Dancing to a new tune
Jamie Bell’s older love
Books about classic Hollywood tend to fall, broadly, into two categories: gossipy memoirs and moderately trashy biographies.
Peter Turner’s book Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, published in
1986, belongs in a strange category of its own: novelistic, unlikely, sorrowful and succinct. It tells the story of the woman who had been the author’s lover – Gloria Grahame, one of 1950s Hollywood’s most intriguing and enigmatic stars – and her death at the age of
57.
The title is ironic and true: Grahame didn’t die in Liverpool (she died shortly after she had left the city for a hospital in New York, on October 5, 1981). But she did spend most of her final days in a bedroom in Turner’s family home, very far from California. This dissonance propels the story: What was she doing there? Could she really still be called a film star then? Who was Gloria Grahame? And how did Peter Turner come to share a life with her?
‘‘It’s kind of like E.T., but there’s no alien in it,’’ says Jamie Bell, who plays Turner in Paul McGuigan’s elegant and scorching film adaptation. Bell is referring to the inevitable departure around which the film revolves, and the pain it precipitates, but he’s right, too, about the arrival of an odd creature in a place many British people would associate with home. The Turner house has a certain kind of bedding, a certain kind of wallpaper, a certain way with electric blankets, that somehow never made it to Hollywood.
Though she is at the centre of the drama, the contours of Grahame’s life and career are barely sketched in the film – and even less so in the book. Best known for her role in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), in which the gangster played by Lee Marvin throws acid in her face, she won an Oscar for her supporting role in The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952), one of the best films ever made about sordid characters in Hollywood.
Grahame was seen by producers as a sort of film noir femme fatale, but she was too sweet and too sly to be the kind of cipher that her co-star Lana Turner became with much greater success.
Perhaps her best performance was elicited by her husband, Nicholas Ray, in his 1950 film InA Lonely Place, in which she played lover and muse to Humphrey Bogart’s dangerously moody scriptwriter. Later, Grahame married Ray’s son – her stepson.
A slight smell of scandal and a taste for younger men were well established by the time she met Turner four years after she and Anthony Ray divorced.
In 1978, Grahame and Turner were both lodgers in a house in Primrose Hill. He was a hopeful young actor, she was a faded grandee making stage appearances abroad – a mother of four, an exwife four times over, who harboured delusional dreams of playing Juliet at the RSC. Turner and Grahame were 31 years apart in age, and their affair lasted two years, before she broke it off, then called him for help as she was dying a year later.
In the film, the woman Turner meets is an engaging, giggly figure who eventually tells stories about the good old days. But he is genuinely unaware of her fame, and indeed much of the film’s sadness stems from the fact that fame has so little currency.
Grahame is played with uncanny breathiness and needy charm by Annette Bening. But the picture would fall to pieces without Turner as played by Bell, a sturdy, handsome and hunted looking onscreen Liverpudlian who couldn’t be further from the bouncy 5 ft 7, 31 year-old I meet in London. Bell’s commitment to conveying the truth of a relationship that he had initially struggled to swallow makes perfect sense of the transformation.
‘‘I read the script and I was like: this is ridiculous,’’ he tells me. He thought: ‘‘This is so unbelievable, such a bizarre piece of fiction, that I don’t know why anyone would come up with this story. Then I read Peter’s memoir, and suddenly all the truth came in.’’
He met Turner, and asked him about Grahame. ‘‘We talked a lot about everything,’’ Bell recalls. ‘‘I’d say: ‘are you OK with me being mad at her in this moment? Would that reflect cruelly on you?’ He was exhausted by it, because it’s weirdly all still so fresh [to him].
‘‘When he tells the stories his voice starts to tail off at the end. It’s like he’s back there. That was really the key for me – this means so much to this man, that I have to adore this woman, it has to be life and, literally, death.’’
At a time when there are so few interesting roles for older women, it’s striking that this story should be about such a passionate relationship between a 59-year-old actress and a much younger man. Bell says he had no difficulty in imagining the romance, or in finding someone attractive regardless of age. ‘‘I didn’t think: ‘This age thing is so weird’. I didn’t think: ‘This is a movie that earns its merit because it’s unconventional in its age difference’.
‘‘And when I knew Annette was playing it, there was never an element of me that thought: ‘I don’t know how that works’. I mean, Annette Bening is a very beautiful woman, and the way that she characterised Gloria Grahame was very alluring – purposefully so.’’
There is, perhaps, an additional trick of perception involved in this. It may be that viewers who remember Bell from his first role, as the titular aspiring ballet dancer in Billy Elliot 17 years ago, inevitably associate him with youth. What’s more, there’s a wonderful disco dancing scene in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool that reminds you of these particular gifts.
But Bell, who says he now only dances in the bathroom, has done remarkably well since then to take on a range of interesting roles that resist any attempt to categorise him – both ‘‘very strange things’’ as he puts it and ‘‘some bigger movies with big film-makers’’, such as King Kong, Fantastic Four and Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin. He’s aware of the precariousness of the profession, and mindful of the risks of such a future for his son, who is 4.
‘‘I presume he’ll have some interest in the arts of some kind,’’ Bell suggests, figuring that the boy’s parents are actors (his son’s mother is Evan Rachel Wood, and Bell is now married to Kate Mara). ‘‘But not until he’s 18. Hell, no. I would want him to finish high school and consider his options before he makes any kind of commitment to something that takes him away from that.
‘‘I didn’t really do anything academically and I’m very lucky, because I’ve managed to sustain some measure of a career. But if I had to stop today, I would be screwed. Because I don’t know anything. So I don’t want to push him academically, but I would give him some caution against acting, and how it’s not a guarantee.’’
Bell has lived in Los Angeles for some time (his vowels have taken up residence somewhere between Teesside and Santa Monica, with the odd result that his ‘‘a’’s are almost Germanic). He used to live by the beach but then he realised: ‘‘What am I doing here? I hate the beach. I’m not a beach person. I don’t enjoy surfing, and sunbathing. That’s just not me. I mean, I grew up in Billingham!’’
His social circle is mostly made up of young actors (Bell has just produced a film written and directed by his friend Max Minghella) and when he meets much younger actors now, Bell thinks: ‘‘I hope they’ve got a good agent. Or a good manager. I don’t mean good at their jobs. I mean a good, nice human being. It’s crucial.
‘‘It’s tough and you can really lose yourself. Your inflated ego and your self-importance can just go and go and go, and if things don’t go the way you want you’re left with all that stuff and no help – you’re left to navigate it alone. That’s really dicey.’’
Perhaps the most striking thing about Bell – it shouldn’t be surprising in an actor, whose job is to seek certain kinds of truths, but it is rare in such brief conversation – is the speed with which he reaches for an articulation of emotion.
You learn that he dislikes goodbyes but finds the notion of them very moving; that he has had an affinity with older people and the small anticipated tragedies of life from an early age; that he would much rather be with his family than working, though he can also be obsessive about work; that as a child he made friends with the only other boy who supported Arsenal (he supported that team accidentally, when his
"Annette Bening is a very beautiful woman, and the way that she characterised Gloria Grahame was very alluring – purposefully so."
Jamie Bell
mum arbitrarily reached for a top in the bargain bin of a sports shop); and that his musical heroes are Michael Jackson and Beethoven.
Reflecting on Grahame’s influence on Turner, he extrapolates and remembers figures who have had a deep influence on him.
Bell’s father left when Bell was a baby, and he was brought up by his mother on her own.
As a teenager, he says, ‘‘I got busted for having a packet of cigarettes at school, and I wasn’t the type of kid who got into trouble very much.
‘‘My mum would have just been devastated. One teacher made me stay back after class and said: ‘You know what? I’m not going to send this report card home because this isn’t you’. I wept. It was an act of empathy and compassion to a kid who was probably lost and desperately trying to fit in.
‘‘Those are real people doing real acts of kindness. I’m still very moved by those. I hope I can do something like that for someone at some point.’’ – The Daily Telegraph
❚ After advance screenings in select cinemas from February 23 to 25, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (M) will open nationwide on March 1.