him.

He drank all the time. What he was was a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, as they say. And even this, even the companionable imperfection of sleeping with someone who's a bit of a mess felt like a freedom, a liberation from the tyranny of physical perfection, so that I came to know him more fully than I would have otherwise. I was happy, and I thought Eric was maybe going to keep me.

‘That thing about the First World War you said. About John Reed,’ Jim said to me one night. ‘Do you really think that?’

‘Well, of course. It was all about prophets. People like Lenin, and Trotsky.’

‘Sorry, Lenin?’

‘Well, obviously. But even people like Wilfred Owen, you know. Marcel Duchamp.’

‘Profits, Sally. John Reed said the First World War was about profits’

20

Jim wasn't ugly at all, I discovered. Faces are like poems – the longer they take to puzzle out, the better, and Jim's was ungettable. It grew in power and meaning every day I knew him. How did the eyebrows rhyme with the mouth? How did the nose get to the cheek? Men with incoherent faces very often have beautiful hands (as a rule, the reverse applies too – either the hands or the face must be more beautiful, and you rarely get the two together). And Jim had sensationally beautiful hands. The tiny network of cracks in the webbing between his fingers was always grouted with pale skin-dust. They were highly coloured like the flank of a rainbow trout, pink and blue stippled, and had the unconscious elegance of Donald Sutherland's – the Gold Standard of manual beauty (incoherent face – see?). And the hands did beautiful things. What was sarcasm in Jim's mouth was softened to wit in his fingers. Using all five fingers of his left hand simultaneously as bookmarks for different pages of the paper, he would tear articles out in right angles with his other hand. He would seem to describe a simple expressive gesture in the air, and the four locks on his front door would fall open. Oh, beautiful dexterity! James Dean was a show-off with his hands, which were the most muscular parts of him. That's why people couldn't stop taking photographs of him – he was always grabbing attention by fiddling with some prop (bongos, a recorder, a cape, a camera). He was a prestidigitator. A hand magician – that very boyish accomplishment. The early turning point of Rebel Without a Cause is Dean dexterously snatching Buzz's knife in mid-air and there is always the bit in Giant when he's under pressure to sell the land he's inherited on Rock Hudson's ranch.

He's playing with a rope and leaning back in his chair, not focused on the other people in the room. Playing with the rope implies: I was happiest in the company of myself as a child. He keeps on playing with the rope, and gets up and walks to the door, still playing, then he flicks it and it forms a knot in mid-air. And although it seems a kind of corrupt, even irrelevant thing to do, so obviously a scene-stealing gesture, you can't help but think: Jesus, that must be acting. Or magic. (In the next scene Dean's showing off with his hands again as he sits on the platform of an oil tower, complicatedly putting one hand down between his legs to take all his weight, then transferring the weight to the other hand – like a monkey, little feet, massive sternum, or a gymnast on the rings, with the shakiness of a flower in time lapse. It's not fluent or graceful – it looks like he's demonstrating the resistance of the air, that oppressive weight Dean always seemed to be bowed under. And which his hair strove up against. Hair which looks like a cartoon of dreams of a better world rising from a head.)

21

Even with my new salary of £60 a week, I still felt a bit of an interloper at the screening-rooms. I had never, for instance, been to one of the lunches that were occasionally thrown for visiting directors or stars, until, hurrying out of a screening one day, I overheard someone discussing a lunch that was being held down the road for Oliver Stone to mark the release of Natural Born Killers. Feeling very much that I owed the Journal some news, I went along to try and gatecrash.

The party was being held in a private room upstairs from the restaurant. There was lots of sail-bright white linen and untouched fruit juice in iced jugs. Completely on his own, looking plaintive and even a bit lost, sat Mr Stone, so I went over and sat next to him.

‘What paper are you from?’ he asked, exhaling a plume of blue smoke.

‘The Camden New Journal.’

He nodded. ‘Is that like the Village Voice?’

‘Oh, yes. Very much.’

A tall and extremely beautiful Oriental woman came over and sat next to Stone, with a cigarette which was successfully impersonating her own slenderness.

‘Are you with the film?’ I asked her.

‘No. I'm with Oliver.’

Then Stone began to talk in a very low, slow voice. He didn't really pause at any point so I started to take notes.

‘Who are the real killers anyway? Is it really Mickey and Mallory? Or is it the media?. And who are the media? It's just another a word for us, right? Are we the real killers?’

While Stone talked, I wrote down his thoughts in big swirls and hieroglyphics and loops across pages and pages of notebook. A strange thing had happened. I think I must have been pretending, to both Stone and myself, that I knew shorthand. Which I don't. A couple of times he looked down at my notes and then caught my eye and I returned his puzzled look with a calm one, reassuring him that this was indeed an obscure but ingenious system of European notation.

‘… If you think about it, a camera is just another kind of gun. They're both machines you shoot things with, yeah? What I was trying to create in NBK was a thinking mans action film. It's like the anthropologist meeting the so-called “primitive” tribe. They think that when he takes a photograph, he's actually…’

Before I caught the bus back to Camden, I rang the Journal and told them to pass on the message to Eric that I had an exclusive interview with Oliver Stone. They were absolutely bowled over, and literally held the front page for my return. I would be safe at the paper from now on, I felt. But when I read back over my notes on the bus, it was like trying to decipher the markings on the cave walls at Lascaux. All I had was – well, it wasn't English, anyway, just pages and pages of drawings, which in their own way did seem somehow to capture the essence of Oliver Stone's conversation. You could have exhibited them, maybe, but not published them. They were quite undecodable. If I showed this notebook to Jim or Eric, having promised them an exclusive, I would be finished. Inconsolably, I nibbled the top off one of the mini pizzas I had pilfered from lunch, trying not to think of the disappointment and even contempt with which they would greet this fresh foolishness, and decided to leave the notebook on the bus. But what if they rang the bus company and got the notebook back, with me all the while palely cheering from the sidelines, saying things like: ‘Oh, thank God’? I dumped it in a bin and prepared myself for a performance of which I was incapable. But it turned out that none of this mattered in the slightest because when I got to the office I found that Jim and Eric had finally had the fight about Jim's drinking which I should have realised had been brewing for years, and that Jim had either been sacked or had walked out – no one could tell – and had gone back to Liverpool. Had gone to his flat and cleared out. Had gone. Gone.

Many years later somebody gave me a poem because they knew how touching I found the end of Withnail and I, though they may not have known why.

In Camden rain falls heavily On elephants and wolves and him in The greatcoat. ‘Man delights not me, Nor woman neither. No, nor women Neither.’ Nor even wolves. Stop now: Make that heartbreaking little bow, Reshoulder your rain-loud umbrella And drink the last of Monty's cellar — One can quite reasonably say That you will never play the Dane, Chin chin. So so long wolves, the rain Was artificial anyway. The city's a machine which tries Us; sorts the Withnails from the I's.

22

nce upon a time there lived a family of ogres called the Noltes. They were enormous, and even the smallest of them still looked as big as a mountain. He was called Nick. Being so small, Nick felt different from the other ogres, but he also felt different from all the other people he came across, because he was still an ogre. So Nick was never quite sure who he was. Was he big, or small? This was something he thought about all day. He realised he knew a secret – big ogres were also small ogres. After all, Nick was both.

One day when Nick was thirty-five, some men came along and said, ‘An ogre! Stand there and look ogre-ish while we film you.’ Nick did as he was told. In a very gruff voice he pretended to be a proper ogre like his brothers and uncles were. They made him wear a scuba-diving suit and go under the sea, and people saw the film, which was called The Deep, and said, ‘Oh, look, a real ogre!’ He had thighs like tree trunks, and a neck like a bull, and a chin like a boulder. He was awfully funny and handsome and looked the very picture of a big happy ogre.

Nick pretended to be a big ogre in lots of films, even though he knew the secret that big ogres were really small ogres. Nobody else knew or cared, but to Nick it was very perplexing, because he saw that all big things were really very small inside, and the rest of the space inside big people and big ogres was filled with sadness, dreadful sadness. Which nobody ever talked about, and they certainly wouldn't believe you if you did!

And Nick was the saddest of them all. How could he tell everybody that he wasn't big at all, but very small and filled with sadness, just like they were? He stretched himself up as high as the sun and then toppled over with an enormous crash. His legs and arms turned into stone, and his ribcage too, and his head turned into a great wooden door. He wasn't an ogre any more, he was just a ruin. But when people went in through the wooden door they were amazed at what they saw! On the walls were four great big pictures, of Nick as a painter, and as a horrible policeman, and a frightened lawyer, and, in another one, as an ogre afraid of his father. But the strange thing about all the pictures was that, in them, Nick was very small. Just about the size of your thumb!

‘How sad it is in here,’ the people said, standing inside the ruin of Nick. ‘There certainly is a lot of empty space inside an ogre!’ And then Nick stepped out from behind a candlestick. He was just as big as your thumb. Everybody fell silent, and Nick said, ‘See how small I am! This is what it's really like inside big ogres.’ Everybody was very surprised. So they all went home that night and felt happy because Nick was telling the truth, and the truth always makes people happy. So by telling the truth about ogres, Nick had also got rid of some of the sadness inside the people and everybody was very grateful to him. Nick was the most truthful ogre there had ever been!

And they never forgot those four wonderful pictures. (New York Stories, Q&A, Cape Fear, Affliction.)

23

Jim rang me from Liverpool but whatever had passed between him and Eric had cut deep and he was too proud to come back. ‘It's the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking I see you.’ And it was the strangest thing – I didn't keep thinking I saw him, but I did feel like he was seeing me, or a ghost of me I had shed and seen on to a northbound train at Euston.

London felt empty. Down none of the fifty-five thousand streets of the city was a long yellow coat moving quickly. Somewhere, on one of them, was Wilson, if Wilson was alive. How strange men were, how unanchored, that they contained within them this show-stopping coup de théâtre. They could disappear. It was the male miracle, this neat erasure, this tidy and total cancelling, the negative of giving birth. Men had secret powers. They were private in a way that women weren't. They seemed to know something we didn't about voids. They were amazing.

24

This is what I did. I watched films to cheer me up when love had made me unhappy. The oldest problem in the world and the twentieth century's greatest solution to it. Plus this was my job, right? Because Eric had actually run my Oliver Stone interview with its two extremely approximate quotes – the only thing I could accurately remember Stone saying was ‘Is the Camden New Journal like the Village Voice?’ – I'd been given a slot on Saturdays at a local radio station filling in holes in the programming with film reviews. It seemed to get easier the more I steered clear of relating everything to Engels. Another ten pounds. I was closing in on the Equity minimum wage.

I knuckled down. I tapped the fan and it opened. Not directors – who the hell were they? – but actors. Whereas some people might see, say, Women in Love and then go on to The Devils because they're interested in Ken Russell, I would see Women in Love for Alan Bates, and then chase after him in Britannia Hospital, bump into Malcolm McDowell there and follow him into If and O, Lucky Man! and then back to Bates in In Celebration, and without even realising it I would have seen most of the cream of Lindsay Anderson. Had you asked me if I'd ever seen any Godard, I'd have said, ‘Oh, no no no!’, even though I'd seen Breathless, Pierrot le Fou and Une Femme est Une Femme during a Belmondo binge and followed him to Is Paris Burning? where I recognised Glenn Ford among the ruins and hitched myself to him through Gilda and The Courtship of Eddie's Father by Vicente Minnelli and some rather duff westerns to The Big Heat where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee over Gloria Grahame, and then careered after Marvin in everything (he was always brilliant) until we (Lee and I) tracked down the erotically brainy-looking John Cassavetes in The Killers, which got me to Rosemary's Baby – Christ, he's good in that – and a film called Brass Target which had good old George Kennedy in it playing Patton, who in Cool Hand Luke I sort of preferred to Newman and then in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I even preferred to Clint, meaning that I could no longer avoid The Dirty Dozen, what with him, Marvin, Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan, who was so fantastic in Bad Day at Black Rock (with Marvin again!) that I went on a Ryan safari, stalking the wounded beast through Billy Budd, The Set-Up, Men in War and Crossfire, where the mighty Mitchum loomed, and that was me gone, an acolyte in the Mitchum temple, where one day (Cape Fear) I formed an attachment to a mid-ranking avuncular type I saw around a lot, Martin Balsam, that virtuoso of shirtsleeves, who has in fact appeared in every film ever made apart from Trainspotting and Raise the Red Lantern. Balsam's forearms were particularly compelling in All the President's Men (which I can never understand and is anyway not all that good but nonetheless my favourite movie of all time), wherein Hal Holbrook, playing Deep Throat, stank so much of cigarettes that I became passively addicted to him (even his hair looks emphysemic) and got out Capricorn One for another fix – though I had Jeff Bridges by now to take care of and Hoffman and Redford and Robards and Harry Dean Stanton and Terence Stamp from Billy Budd and Gregory Peck, obviously, and Jack Palance who was in Second Chance with Mitchum – and who do you think was running around in Capricorn One, in a flapping tie, but Elliot Gould, trying to rescue James Brolin, who at one point uses his medallion to break out of his prison, an action which perfectly describes Brolin's entire career. (In the ruinously expensive illustrated version of this book, the ‘Connoisseur's Edition’, there will be a full colour fold-out wall chart detailing these connections more lucidly.) It was always the actors. You could track actors through the cities of their films, and they would never disappear.

The best example of how my actor tracking worked is Woody Allen. I developed an enormous crush on Tony Roberts (oh, Tony Roberts!), Allen's microphone-haired sidekick in Annie Hall, and ignored Manhattan (for years) in favour of the Roberts flicks – Radio Days, Play It Again, Sam, Stardust Memories (great thighs, Tony Roberts) and Hannah and her Sisters, in which I saw, sort of for the first time, Max von Sydow (‘Haf you been kissed tonight? You can't fool me, Lee, I'm too smart!’), whom I hunted down through Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, Three Days of the Condor and The Seventh Seal, during which I tumbled head over heels for the acrobat played by a man called Nils Poppe. Since I couldn't find Poppe in any more Bergman films, I callously discarded the great Swede and sought out Tony Roberts again, who I mistakenly thought had a part in Allen's September (even better than Gene Kelly's thighs in a way – he's taller) in which I saw Sam Waterston, who I went on to fancy even more in Capricorn One of course and even more, so meticulous and lonely-seeming, in The Killing Fields, which had the effect, I remember, of splitting me in two directions – towards Malkovich and also towards Patrick Malahide, who happened to be on television at the time as Casaubon in Middlemarch, in fact it was on tonight, oh, good!

In short, I didn't get out of the house much. I was promiscuous. The actors just kept on coming, and it's not like when an artist rearranges your head leaving no room for others and you go into a Dylan phase or a Ted Hughes zone or a Godard jag. It's a broad church, the church of actors. The Church of the Beautiful Strangers. It's always got on my nerves, the affected way with which some people try to lay claim to a kind of screen monogamy – ‘I'm a Monica Vitti man.’ Oh, you liar! Monica Vitti and not Claudia Cardinale? Not Sophia Loren? Such fidelity! ‘For me it was only ever Gary Cooper.’ What and not Gregory Peck? Ooh, you lying cow! Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice is required of you? The sane response to a rainbow is not to pick your favourite colour. And it did make me happy. If you'd have seen how happy I was, going through my stack of Lee J. Cobb videos like so many digestives, you'd have called me sad. But I really was sad. Because I really was happy.

25

Perhaps it was the result of a slight difficulty in adjusting from one reality to another, but when one Saturday I saw one of the production assistants at the radio station reveal a Quaid-cobbled stomach as he changed his shirt, I determined to doorstep him in an effectively cinematic fashion, which is to say like Sean Young in No Way Out or Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love, that is, in nothing but a fake fur coat and a pair of heels, thinking keep it snappy, keep it flirty, keep it The Big Easy, as I rode the tube to his flat on the Edgware Road inside which Tom, the Quaid-cobbled production assistant, asked me why I had such a guilty look on my face, to which I had no reply other than to attempt to shrug the coat to the floor, struggling with the buttons in an un-Sean Youngian fluster which nonetheless carried enough weight of intent to make him, maladroit himself, lurch towards me and sort of accidentally knock me to the floor, where, after rather a while of polite tussling, he scrabbled for a condom and put it on, tentatively, like he was potting a cactus, and, once inside me, became oddly static, allowing me to observe his beautiful silky hair (of a paler, more delicate red than Jim's, hard to describe) and wonder, with steadily diminishing enthusiasm, whether he were doing some sort of tantric sex on me, a semi-debacle which I amended a week later with a twenty-year-old trainee chef who had curls like James Frain and who, to my horror, turned out to be fifteen in the morning (that skin, I knew it!), an offence which I assume, perhaps overconfidently, the police will regard as having happened a long time ago etc. etc. should they ever read this or subpoena my diary of the time, which records that I attempted to remedy, and then – what do you know – remedied the child-chef-non-semi-debacle over the following few days with several other legal (take note, police!) men, the last of whom was an ethical banker with a garland of rose-tattoos around his neck, just low enough to be invisible under a T-shirt, with whom I enjoyed a lovely fortnight before his tetchy tutting at Walter Matthau's casual, rather gentle sexism in The Odd Couple drove a wedge between us, leaving me with nothing to show from the fling except an American acquaintance of his called Ilana, from New Jersey, a chestnut-bright young woman simultaneously hard and soft like all the great movie stars, with whom I felt I was going to be permanent friends, and who in fact set me up with a Canadian who lived alone, bald as Kurtz, in a condemned house on Plimsoll Road in Arsenal which he had decorated with the most staggering murals of Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and other gods whose names he must have told me but I have since forgotten, and who comforted me the day I was diagnosed with cervical cancer by making me watch In the Heat of the Night, which did indeed help keep my spirits up until I received a call from the hospital two days later informing me that they had mixed up their smear tests and I wasn't going to die after all – a relief which had the paradoxical effect of somehow sundering me from the Canadian and propelling me into a, no doubt, easily explicable series of one-night stands over the next ten days, as England rolled past their opponents in the European Championships on a growing wave of belief that this time, finally, they were going to prevail, and I found myself considering the question of promiscuity and wondering about the motives of the promiscuous, maybe 50 per cent of whom are Don Juans, mere number-crunchers, and maybe two-thirds of whom are sex-addicts and maybe nine-tenths of whom are frightened of commitment, and for maybe four-fifths of whom promiscuity is an index of their unhappiness, and wondering what proportion simply liked a lot of people, could simply be marked down as slow learners, could be thought of as just needing lots of lovers, lots of lessons, before they understood about their own capacity to absorb other people, such as the apple-picker from Somerset whom I attempted to console after Gazza had stretched to make that Sistine Chapel contact with the ball in front of the gaping German goal (which he would never, never do, freeze-framed forever in memory a millimetre from redemption) and who had been so thoroughly consoled he broke, that very night, into his estranged father's house in Greenwich where we lived an idyllic life for three weeks before the police, called by a neighbour, arrested us, sending me on my way that afternoon with no charge against my name but with a note from the apple-picker in my hand which read, ‘Good luck with everything and, well, just don't put people off by making too great a display of yourself and by overdoing things’ which, although with hindsight I can see that he was on to something, royally pissed me off at the time: so much so that it was rather self-consciously in defiance of this advice that I went out and overdid things a bit, thinking it's not me that's doing this, it's the movies as I learned about the absolutely crucial importance of beryllium to the Russian economy, and what it was that banks did exactly in the bed of a precious metals dealer, and just how hard it was to be an amateur boxer in London if you were from Paris, and that blue Y-fronts are acceptable underwear among Brazilians, and that being an officer in the British Army does not preclude a high intelligence, and even softness, and that ‘good in bed’ is pretty much a meaningless and vicious term imposed upon life by a public discourse that revels in encouraging neurosis, and that the anxiety I felt in the company of a dimple-chinned Sinn Fein man (whose smoke-and-mirrors face seemed to incarnate all the shape-shifting of his political life) with whom I conducted a stop-start affair at this time was different from the kind of nervousness I had felt around Jim, because Jim's violence was social and unconcealed whereas the Sinn Fein man's was something altogether more unreadable, so that I felt, when I was with him, like William Hurt faced with the opaque obelisk of Lee Marvin in Gorky Park, to the extent that even though I idolised him, I would come over with a fit of the vapours like Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons whenever he undressed me, causing the affair to fizzle out, and I thought, about that time, how incorrect it was that the promiscuous should be thought of as jaded where they were really innocent, that they were not so much fools slow to understand the fact that human variety is far from infinite, that the exploration should be in oneself rather than of others, but a different kind of fool, happy in the illusion that human variety was infinite – having said all of which, and despite the fact that I was hardly Catherine M. (and doubtless sixteen-year-old readers will at this point be asking themselves, ‘Where's this promiscuous patch she keeps talking about?’), I must have been feeling a slight lesion of identity, a slight blurring of definition, a slightly stretched kind of feeling, because when a man with curly hair and a long nose asked me who I was one night in a bar, I surprised myself by saying, and almost meaning, ‘Oh, just some girl.’

26

Marcus Denning was an actor who had appeared in a series of adverts for instant coffee in the early 90s as a thirtysomething vet who goes to work in the country because, as he tells his mother in the first commercial: ‘I'm a vet, Mum. I belong in the country. Country air, country people, country ways.’

No sooner has he arrived (‘But I haven't even unpacked yet!’) than he is doing something indeterminate to an ailing but photogenic cow. ‘That's that, then,’ says the kindly yet curmudgeonly farmer. Marcus, transmitting with great delicacy a millisecond of umbrage, counters with: ‘A coffee would be nice …’ (the embedded catch-phrase). But the farmer doesn't have any!

‘Good job I brought my own,’ Marcus says, still cleverly conveying a scintilla of urban disdain for rural hospitality. Fences are mended over a cup of instant at the farmhouse table. Indeed, so taken is the farmer by this metropolitan concoction that he threatens to retain the jar ‘until next time’. Marcus now has to convey, in one-and-a-half seconds,

 shock

 reflex urban possessiveness

 the softening of that possessive impulse as he comprehends the farmer's disguised compliment

 and soul-deep satisfaction as he realises he's been accepted, thus escaping the surly bonds of his transparently suffocating maternal relationship

Don't knock the ad actor, master of micro-technique. So recognisable was he as this vet at the time, that he'd come out of his house the week before I met him to see a group of people standing round an injured bird, and they'd turned and looked at him, clearly expecting him to do something about it. He'd even been in the News of the World under the headline ‘RAT VET LOVER – Coffee Vet Cheats!’ when an ex-girlfriend sold her story about how he'd left her for another woman.

The girl who he'd left the kiss-and-tell artist for, he told me, used to lounge around in front of the telly and would, bored, shout through to him in the kitchen, ‘Come on, Maz, shove it up my box!’ Marcus was a master of that very thespian accomplishment – the unimaginably dirty one-liner, or indeed any story to do with sex, and over the next year I would ask for my favourites again and again. My very favourite was a story about a friend of his whose sex life with his wife had deteriorated to the point where sex had become a once-weekly treat scheduled for the weekend. One Wednesday night, Marcus's friend had reached out to touch his wife on the hip as they lay there in bed and the wife had turned to him and hissed: ‘IS it Saturday?’ The best storytellers always know how to make your flesh creep. Is it Saturday? became a catch-phrase between us, the sort of totem lovers use to ward off bad luck when they're rich in love themselves.

They're exactly the kind of dirty stories Brian Blessed might tell to break the ice at a read-through. But they used to make me laugh and laugh, putting my hands together with a satisfied clap: ‘Tell it again, Marcus …!’

Marcus's family were aristocratic and deeply eccentric. His maternal grandfather had been an hereditary baronet (‘rare as rocking horse shit these days’) and the whole lot of them (mother, father, three sisters and Marcus) went around on motorbikes. When Marcus had been younger, they used to go on nudist holidays together on their motorbikes, the kids in sidecars. The family had once been invited to a drinks party on the compound to which they went, naked, on their motorbikes. Their hostess, wearing an evening gown and pearls, ushered them into a room full of similarly dressed people. Marcus insisted on leaving, but his father was mortified and ticked him off for being so rude. ‘Rude?’ Marcus sobbed. ‘Aubrey, we're naked.’ It was like a grand trumping of my own Adam and Eve indiscretions with the draught-excluding snake. He'd do an impression of Aubrey getting back from the party, sitting on the stairs with his balls out, sighing, ‘I met a wonderful couple. She's seventy-one and has just taken up the piano and is already on grade 5. He's just designed the postgraduate centre at Maidstone General Hospital. Such a lovely airy room …’

Aubrey was a GP who operated an out-of-hours service and used to take calls during the family's suppers, which Marcus relayed to me: ‘Mister Coombes, if you think I'm coming out to provide digital manipulation to your wife's recalcitrant stools, you can think again!’ ‘Tell it again, Marcus …!’

He had a cousin called Marie who had won Best Actress on the Edinburgh Fringe six years earlier for playing Nora in A Doll's House. She'd received a fan letter from a man who maintained that her Nora was the only English one he'd seen who retained a hint of the phonetic hardness of Ibsen's Norwegian. ‘In short,’ it said in a PS, ‘you were so good I pissed my cords.’

And each time he told it, the letter would get funnier and funnier, and he'd do a perfect little impression of Marie's face falling as she got to the bottom of the page.

Aubrey was posh, but his dreamy wife Janie was incredibly posh. She was a twin, and fiercely proud of it, as if it were a personal achievement. She and her twin sister Duzz (Dorothy? Dolores? Dusty? Doris?) once volunteered to have tests done on them at the Great Ormond Street Hospital and arrived there expecting to be fêted and shown through to a buffet, only to find literally hundreds of other twins in the corridors. Already somewhat put out, they were poked and prodded and urine-sampled and thoroughly out of temper when Marcus and I went to pick them up:

‘Goodness. What a day!’

‘What did they do to you?’

‘It would be much easier to tell you what they didn't do.’

‘What didn't they do?’

‘Well, they didn't fuck us.’

I had been there but I would still be asking him what had happened: ‘Oh, tell it again …!’

And they were like this all the time, each one of them, his father, his mother, his sisters, his brothers-in-law, his five-year-old niece with her imaginary friends Dot Com and Direct Debit. It wasn't as if Marcus cherry-picked these stories, it was normal. The first time I went to visit the clan in Dorset for the weekend, Janie came downstairs to breakfast holding an enormous vibrator and asked me in the nicest possible way, as if it were a paperback that she'd found on the stairs, ‘Antonia, my love, is this yours?’ I demurred and went for a wander around the house, the rooms upon rooms, a colossal ballroom with just a single bed in the corner and a bowl out to catch the leaks from the ceiling. A nursery in the attic entirely filled with an ancient train-set. A four-poster bed with tights blatantly knotted around each post. In one of the corridors I ran into Aubrey: ‘Oh, hello! I've been walking around the house and do you know everybody is in bed with their lover. It's marvellous’

That evening over dinner, the family tirelessly berated Marcus's brother-in-law for failing to go down on his wife, Marcus's sister Jennifer. The indictment lasted well into coffee. ‘But why?’ Janie kept saying, gripping the brother-in-law's hand, genuinely distressed.

‘We're not trying to make you feel bad; it's just so unfair!’ It was Jennifer's vibrator which Janie had been hefting over the breakfast table. ‘Oooh, can I borrow it, Jen?’ said Marcus's other sister, Harriet.

Next morning Marcus flew me back to London himself, in his yellow two-seater aeroplane which he kept at the BBC flying club at Denham.

27

What is love? Let's ask Barbra Streisand.

It's like going to the movies, and we see the lovers on screen kiss, and the music swells and we buy it, right? So when my date takes me home and kisses me … (This is The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) and she's playing a professor of English at Columbia University who is adored by her students but, being plain, can't attract a man of note, although in about fifteen minutes she'll be approached by a maths professor played by Jeff Bridges who, cynical about long-term love, will suggest they marry purely for companionship. Bridges has come to spy on her, here in a student-crammed lecture hall the size of the Coliseum. Crammed with more than students, actually: there are people standing at the back, suggesting that perhaps even the janitors, or tutors from other disciplines, are gatecrashing Streisand's Nurembergian weekly address.) Barbra, in black dungarees and big specs, continues – and if I don't hear the Philharmonic in my head I dump him, right? From the students, appreciative, democratic laughter. It's the one lecture they've been looking forward to all week, and note-taking has been superseded by the desire simply to drink this all in. Now the question is, why do we buy it? Cut to the leonine Bridges, whose gravitas suggests that this is truly an exceptional college lecture and he is responding to it as one should to a serious contribution to the social sciences. Unfortunately his pager goes off, causing a rapt black student to look daggers at him, and he is forced, reluctantly, to drag himself away, looking perplexed yet intrigued. Had I reviewed The Mirror Has Two Faces, I might have been tempted to write something like: Jeff Bridges looks as if he wishes he were elsewhere. It's a classic reviewer's white lie, designed to let a favourite actor off the hook. Can you really imagine it: ‘Jeff! Can you please concentrate?’ Yet it appears in reviews all the time. Here's one, from a review of Chicken Tikka Massala, a ‘British Asian comedy’, in The Times a while back (May 2005). The reviewer, Wendy Ide, wishes that she'd been somewhere else rather than watching the movie, and ‘from the bloodless crushed look on Chris Bisson's face, I'd say he feels the same way’. Can it really be the case? It's a kindness. But in The Mirror Has Two Faces, I submit, we have a genuine once-in-a-lifetime example. No beautiful teen asked to fall for Woody Allen could ever have looked so stunned and reluctant and nauseated as Jeff does looking at Barbra Streisand. Rent the DVD and if you spool to the final credit sequence where Streisand and Bridges kiss and dance on the street, you'll notice that Bridges suddenly makes a break for it and runs to a taxi – and even though Barbra drags him back for another clinch, it unmistakably looks like the great Bridges has miscalculated by a mere twenty seconds how much time he must spend sentenced to this mishagas and is trying to get the hell off the set of what, to extend this digression, I further submit, is the worst film of all time, worse even than Peter's Friends or Maybe Baby. Worse even, possibly, than The Godfather Part III. A little charge goes off in reviewers' heads when it becomes apparent that such a possibility is in the offing. I have sat through screenings of Battlefield Earth, The Brylcreem Boys and Sex Lives of the Potato Men, and felt the electricity in the room, the silent commencement of an unspoken inter-critic competition to write the most freakishly abusive response. It's a perk of the job. And this really is the worst scene in the worst film ever made. We buy it because whether it's a myth or a manipulation, let's face it, we all want to fall in love, right? Cut to student with a red rinse, solemnly nodding. The blond guy in front of her looks a little confused, not because he can't follow, but because of the intellectual head-storm Barbra has whipped up in his cortex. Why? (Streisand's accent is becoming increasingly twangily Brooklynite.) Because the experience makes us feel completely alive! Where every sense is heightened! Every emotion is magnified! Our everyday reality is shattered and we are flung into the heavens! It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon, but that doesn't diminish its value. Because these are memories we will treasure for the rest of our lives. (Or resent, of course. Or possibly be tortured by.) She pauses, and takes off her spectacles, enjoying a well-earned breather while the camera moves towards her, triggering an unusual effect: the closer we get to Barbra, the less visible she becomes, so smudged and blurred and vaselined is the film texture. I read an article a while ago – she flicks her hair from above her left eye with an un-academically long and manicured fingernail, and one wonders momentarily if those nails were ever the subject of battles at executive level before wearily realising that Streisand is both director and a producer – that said when we fall in love we hear Puccini in our heads. (God, Puccini ? What kind of article was this? Not Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books, surely?) I love that. Balding mature student with moustache and cricket jumper raises a fist in salute and silently mouths the word yes like a tennis player who has just aced a volley. I think it's because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and romantic love. Shot of a transfixed bank of female students in polo necks and tweed jackets, almost tearful, as if they were watching David Helfgott swing through the Rach II. So, the final question is – why do people want to fall in love when it has such a short shelf life and can be devastatingly painful? Stacey? She points to a female stooge in a lumberjack shirt who offers: ‘It leads to propagation of the species?’ Ray? ‘Because psychologically we need to connect with somebody?’ Barbra cedes Ray's theory with a nod, but points to a third student – Cath? And suddenly it dawns on us that this woman knows every single one of her students by name. Cath stands up to put her full weight behind her answer – Is it because we're culturally preconditioned? The camera pans to Barbra, who smiles. (One imagines that the Reverend Gary Jones gave the same smile to his doomed acolytes minutes before the Jonestown Massacre.) Awawall good answers, but way too intellectual for me. There's a near-hysterical buzz in the room, and the viewer is already anticipatorily cringing at the by now completely inevitable bathetic definition that Barbra is unswervingly heading towards, like the Titanic towards its iceberg. I think because, as some of you already may know, while it does last – again, the smile, and one's sinking spirits now register the absolute certainty of an incipient deflationary profanity (a scientific curiosity: studies among both rats and humans have shown that if you stab somebody at this point in the film then they will actually pull the blade into them) – it feels FUCKING great! The room erupts into wild applause. Joseph Fiennes has just pulled off Romeo and Juliet. Cuba Gooding Jnr has just followed his touchdown with an amazing little dance. Liam Neeson has just won the Second World War. And Barbra raises a thumb up to the crowd and shouts Thank you! Thank you!

She's right about one thing of course, but it doesn't feel like Puccini.

28

To me it felt more like this:

Jeremy Irons says I've been waiting for you and Patricia Hodge says What do you mean? They're in a bedroom upstairs in a smart house; music is thudding below. I knew you'd come he says, and she says I've just come in to comb my hair. He says I knew you'd have to comb your hair. I knew you'd have to get away from the party.

He's drunk but he looks like he means it. She laughs – he's her husband's best friend and there is absolutely nothing whatsoever about her which suggests that flirtation or infidelity has ever crossed her mind. So when she asks Aren't you enjoying the party? and walks amusedly to the dressing table to pick up her hairbrush, she is just humouring an old friend, no more, no less. He just comes out with it. You're beautiful. Listen. I've been watching you all night. I must tell you, I want to tell you. You're incredible.

You're drunk.

Nevertheless. Irons delivers this word beautifully. It is a beautiful word to say, after all. I was best man at your wedding. I saw you in white. I watched you glide by in white.

I wasn't in white.

I should have had you in your white before the wedding. I should have blackened you in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress before ushering you into your wedding as your best man …

She looks headmistressily unbothered by the situation. My husband's best man, your best friend's best man.

Irons ignores this. You're lovely! I'm crazy about you. All these words I'm saying – don't you see they've never been said before? Can't you see? I'm crazy about you. It's a whirlwind. Have you ever been to the Sahara Desert? Listen to me. It's true. Listen. You overwhelm me, you're so lovely.

I'm not!

You're so beautiful – look at the way you look at me!

Patricia Hodge gives us this woman's easy talent for coping with such situations. Fending off this kind of approach, we see, has always been one of her more instinctive accomplishments. I'm not looking at you! She is kind but stern.

Look at the way you're looking at me! I can't wait for you. I'm bowled over. I'm totally knocked out. My jewel. He puts his hand near her hair as though it's radiating heat. This isn't a pitch or a line, although I have seen several actors play this speech of Pinter's as just that. Nor is it a drunken error, as Douglas Hodge had it at the National Theatre in 1998: Hodge is supposed to be good in Pinter but he never plays against Pinter, which is what Irons is doing, rather than nudging us in the ribs to tip us off to what the author really thinks of these avowals. You could do this scene so many ways. But for Jeremy Irons, no editorialising, no standing apart. This is actually happening. The actual magic. It's magic.

I can't ever sleep again. Now, listen! It's the truth! I won't walk! I'll be a cripple, I'll descend – I'll diminish into total paralysis. My life is in your hands, that's what you're banishing me to – a state of catatonia. Do you know the state of catatonia? Do you? A state where the reigning prince is the prince of emptiness, the prince of absence, the prince of desolation. I love you. She makes some footling objection, looking as pale as Patricia Hodge has ever looked. You want to reach into the scene and pinch her cheek, raise the blood to the surface. I adore you. I'm madly in love with you. I can't believe that what anyone at this moment is saying has ever happened. HAS EVER HAPPENED. Nothing has ever happened. NOTHING. This is the ONLY thing that has ever happened. Your eyes kill me. I'm lost. You're lost.

No she says. But her brain is beginning to register depths of feeling which have been slumbering under her marriage for years, for fifteen years, which this man has disinterred for her.

Yes.

Well, that's Pinter. The film is the backwards-running Betrayal (1982) and this, the final scene, is the start of the story, a trick which the last decade has become rather addicted to copying. It's one of the greatest love scenes ever filmed because it does something which you almost never see. This is where, if you don't have a script like Pinter's, you have to cut away (to bedroom or breakfast) but here we actually witness the woman falling in love with the man, and you can see it because you can see Irons hypnotising himself, enchanting himself. You can see the actual magic.

Of course Irons has this quality of doomed romanticism – there is in his face something tending towards sickness and his teeth look a little brown – which makes him perfect for old-fashioned romantic parts. His best bit in Brideshead Revisited was being dumped by Julia Flyte, sitting on the stairs, embodying the pain of love: I don't want to make it easier for you. I hope your heart may break. In The French Lieutenant's Woman (another Pinter script, which I've always cherished for presenting the actor's life as an idyll, with Irons and Meryl Streep both playing actors, lounging around on beds doing the crossword and at garden parties in the sunny 1980s) he says to Streep: Why did you leave Exeter? You told me you loved me; you showed me your love. Answer me! Are you saying that you never loved me? You must say, ‘I am totally evil, I used him as an instrument, I do not care that in all this time he hasn't seen a woman to compare with me! That his life has been a desert without me. That he has sacrificed everything for me!’ Say it! In Damage he gets damaged by Juliette Binoche. And naturally Betrayal ends unhappily. They should sell a three-disc DVD box-set of these sad stories called The Jeremy Irons Grief Trilogy. I'd buy it.

The thing is, I just can't take my eyes off Irons's face in any of them. And I mean that literally. I just can't take my eyes off him. There is a quality of mesmeric handsomeness in certain actors which simplifies the experience of movie-going to the point where the aesthetic pleasures of bone-structure photographed over an hour or so are enough entirely to satisfy you. And it's a kind of acting available – among a multitude of hunks and dreamboats – only to a tiny minority of the shockingly beautiful. Faces so beautiful that you get a tension between the idea of a movie being a story and it being moving portraiture. It's weird – your appetite for looking at these faces seems never to be sated. Were Last Tango in Paris twelve hours long I'd still be shovelling Brando's face into my eyes. How can we tear ourselves away?

Into this category put: David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) – a good example since it is one's riveted gaze on Bowie's indescribable beauty alone which holds a somewhat bitty film together. Christopher Walken in everything. Billy Crudup in All the Pretty Horses, a face somewhere between the young Sinatra's and Montgomery Clift's. Rupert Everett in Another Country, handsomeness raised to an almost comical level. Bruce Robinson in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975). Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, fighting against it. Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner, looking like a sane Klaus Kinski. I can look at Hauer for hours, unable to believe that nature has done something so complicated as a face and made so few mistakes. That throughout the whole delicate process it hasn't made a single error.

And Kinski, of course, handsomeness gone insane; a grotesque exaggeration of handsomeness, as though every feature on his face is trying to out-handsome the others. Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers, obviously. Adrien Brody in The Pianist, like someone from a different breed of men, taller, nobler and more hairless than us. Robert de Niro – just that once, but undeniably – as the young Vito Corleone with his otter-slicked hair in the section just after he has assassinated Don Fanucci in Godfather Part II. Buster Keaton, proving the point about mesmerism – without those good looks our concentration on his smooth, logically unfolding routines would be lessened. Gary Cooper. One feels amazed and almost grateful that people so physically gifted should condescend to have talent at something else as well. These are the hypnotists.

And Jeremy Irons's brand of hypnotism is the suffering of love. We are prettier when we're happy, but often we're more beautiful when we suffer. And we hate the beautiful because we don't believe that they do suffer. Watching Irons suffer, you see it especially in his slender and muscular throat - his expressive Adam's apple, those tortured tendons, that clavicle, the paper-knife jawbone. I love Jeremy Irons's neck. So to see him capsized, hyperventilating with joy, in that scene with Patricia Hodge is doubly delirious because we so rarely see him laugh. And that's what love is. It's a total surprise. It's not what you expected. It's a relief from those decades of consciousness which try to kid us that they're enough to be going on with.

29

Happiness in movies is a bit like love – the camera's always cutting away. You hardly ever get to see it. All you get are those ultra-casual but ever so slightly speeded-up kitchen sequences over breakfast just before Harrison Ford's wife gets murdered by a terrorist, or his kid gets crushed by a hit-and-run HGV. Instead we have happy montage sequences, like the one in Manhattan where Woody Allen dangles a hand into Central Park lake and comes up with an armful of muck. Woody was the master of these sequences. So happy

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