This much I Know / Jonathan Pryce / ‘Love is the most important thing’

‘In lockdown, we all looked out for each other’: Jonathan Pryce. Photograph: Karen Robinson/

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This much I know

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Jonathan Pryce: ‘Love is the most important thing’

Michael Hogan
Saturday 8 August 2020

The actor, 73, on surviving coronavirus, being Pope for a few weeks, and a smouldering Warren Beatty

Michael Hogan

My father had a nervous breakdown. My parents opened a small grocery shop and he always let customers put things on tick. He was a town councillor, on the housing committee, very caring. People ended up owing him a lot of money. When I was 11, he walked out of the house and went missing for days. When he was found, he’d lost his memory. It’s why I’ve never got into debt.

The Welsh countryside was one big adventure playground. When we weren’t at school, we ran wild. There was a local paedophile but everyone knew to avoid him.

My art teacher, Ifor Jones, was an early role model. He had wonderful italic handwriting – as did I soon after, because I copied it. Aged 17, I got in trouble for driving without insurance and the clerk of the court congratulated me on my handwriting. Ifor’s son came to see me in The Merchant of Venice at the Globe in 2015 and gave me a letter from his father. I welled up when I saw the handwriting on the envelope.

Theatre can still change the world. A live experience goes deeper and stays with people longer. Film is more fleeting. It can have social impact, but there’s only one Ken Loach, sadly.

Warren Beatty looked every inch a film star. I met him a few times and I went to supper in New York in 1976. I watched women take the scenic route to the toilet so they walked past him. Every time, he’d take off his glasses and smoulder.

Work is my therapy. My father was violently attacked and died when I was 28. Five years later, I played Hamlet at the Royal Court. It helped me work out a lot of things about our relationship.

Bill Nighy always fetches a high price. I used to organise charity cabarets and auctioning off Bill invariably raised the most money. He’s stopped agreeing to it now. I think he got tired of being propositioned by ladies of a certain age.

Love is the most important thing. Giving and receiving love. I’ve been with my wife Kate [Fahy] for 48 years and it’s flown by. Where did the time go?

I got starstruck meeting Morecambe and Wise. I was a huge fan, then Eric Morecambe came up to me at this event and said: “Hello, Jon. How are you?” He chatted away like we were old pals. I was dumbfounded. It turned out a mutual friend had put him up to it.

Whenever I get depressed by our appalling leadership, I gain comfort from the fact that we’re not as bad as America.

The High Sparrow in Game Of Thrones got compared to Jeremy Corbyn, but I actually based him on Pope Francis. Three years later, I ended up playing him, too. I’m a lifelong Labour supporter and a lot of his instincts were right, but he shouldn’t have been leader. I protested side by side with Corbyn twice during the 70s. He hasn’t moved on since.

I didn’t want to do The Two Popes. I thought playing Pope Francis was a hiding to nothing. A living Pope? I wasn’t going to please anybody. But it ended up being a joyous experience. One of my best jobs ever. We screened it in Rome for members of the Vatican and they seemed to think I’d got him right.

One comfort of being in lockdown was that everyone else was, too. Well, apart from Dominic Cummings. I live in an area of east London with a lovely community feel. We all looked out for each other, dropping off home-made bread and cakes. I’ve secretly enjoyed being cocooned at home.

I had coronavirus in late March. I was hospitalised for eight days with Covid pneumonia. It left me tired and anxious for a long time, but I’m over that. I’ve now got high levels of antibodies so I’m secretly rather pleased with myself.

I always thought I’d find religion in my old age and it would be the answer to everything. It ain’t happened, apart from being Pope for a few weeks.

Jonathan Pryce is supporting Crisis’s Home for All campaign

THE GUARDIAN

 Left to right, top to bottom: Jacob Anderson, Jonathan Pryce, Carice van Houten, Bella Ramsey, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Gemma Whelan, Iain Glen and John Bradley. Composite: HBO, Sky Atlantic

'It was madness': Game of Thrones stars on how it changed their lives

On the eve of the final series, ten Game of Thrones stars including Carice van Houten, Jonathan Pryce and Gemma Whelan reflect on what it’s meant to them

Killian Fox, Kathryn Bromwich and Michael Hogan

Sunday 31 March 2019

Carice van Houten (Melisandre)

Now filming Sky series Temple and a film called The Glass House. Has had a child with partner, fellow actor Guy Pearce

When Carice van Houten goes out in public, she often notices people giving her searching looks, as if they can’t quite place where they’ve seen her before. When a woman came up once and asked her that, van Houten replied with the words, “The night is dark and full of terrors” – a key line from her terrifying fire priestess Melisandre. “The girl almost screamed,” she recalls with satisfaction. “Not just because she recognised someone from TV, but as if she really thought I was scary. Which was fun!”

Prior to Game of Thrones, the Dutch actor was best known for her smouldering performance in Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 thriller Black Book,playing a Jewish singer who joins the resistance against the Nazis. She joined the show at the start of season two, having turned down an opportunity to audition as Game of Thrones character Cersei Lannister a year earlier.

Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 13 – The Wife  

Glenn Close is unreadably brilliant as author's spouse plunged in late-life crisis

5/5stars5 out of 5 stars.

*****

As the apparently-perfect wife of a Nobel prize-winning writer, Close gives arguably her best ever performance in an adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel

Peter Bradshaw
Tue 12 Sep 2019

“T

here’s nothing more dangerous than a writer whose feelings have been hurt.” The speaker is Joan Castleman, the charming, enigmatically discreet and supportive wife of world-famous author and New York literary lion Joe Castleman. It is a fascinating and bravura performance from Glenn Close, in this hugely enjoyable dark comedy from director Björn Runge, adapted by Jane Anderson from the novel by Meg Wolitzer. Perhaps it’s Close’s career-best – unnervingly subtle, unreadably calm, simmering with self-control. Her Joan is a study in marital pain, deceit and the sexual politics of prestige. It’s a portrayal to put alongside Close’s appearances in Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction. This is an unmissable movie for Glenn Close fans. Actually, you can’t watch it without becoming a fan – if you weren’t one already.

The Castlemans are on the plane to Sweden, ready for Joe to get the Nobel prize. Yet they are being pestered on the flight by a certain Nathaniel Bone, part stalker-fan, part parasitic hack who wants Joe to cooperate with a warts-and-all biography he is planning to write. Joe gives him the contemptuous brush-off but Joan cautiously advises a more diplomatic treatment. It is a key moment in this hugely enjoyable drama when things begin to fall apart.

Jonathan Pryce is excellent as the cantankerous and conceited old writer, a man now childishly addicted to praise and luxuriating in his colossal quasi-Bellow reputation. Christian Slater is the insidious and dangerous Bone. Max Irons plays Joe’s moody son David who also has plans to be writer, desperately needing the old man’s approval and yet prickly and resentful at Joe’s sorrowing criticisms of his work – criticisms which do not convey any great reassurance that his son has chosen the right career. And there is an unsettling moment in his Stockholm hotel suite when the great man appears not to recognise the name of one of his own characters. Is Joe succumbing to dementia?

And of course Close plays Joan, a woman much loved and admired within Joe’s circle of acquaintance: supportive helpmeet, mother – soon to be grandmother – and deeply affectionate spouse, apparently happy with a life lived in the titan’s shadow. Yet everyone is aware of a difficult truth; despite Joe blandly telling people at these cocktail parties that his wife “doesn’t write”, Joan had her own literary ambitions as a young woman. Joe’s moment of Nobel triumph appears to be triggering a late-life crisis in Joan.

Flashbacks to the 1950s and 60s show her as a co-ed taking a creative writing class with the young, insufferably pompous and married Professor Joe Castleman – who has himself only published minor short stories. She flirts, babysits his children and submits an outrageously seductive short story to his class, entitled The Faculty Wife. Things go as expected and soon Joan is wife number two, with a perennial suspicion that as Joe’s eye once roved to her, it could rove on to other people. Joe continues to stray, right up to the Nobel ceremony – and the film’s present-day section is set in the Clinton 1990s, when denying having sexual relations with younger women had become a political trope.

The film shows how Joan’s own literary ambitions began to wither in that sexist time and place: Elizabeth McGovern has an amusing cameo as an embittered minor author who advises her to give it all up. Later she gets a job as a reader in a publishing house whose smug and cynical editors are looking for “a Jewish writer”. Shrewdly, she puts Joe’s manuscript forward and his journey to greatness has begun.

The intrusive and insistent Bone thinks he has figured out the secret of Joe’s success and that of their troubled marriage. Yet for all Bone’s investigative excitement, the movie shows he still does not fully understand the truth about them, and perhaps Joan has herself not fully understood the nature of her wifely submission until that moment. The final plot turn can be read as a parable for patriarchal politics and the artist’s prestige: when people read novels, they are not merely responding to a text, they are consuming the artist’s prestige and reputation, which is itself a created performance. It is a smart, supremely watchable and entertaining film, and Close gives a wonderful star turn.

THE GUARDIAN

Posters / The Wife / 2018

Posters

THE WIFE

2018