'This is the best moment of my life,' he said, lying in the bath: Ian Holm remembered
And after this moment, like a violinist picking up his bow, he returned to the same point in the scene, first beat of the bar, pitch, tempo and intensity perfect, no shuffling, no prevarication. That’s the true actor: the true professional – experiencing the state of possession, enduring passion and yet, like a firewalker, remaining untouched by the experience.
When I asked him to play Lear in 1996 he had hardly been on stage for 15 years and had not played Shakespeare for 35 years. We talked about love of family, of children, of parental tyranny – different only in scale from the political variety, of failing to express love. And we talked of madness. “That’s the easy bit,” said Ian. Perhaps he was referring to his familiarity with insanity – his father was a psychiatrist in a mental hospital – or perhaps he was hinting at his experience of stage fright, when he lost his nerve, a neuron away from losing his mind.
Rehearsing Lear, Ian was like a fit dog gnawing at a bone. He became obsessed, always thinking constructively, never perverse or nit-picking. “When Lear talks of being ‘unaccommodated man’ he must be naked,” he said, “anything less would be dishonest.” Before the first preview he stopped me: “I think I know how to do the ‘Howl’ speech. See what you think.” And he did know how to do the ‘Howl’ speech: he carried Cordelia’s body on and instead of putting her down before he spoke, he stood with her corpse in his arms and howled at Kent, Albany and Edgar. The four ‘howls’ emerged as an order, a command, the indictment of a father - don’t be indifferent to my suffering.
After the show on the opening night I went to see Ian in his dressing room, where he was lying contentedly in his bath. “This is the best moment of my life,” he said. When he died I had a message from his Cordelia, AnneMarie Duff, with this photograph attached.“What an honour that was,” she said. I felt the same.
He was sort of like a little dog: really hungry to play
Anne-Marie Duff
There’s always quite a strong bond between the actor who plays Lear and the young actor who plays Cordelia. It’s such a powerful relationship on stage, it’s bound to bleed into one offstage. That was the case with me and Ian. We hit it off immediately: from the getgo he was so warm and authentic and made me feel important and that what I had to say was valuable. That doesn’t always happen when you’re starting out, with people who have been around the block.
But Ian was really interested and engaged. A director once said to me that the two hardest-working people in the room will always be the youngest actor in the cast and the lead. One is so hungry and the other is so dedicated. If I ever came up with an idea he’d go: yeah, tell me more, tell me more. He was sort of like a little dog: really hungry to play. He’d be really helpful and a great teacher but at the same time playful and brave and up for doing things differently.
He kept curious, and that was key. Once you stop being bothered you’re screwed. Great artists seem to doggedly hold on to curiosity and he was a great artist, in all mediums. He shone on stage, on TV, on film - there wasn’t an arena in which he couldn’t perform. That’s another sign of someone who’s just good at his job.
Ian was also very mischievous, which made him feel super-young. He was cheeky, but there was nothing lascivious about him. He was funny – which I think is insanely attractive. He’d tease me if I was getting too selfrighteous; would be first to raise an eyebrow from across the room which would just make me laugh. That’s an act of generosity in itself. It’s a lesson: don’t take yourself too seriously.
I did have a sense at the time that the production was a career highlight. When he first came in, he knew every single word of the whole play. It was part of his youthful energy – he still had hopes and dreams to be fulfilled. It wasn’t: “Well, I suppose it’s my time to play Lear”, but “Oh mother of God! I’m playing King Lear at the National Theatre!” He worked so hard every single night, there was never one show he was in a lower gear. Always and ever full force.
The people who’d come to see him were off the scale: Paul Newman! Gene Hackman! It was phenomenal – that’s how well-regarded he was. But of course people like that wanted to breathe in what he did. You can’t fight or hide a real gift, just as you can’t fail to recognise and respect it. It has nothing to do with whether you have five Oscars under your belt; it transcends any of the nonsense.
I’ll always remember one night early on. I was super-nervous; I was just starting out and it was such a big deal for me. The two of us made our entrance together and he took both my hands and looked me in the eye and said: “Let’s just go out there tonight and pray.” That was the coolest thing. It was also poetic – and that’s who he was. I loved him very much.As told to Catherine
Shoard
I committed what in the theatre is considered a cardinal sin
Ken Stott
I was barely a month out of drama school in 1973 when I saw Ian Holm at the Royal Court as Hatch in Edward Bond’s The Sea. The truth, the power, the intensity, shocked me – and inspired me.Three years later, I was carrying a spear on behalf of the RSC on a world tour when the news came in like a chill wind through my soul. Ian Holm had suffered “stage fright”. Not the kind that makes you a wee bit more nervous than you normally are in front of an audience and a “scrotum of critics”, but the kind of hellish incident that can end your fucking career.
Details were scant; we, the young actors who didn’t know him but unanimously adored him were “shielded from” the information. Apparently it had happened during the final preview of The Iceman Cometh, at the Aldwych. Someone said they knew someone who’d seen it and “it was going to be the best work he’d ever done so why should he be afraid?” Yes, so why be afraid we asked, but we all of us knew, and we were all afraid.A year or so later, I got my first substantial role, in Kennedy’s Children directed by the great David Scase at the Library Theatre Manchester. One evening as I was preparing for our final preview, my colleague Maggie Ollerenshaw announced brightly, indeed almost matter-of-factly, that Ian Holm would be in the audience, and would I like to meet him afterwards? I was a wreck. We met in the bar afterwards where Ian spoke encouragingly about the production and during a slight lull in the conversation I committed what in the theatre is considered a cardinal sin, blurting out: “You are my favourite actor in the world.”
There followed a terrible silence during which David smiled into the middle distance and Maggie gave me a withering look. Ian stared at me … then suddenly threw his arms around me and said: “Thank you.”
It was 20 years before we met again, and I was enjoying a run of Art at Wyndham’s theatre. As I walked into the Ivy one evening after the show I saw Ian in the lobby. I approached him and tentatively offered my hand, he grasped it, pulled me to him, threw his arm around me and said: “You are my favourite actor.”
Latterly, despite the onset of illness, he came to see my work and he was very supportive. Despite the astonishing variety and brilliance of his work in film, if I were to re-evaluate his work I’d need look no farther than the Royal Court to see that his truth stands against the demonstration of acting and his power and intensity against attitude.
Laurence Olivier came up to him and said: ‘How do you do it?’
Hugh Hudson
I first met Ian when I was preparing Chariots of Fire and he fitted the part of the running coach perfectly. I put him in my second film, Greystoke, too, and would have loved to put him in every