Warning us that “everybody in this book is either dead or cancelled”, Brian Cox has produced one of the funniest, most rip-roaring, irreverent and candid showbusiness memoirs this season, full of lively mockery. Ed Norton is “a bit of a pain in the arse”, Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated” and working with Peter Hall when he was the director of the National Theatre was “a complete nightmare from start to finish”. Michael Gambon, who has “got a dark interior”, had plastered on his dressing-room mirror photos from Robert De Niro signed “Dear Mike, I admire your work, love always, Bob” that Gambon had written and sent to himself.
Cox has a wonderful eye and ear for the absurd — Ralph Richardson riding about on a motorbike with a parrot on his shoulder or Woody Allen playing chess against himself between takes — but such is the endemic drunkenness in the acting profession, as recounted by Cox, it’s a miracle curtains ever manage to go up or that cameras roll. Michael Elphick “ended up dying of the drink”. Nigel Terry would “buy himself a crate of vodka, lock himself in his room and drink the lot”. John Hurt got plastered and insulted a rugby team: “You’re all after each other’s bottoms, aren’t you . . . Rugby. I mean, it’s a sort of substitute, isn’t it?” John Thaw was “another one who was fond of the drink” and Albert Finney’s greeting was, “Have a glass, lad.” Jonathan Rhys Meyers “turned up worse for wear and couldn’t act”.
On the whole, Cox is disapproving of these antics, which he attributes to insecurity. As a diabetic, he avoids cocktails if he can, but his neuroses are numerous. He doesn’t enjoy attending his own parties, for example, and does a bunk as guests arrive. The 75-year-old actor is not at ease with domesticity or family life (“Let’s be honest here, I have been a fairly crappy father”) and doesn’t much like his teenage children (“I have absolutely nothing in common with them,” he says of his 19 and 17-year-old sons). There seem to have been quite a few mistresses and an ex-wife (“I wasn’t always as faithful as I might have been”) discarded here and there.
Cox’s focus, instead, is his work. Apart from a brief spell of uncertainty during which he worked as a bikini-waxer, he has never known unemployment. Putting the Rabbit in the Hat mentions dozens of films, television dramas and stage shows, which Cox was in, that I have never previously heard about. He’s the actor who casting directors have always sought if they want a “rough but sensitive type, a soul in a donkey jacket”.
He is presently riding high as Logan Roy, the tyrannical family patriarch, in Succession. Logan is “not Rupert Murdoch, he’s not Conrad Black, he’s his own entity”, which is useful to be told. He’s also, as a ruffian, a culmination of Cox’s craft — and Cox has played Trotsky, Stalin, Nye Bevan, J Edgar Hoover and Churchill, none of whom you might call a shrinking violet.
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Cox says the job of the actor is to “touch on the inner life of people” and he has no time for bombastic show-offs who like the sound of their own voice, such as Ian McKellen: “His acting is not to my taste.” Cox doesn’t like directors who are overly stylistic. “I find his work meretricious,” he decrees of Quentin Tarantino. He particularly can’t abide television stars who get above themselves, particularly the horrible-sounding James Bolam. When a florist cheerfully called out to Bolam, “Hey up, there goes a Likely Lad!” Bolam went bonkers. “You can stuff your f***ing flowers!” he glowered.
Despite Cox’s being good at portraying “a lion who needed the thorn plucking from its paw”, and he is indeed a big, shaggy presence, he has no ego. He wants to vanish into his roles, serving the text. “It’s this propensity for absence, this need to disappear” — and this is, he claims, how he is with wives, children and at family parties as well as how he behaves before a camera or audience.
Early in his career, this wasn’t always so. A director once said to Cox, “Your performance tonight was indulgent, unspecific, audience-pleasing, generalised crap.” Cox has knocked himself out for half a century, determined never to repeat those mistakes and to become more enigmatic. His skills long since recognised, he has a CBE, but is worried that his support for Scottish independence has scuppered a knighthood.
His upbringing in Dundee, a time of “intolerable hardship”, explains much about his complex psychology. He was born in 1946 and his ancestors were denizens of workhouses and insane asylums. One grandfather was an alcoholic drill sergeant invalided out of the First World War with “frozen feet”. (“My mother used to say that he had a look in his eyes as though he’d seen the dark side of the moon.”) Cox’s father died of pancreatic cancer when Cox was eight. His mother battled mental illness, endured electric shock treatments, suffered a phobia for coal and became a chalet maid at Butlin’s.
While all this was going on, Cox spent his time eating sweets in Dundee’s many cinemas. “Considering I was just a wee boy, my tastes were pretty sophisticated.” Cox was to develop a deep and abiding knowledge of the careers of everybody from Jerry Lewis to Merle Oberon, Marlon Brando to Kenneth More and Alastair Sim. One of the pleasures of this book is Cox’s astute evocation of the luminaries he has long admired. As he says, “the thing about my job is you never stop learning” and he is always deriving inspiration from, say, Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant, names that shamefully mean nothing to the younger generation, but who were titans. Cox also salutes Fulton Mackay and Leonard Rossiter.
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Today, Cox says, referring to big-budget epics, we live in “a world where Orlando Bloom can beat Brendan Gleeson in a fight. Orlando Bloom?” Yet odd things will occur. Cox knew someone who choked to death on a strawberry cream. He was once sexually assaulted by Princess Margaret, who tweaked his nipple. “Princess Margaret was feeling me up.”
Cox’s book is like a transcription of a pub or after-dinner monologue: clever, perceptive, wandering back and forth chronologically. One moment we are at the Dundee Rep where Cox started out, witnessing the eccentricities of Nicol Williamson; the next we are told that Keanu Reeves “took himself off to a small theatre in Canada and played Hamlet” (true; I spent a week with him in Winnipeg). Cox hops from subject to subject, amplifying themes, picking up where he left off. There are lots of asides and digressions, as in the best talk. “We touched on it before” is a typical phrase. It is loose, baggy, brilliant.
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox, Quercus, 374pp; £20
Brian Cox on . . .
Michael Gambon
“He was notorious. If he saw the opportunity for some mischief, he just couldn’t help himself. The famous story about him is that while at the National he was working with Laurence Olivier, who at one point had to sweep onto the stage wearing a huge flowing cloak. During rehearsals, another actor stood on Olivier’s cloak, completely ruining the entrance, and Olivier got more and more irate. ‘If I find out who’s been standing on my cloak, their f***ing life won’t be worth living,’ he apparently seethed at one point. Gambon let it slip that it was an actor called Peter Cellier who was standing on the cloak, and sure enough Peter was on the receiving end of a bollocking, but Peter was a lovely, mild-mannered guy — no way would he have stood on Olivier’s cloak. The true culprit, of course, was Gambon. The same Gambon who once took the actor Terence Rigby up in a two-seater aircraft, supposedly to cure his fear of flying, and then pretended to have a heart attack.”
Steven Seagal
“He suffers from that Donald Trump syndrome of thinking himself far more capable and talented than he actually is, seemingly oblivious to the fact that an army of people are helping to prop up his delusion.”
Johnny Depp
“I mean, Edward Scissorhands. Let’s face it, if you come on with hands like that and pale, scarred-face make-up, you don’t have to do anything. And he didn’t.”
