Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

causing me to look momentarily up, and these thighs and long shins – all of it magicked up by my courage. Anything I did, like this, and this, and that, and that again, I had brought into being!

      Love runs through you and uses you as a device to get what it wants, and when you're in love you're simply keeping pace with it for a moment, briefly allowed to lope along at the front where everything that comes into view is new.

       18

      Let's get something straight. The most embarrassing film to like, if you're English, is Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson's failed-actor comedy with Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann. Even the BFI Classic on Withnail begins with much blushing and a statement that to admit to a liking for the film is to declare oneself unfit for adult company. Let's get another thing straight. If Kind Hearts and Coronets is not the funniest British film ever made, it's Withnail. If Kes is not the most touching British film ever made, it's Withnail. No film at all is as loved as Withnail, and if your hatred of students extends to dismissing that love then you're probably someone whose response to films stops at something like ‘intense admiration’. In fact, bugger Kind Hearts and Coronets, it is the funniest film in English. It's also a better film about the sixties than something like Blow-Up and, very indirectly (it's a subtle movie), an exceptional film about homosexuality.

      The model for Withnail was a failed actor called Vivian MacKerrell whom Robinson knew. But Robinson is a failed actor too. He had parts in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and other bits and pieces before turning up, extraordinarily handsome, as the object of Isabelle Adjani's amour fou in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (great movie!). He's pretty good. He's really very good. All he gets to do is simply be there while Adjani's wave breaks over him. You'd have to see it, if you haven't already. But after that Robinson's phone wouldn't ring. So he became a writer and did The Killing Fields before Withnail and directing. Then he sort of failed as a director. He continues to sort of fail as a writer. Is there any profession in the world with as high a rate of failure as acting? As the movies as a whole? This is a book about successes (apart from me, obviously) and all the actors I mention share a common trait, because being successful is a trait – they're all one kind of person, whereas partial success or failure is various.

      Why not Bruce Robinson? He had a beautiful wide mouth wittily ironised by the quotation-mark lines around it, enormous cool, even greater charisma, talent (see Adele H.), brains, training (RADA), star quality (if you'll excuse the cobwebs on those words), and he talked, well, the guy talked and still talks like the greatest talker in the English language.

      ‘Vivian was too smart to get a job – an intellectual, erudite man. He'd go to an audition to play a priest, read up all this cackle of theological bollocks and then say, “It's very strange you should be considering me for this part because before I became an actor I was considering the priesthood.” And they knew it was nonsense, so he'd never get the job.’

      Just one of the quieter bits from a twenty-page interview he did in 1995. Not a great story, but what is that word ‘cackle’?

      Another bit, reluctantly endorsing capital punishment for rapists of children:

      ‘Dead him, is my view.’

      Concerning a Spielberg project about a psychic woman and a child killer, which never got off the ground:

      ‘It's as black as your hat. This woman bounces off the lino of hell.’

      The lino of hell? ‘Black as your hat’ I'm pretty sure is a phrase. But nobody uses it any more. It's remembered or rescued language. What a great phrase anyway, black as your hat – I hope it comes back. But ‘the lino of hell’? ‘Dead him’? A ‘cackle’ of something? You know who he reminds me of? William Shakespeare, that's who. That's what Shakespeare used to do instinctively, that black as a hat, lino of hell thing. He'd make something up (‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’) and then let the groundlings know what he meant (‘making the green one red’).

      I love Bruce Robinson, and all this is merely to remind you of what a great guy he is, this failed actor. Because it's not just the RADA boys who ‘only’ make a dozen films who are failed actors. It's not just the RADA boys who make no films at all who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who didn't get into RADA but still managed a lot of acting who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who were bloody good in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors. It's not even the boys who were OK in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors (like me). It's the boys, that is to say pretty much everyone in the world, who stand in front of the mirror one day, just once, casually, and think shame I'm no actor. They're the failed actors too. Most of this planet consists of failed actors.

      So the parting scene at the end of Withnail and I, with its dramatisation of the sorting of the successful from the failed, I find as universal as Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac in Casablanca. The ‘I’ character is moving on, off to Manchester to play the lead in Journey's End. Withnail wants to walk him through Regent's Park to Euston, but it's raining cats and dogs and ‘I’ would rather have a quick clean break. He refuses the wine which Withnail presses on him and asks him to go back, and Withnail, perhaps realising for the first time that he will never play Hamlet (one of the film's motifs), turns to the wolves of the zoo, those same wolves which gave such comfort to Ted Hughes and his children after their mother killed herself, and gives them ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not …’ Then he turns back through the rain towards Camden, where, if he looked to the right he'd see Park Crescent, where Robert Donat left his milkman's cart in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and if he turned his head further he'd see the cul-de-sac of St Andrew's Place where Glenda Jackson gave Salome's Last Dance for Ken Russell. And then he'd walk past Chester Terrace where Bette Davis scared the kids in The Nanny and down which Robert Redford would drive in Spy Game: all the successful actors. I is a success. I is saved. I wanted to be I, but Jim was I, I thought.

       19

      Jeff Sawtell, the film critic of the Journal, was so much of a communist that he wore navy blue Cultural Revolution pyjamas all year round, adding only a scarf in winter. ‘If you like your brew in a mug,’ he said to my excited inquiry about Four Weddings and a Funeral, ‘then it won't be your cup of tea.’ One got the impression that Jeff thought Jean-Luc Godard was a lickspittle bourgeois dog. A liver disease was making him progressively weaker, however, and Eric had nowhere else to turn but to me. I was thrilled, a thrill vitiated only by the lingering suspicion I had learned reading Jeff that movie reviewing was a branch of Marxist socio-economic theory.

      ‘Will this do?’ I asked Jim, showing him my first ever review, of a Richard Gere movie called Mr Jones.

      It read:

      The screen persists in portraying the mentally ill as remarkably gifted on the side. Not only is Mr Jones a virtuoso pianist, he is also a whizzkid mathematician and mind-reader. This kind of publicity does mental health organizations like MIND no good whatsoever.

      Umbraged social comment, that was the thing. Plus the MIND charity shop was three doors down from the Journal. I practically killed myself trying to work out why the incontestable Pulp Fiction was somehow despicably pro-capitalist. Also, you had to write something about guns – God knows what, but something about how a gun was in some way very similar to a camera. I knew it was in that kind of area. And there was nobody I could ask at the screening-rooms, where the atmosphere seemed strangely furtive and even shameful, as if one were in a municipal library where near-derelicts came to get out of the cold, and lovingly fold the newspaper into columns. Always, there would be four or five very old critics no longer attached, as far as one could see, to any particular publication, always in macs, always carrying little briefcases as blazons of busyness, grey and indeterminate as pigeons and vigilant over their rations of the free chocolate digestives, with which the pockets of their macs bulged. The husks of critics.

      It