It may be necessary, certainly for those in their 30s and younger, to explain who Nicol Williamson was – the actor who John Osborne said was second only to Marlon Brando, the creator of some of the most extraordinary stage performances of his time, and a handful of indelible film performances. He should have been a household name. Why he isn’t is painstakingly described in the pages of this sympathetic biography. Described, but not exactly explained.
His RSC Coriolanus, Macbeth and Uncle Vanya, his Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, his Birmingham-inflected, raw Hamlet, his Bill Maitland in Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (four times), all before he was 40, as well as a remarkable string of smaller parts, had established him as an absolute phenomenon. In 1964, when he was 28, he won the Evening Standard and the Plays and Players best actor awards: his competitor was Laurence Olivier, at the supreme height of his talent, as Othello. In 1970, in the full flush of his youthful power, Williamson was summoned to the White House to give a 90-minute performance for President Nixon – singing, reciting, speaking Shakespearean monologues. Harold Wilson had told Nixon that a “great new star had come on the theatrical stage, the best Hamlet in a generation and perhaps of the century – Nicol Williamson”.
But already Williamson had started to manifest the erratic behaviour that fairly swiftly destroyed his career. Martin Dowsing records the booze-fuelled transgressions, carefully assessing whether, on the Broadway transfer of Inadmissible Evidence, Williamson merely threw his Budweiser in the producer’s face and then socked him on the jaw, or also picked him up and put him in the dustbin for good measure. Either way, it was an unwise thing to do to the then most powerful man in US theatre. But so great was Williamson’s talent, he survived. On films, his behaviour was as bad, or worse – phone cables ripped out of walls, and so on. Once, when shooting, he found himself in a hotel room next to Bob Dylan, and threatened to throw him off the balcony for complaining that Williamson was singing too loudly. Mostly, though, with films he just gave up and walked away: on one occasion, he took against the driver who picked him up at the airport, told him to turn round and got on the next plane out.
This was not just because of the alcohol, which he consumed in industrial quantities, though it must have made him emotionally unstable: it came from a deep place in his psyche. It was a declaration of defiant independence, a manifestation of his terrible loneliness. Sometimes it was motivated by disappointment at his own performance, sometimes just by utter boredom with the whole business. Either way, it betokened a precarious mental state. “I am the last of the controlled madmen,” Williamson told a journalist. The adjective is hilariously misplaced, though he was able, almost to the end of his prematurely shortened career – he didn’t appear on stage for the last 15 years of his life, nor on film for the last 10 – to hold it all together and give witty, original performances of some delicacy, always with an undercurrent of danger. He was perhaps at his happiest in his cabaret act with a band of musicians: this seemed to give him a sense of belonging, which acting could not do.
He was outspoken in his contempt for most of his fellow actors: “a hateful breed of people, on the whole, to me”. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose version of Sherlock Holmes Williamson played with mordant self-disgust, sums him up pretty succinctly. He was, thought Meyer, “a desperately unhappy, lonely, anhedonic man, more or less trapped in a melancholy world from which he seemed unable, indeed, perhaps, unwilling to escape”. All performers to one extent or another want at the very least to be endorsed by the audience; Williamson, as the director Jack Gold remarked, “sort of dared audiences not to like him, but to understand or appreciate him”. Perhaps he sought in his work an escape from the dread of death, which he carried within him at all times. Unsurprisingly, he was drawn to the work of Samuel Beckett, whom, in a rare burst of approval for a fellow human being, he described as “a saintly cockatoo, a great pale bird, a breathing saint”.
Jill Townsend, Williamson’s ex-wife, in one of many shrewd observations, felt that the key to it all was his wartime experience: sent away from heavily bombed Birmingham as a four-year-old to live with his severe grandparents in Lanarkshire, he returned to find that he now had a sister, who had not been sent away and who had been the recipient of all the love he’d missed. He felt, Townsend says, “thrown away”. That’ll do it; allied to a prodigious talent, such a damaged sense of self can result in profound and unforgettable accounts of what it is to be human, but happiness is by no means guaranteed to the owner of the talent.
Dowsing’s generous, well-researched book records the affection Williamson inspired in those on whose love he felt he could truly depend, such as his son Luke, who keeps the flame in an excellent website. His end, a slow death in 2011 from oesophageal cancer (he mocked his tumour, calling it Seamus the Squamous), was gallant and touching. Those of us who saw him will never forget him – “like a coiled cobra”, as the director Rob Knights so well puts it – and there are the films, Inadmissible Evidence and The Bofors Gun perhaps most notable. Dowsing tells the whole sobering tale with grace.
