50 films later, James Cromwell lands leading role
Actor James Cromwell is the last guy you’d figure would want strangers calling him “Jamie.”
A vigorous 73, he stands an imposing 6-foot-7 and sports a bald head and beard combo that would look great while riding a Harley.
He’s played the U.S. president in four films, was dour Prince Philip to Helen Mirren’s title monarch in The Queen and was such a badass cop in L.A. Confidential he’s on Total Film’s list of greatest screen villains.
In recent weeks, Cromwell has been handed a golden trophy and also placed in handcuffs. Our interview is happening a day after he won the Best Actor prize for his co-starring role in Michael McGowan’s rebel romance Still Mine (opening Friday) at the March 3 inaugural Canadian Screen Awards.
Less than a month earlier, the activist-minded actor was wearing cuffs after cops charged him and his fellow PETA members for protesting lab experiments on cats at the University of Wisconsin.
You’re going to address a man like this by his affectionate name “Jamie”? You’d better, because that what he answers to. “James” is just for movie marquees.
“Anybody can call me Jamie, and you have to watch it when you call me James,” he cautions. “Then there’s going to be a problem.”
It’s a good thing he’s smiling as he says this.
“James is the name that’s up there (on marquees), but whenever I hear it, I know I’ve just done something wrong, and my back goes out. Jamie is what my mother gave me, and that takes the onus off of being big. Somebody thinks, ‘Oh, Jamie — how threatening can he be?’”
True enough. More than once in his long showbiz career (his first major screen credit is Murder by Death in 1976), he’s been passed over for a gig because he deemed too tall for the insecure male lead.
He’s actually the tallest man ever to be nominated an Oscar: he was up for Best Supporting Actor in 1995 for playing Farmer Hoggett in Babe, perhaps his best-known role. He considers Still Mine to be his first leading role of his 50-plus films, because the pig took top billing in Babe.
Cromwell towers over his Still Mine co-star Geneviève Bujold, 5-foot-4, as you can see in the movie poster, but that’s actually one of the charms of the film. Cromwell and Bujold play real-life elderly New Brunswick couple Craig and Irene Morrison, who clash with small-town bureaucrats when Craig starts building a new home for his Alzheimer-afflicted spouse. (Morrison died in February, age 93.)
It’s not at all unusual to see to a tall man paired with a much shorter woman. Cromwell is moved to quote the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray to bolster that assertion.
“Someone once asked Thackeray, ‘How tall is your beloved?’ And he said, ‘As tall as my heart.’ I like that.
“My present lady is here (he lifts a hand to his heart to indicate height). Right around the heart areas is a good place to have the feminine.”
The L.A.-born Cromwell also has a soft spot in his heart for Canada. He’s made “five or six” films in this country and many TV shows. He was astonished and tickled to win Best Actor at the CSAs, which are primarily intended to support and promote Canadian talent.
“They put the camera on you because the media like to photograph the loser as much as the winner and I was sure I wasn’t going to win the thing because I’m not Canadian. So I was pole-axed!”
For writer/director McGowan, whose previous films include One Week and St. Ralph, Cromwell had the right combination of grit and sensitivity to play Craig Morrison, a determined farmer, rancher and master carpenter who stood larger than life, even if not quite as tall as the actor who plays him.
“You look at the list and you start doing the dream casting, and Jamie was the first one we went out to,” McGowan says, sharing a table with Cromwell during a lunch interview.
“We thought he might not like the script, or his agent would say he was too busy, and we couldn’t throw much money at him. But with Jamie, it was easy. He did it because it was a project he wanted to invest his time in.”
Cromwell was drawn to the story of Morrison’s romantic anti-bureaucracy crusade because it runs deep in his blood. Besides fighting for animal rights, he’s also put his name and body on the line in protests against the planned Keystone XL oil pipeline. His father John Cromwell, a one-time president of the Directors Guild of America whose pictures include The Prisoner of Zenda, Of Human Bondage and Dead Reckoning, fell victim to the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s-50s, orchestrated by red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Like Craig Morrison, Cromwell sees himself in opposition to petty bureaucrats of all stripes. For this interview, he wears a proletarian plaid shirt and blue jeans that seem like default attire for him. “Bureaucracy doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he says firmly. “Those rules are established because people lost touch with being ethical and generous and honest with each other . . . the thinking has got to change, and it will through the collective, the feminine and the empathetic. All this is embodied in the film.” Yet when Cromwell first met Morrison, while preparing for Still Mine, he didn’t want to compare rebel tales as much as he wanted to hold the man’s real baseball, autographed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, that’s part of the movie’s story. He was impressed by “the chutzpah” Morrison had shown as a kid, by sneaking into baseball dugouts to get the famous signatures of his ballpark heroes. “The first thing that occurred to me when I met Craig was to say, ‘I want to see the baseball.’ Just to hold it in my hand . . . you can take that story and make it a metaphor for everything else.” He feels the same way about Still Mine. He’s 16 years younger than the age Morrison was when the Maritimer took on the pointyheaded permit pushers, risking demolition of his home or personal incarceration. But the film’s undercurrent about raging against the darkness isn’t lost on Cromwell. He’s an extraordinarily thoughtful actor and man. “Oh no, it resonates! You get to be, as they say, a certain age, and you begin to hear the hiss of the waves. You’re not going to get out of that ride. That ride’s coming. “And the last part of life is a spiritual concern. You need to find a context to put your life into, that will allow you to go through it with as much grace and balance as possible, even if there is rebellion and adventure and exploration and resistance. Life smoothes the rocks out, like the huge worn boulders on an extraordinary old beach I saw in New Brunswick. It was like a beach of baseballs!” Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm