The Actor Within: Intimate Conversations with Great Actors

James Cromwell

59 i James Cromwell I grew up watching the hit television show All in the Family (1974) in which character actor James Cromwell played Stretch Cunningham, one of Archie’s co-workers. My kids loved him as Farmer Arthur Hoggett in the endearing film Babe (1995), for which he received an Oscar nomination . As Captain Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential (1997), Warden Hal Moores in The Green Mile (1999), and George H. W. Bush in W. (2008), Cromwell has proven that he only gets better with time. When he visited me at my studio, I was eager to learn how he continues to evolve the actor within. ‘‘You were born into an acting family. Your father was the acclaimed actor and director John Cromwell and your mother, actress Kay Johnson. Were you expected to follow in their footsteps?’’ ‘‘I actually chose to major in engineering at the Hill School, Middlebury College, but my engineering path was quickly aborted when my father visited me at college and surveyed the aftermath of a Saturday night fraternity party. He decided to get me out of that environment and took me along with him to Sweden, where he was making a picture. Although I had been on sets with him on a number of pictures in the past, beginning when I was five with the filming of Anna and the King of Siam, this time I found the process fascinating, and I was hooked. When I returned to the States, I dropped out of college and moved to New York to study acting. My father disapproved of my decision, so I enrolled in Carnegie Tech College (Carnegie Mellon today) and got my engineering degree. After graduation, I aspired to be a director but couldn’t land a job, so I turned to acting.’’ ‘‘Did your parents influence you as an actor?’’ ‘‘Yes. My mother, Kay Johnson, was a wonderful actress. One of her best-known roles was Nora in Of Human Bondage, a film my father directed. Norah falls in love with Leslie Howard’s character, Philip Carey, but he chooses the dark-spirited Mildred, played by Bette Davis. I remember watching the film in the auditorium at Lincoln Center at the first New York Film Festival and thinking to myself, Wow, she’s really good! My mother had a quality that I take for granted in my own acting: letting who 60 The Actor Within I am as a human being come through on the screen. People see my character and like the guy, even when he’s a son of a bitch. They understand that the person behind the character is human. He’s real. ‘‘I also admired my father’s acting. He won a Tony Award for his work alongside Henry Fonda in The Point of No Return and then did Mary, Mary and Sabrina Fair, each of which ran for three or four years. My father influenced me mainly by example. He never formally worked with me on acting. I didn’t learn his technique. What I got from him was the elegance with which he conducted his life, his dedication to the craft, and, most of all, his sense of discipline. I needed discipline as a way for me to conduct my life because I was drawn to actors like James Dean, who was erratic in his behavior and had destructive tendencies.’’ ‘‘Would you agree that people are drawn to films, live theater, and television shows because consciously or unconsciously they are trying to make sense of their lives?’’ ‘‘Yes. Shakespeare wrote, ‘The purpose of playing is to hold a mirror to nature.’ So we as actors mirror real life through dramatization, which is an abstraction of reality. This allows us to look at ourselves from a distance , with a degree of objectivity. The concept of abstraction was understood and used well by the Greeks. It began as a dance, the dithyrambic dance in which every Athenian was obliged to participate in creative expression . Then it became formalized with a chorus and dancers. A player danced a solo and then began to recite lines. The chorus responded, and that’s how plays came to be. But by the time they got to the Athenian theater—the theater that we now think of as the beginning of Western theater performances—staged performances became a tool to expurgate feelings of resentment and rebellious tendencies of the audience through catharsis, making citizens accepting of the status quo.’’ ‘‘In...