In 1974 an 18-year-old aspiring actor named Thomas J Hanks wrote a letter to the director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill, begging to be discovered. “Dear Mr Hill,” it begins. “Seeing that I have seen your fantastically entertaining and award-winning film The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and enjoyed it very much, it is all together fitting and proper that you should ‘discover’ me.
“Now, right away I know what you are thinking: ‘Who is this kid?’ and I can understand your apprehensions. I am a nobody. No one outside of Skyline High School has heard of me . . . My looks are not stunning. I am not built like a Greek god, and I can’t even grow a moustache, but I figure if people will pay to see certain films . . . they will pay to see me.
“Let’s work out the details of my discovery. We can do it the way Lana Turner was discovered, me sitting on a soda shop stool, you walk in and notice me and — BANGO — I am a star. Or maybe we can do it this way. I stumble into your office one day and beg for a job. To get rid of me, you give me a stand-in part in your next film. While shooting the film, the star breaks his leg in the dressing room, and, because you are behind schedule already, you arbitrarily place me in his part and — BANGO — I am a star.
“All of these plans are fine with me . . . Mr Hill, I do not want to be some bigtime, Hollywood superstar with girls crawling all over me, just a hometown American boy who has hit the big-time, owns a Porsche, and calls Robert Redford ‘Bob’.”
Five years later, he moved to New York and began his career.
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This letter by a young Tom Hanks, right, is one of Shaun Usher’s latest discoveries, mined from a musty archive and ready to be delivered to an audience hungry for new material. It will be read at the latest round of Letters Live events next week, where each night a selection of correspondence is brought to life by an all-star cast.
The premise of Letters Live is simple, and that’s what makes it so brilliant. The sell-out event has in the past hosted big names including Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law, Gillian Anderson, Juliet Stevenson, Nick Cave, Matt Berry and Stephen Fry to name just a few. From March 10 it is back for six nights of readings at the Freemasons’ Hall in London.
If you haven’t heard of Usher, perhaps you have heard of his blog and subsequent book. Letters of Note is a compendium of fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes and memos from people both famous and everyday. The idea came about in 2009 when the writer began researching famous correspondence. So enthralled was he with what he discovered that he began recording the best of it on his blog.
However, it wasn’t only the well-known names who fascinated him, it was anyone with a story. So he began with a missive sent to a young female animator in 1938 by a Disney employee: “Women do not do any of the creative work . . . The only work open to women consists of tracing.”
The archive soon grew to more than 1,000 letters spanning centuries, subjects and continents. Perhaps its appeal is that it’s a “legitimate form of snooping”, as Usher describes it. Where else can you spy on the private love letters of Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor and in the next discover Jane Austen’s confession to her sister Cassandra that “I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne”?
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Three years ago, realising the appeal these letters had, Usher and his publisher, Canongate, led by Jamie Byng, brought the letters to the stage. “What surprised me was how easily it came together,” says Byng, the driving force behind Letters Live. “The speed at which people responded positively to the approach was overwhelming and incredibly gratifying. Everybody seemed to say yes and in a few days we had Gillian Anderson and Neil Gaiman and Benedict Cumberbatch. People just got it very quickly.”
One of the most memorable pairings he made was Ben Kingsley, who won an Oscar for playing Gandhi, reading the independence leader’s 1939 letter to Hitler, urging him to prevent war. It begins, as all Gandhi’s letters did, “Dear Friend” and continued: “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” However, it never reached the Nazi leader: it was intercepted by the British government.
Byng usually keeps the names of the actors, musicians and public figures a secret until the night but he has released a few names for the special family matinee show: Ian McKellen, Julia Donaldson, Russell Brand, Samantha Bond and Omid Djalili are among the line-up reading letters by Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss, JK Rowling and Beatrix Potter. There will also be one from a refugee in Calais — a portion of the profits from the show will be donated to the Calais charity Help Refugees.
Each show is different and spans the comic and the tragic. The actress Juliet Stevenson has become a regular performer. “I love to be surprised by what I discover about somebody I thought I knew,” she says. “You read a letter by Virginia Woolf or Anthony Trollope or even Sid Vicious and you are surprised by how they thought or what they were capable of.”
Stevenson spent hours perfecting Marge Simpson’s voice to read the cartoon creation’s 1990 letter to Barbara Bush after the first lady called The Simpsons “the dumbest thing” she had ever seen. It worked. Bush replied to apologise: “How kind of you to write. I’m glad you spoke your mind; I foolishly didn’t know you had one.”
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Samuel Johnson believed that “in a man’s letters his soul lies naked”. Will we be able to say the same thing about emails and text messages in 40 years’ time? Who knows, but perhaps that’s part of the appeal of Letters Live. For Byng, “it’s all about connection between one person and another that a letter allows, even if it’s 100 years after it was written”, he says. “There’s a great line by TS Eliot that says Hell is a place where nothing connects. I love the opposite of that: humanity lies where there is connection. That’s what we’re doing.”
Letters Live takes place at Freemasons’ Hall, London, on March 10-15. To book tickets, visit lettersofnote.com