What should I have said to Patsy Pollock back then when I read for In The Name Of The Father? Who are you Ralph? We’ve seen all these characters and roles you’ve done, but who are you? I could’ve said “I don’t know“. After all, I didn’t. Still don’t really…who does? I should’ve told them I had a law degree, because the character I was reading for was a barrister, the ghost career that I abandoned to become an actor. Might’ve got the gig but it wouldn’t have answered the question. I’m all of the characters I’ve played, and none of them. There’s a part of me in each one otherwise I couldn’t do it. But it is a small part which gets exaggerated. They all look like me – I haven’t played a creature or a space alien. The closest I got was in 1997 reading for Star Wars : The Phantom Menace. I was reading for three different cartoon-face creatures from that universe, wouldn’t it be great if I could remember which ones? Plo Koon? Bib Fortuna? I doubt if even Robin Gurland the casting director can remember. We met at Leavesden and I read a bunch of pages in different accents, loved doing it, showing off really. This is Welsh and this is Belfast. Blow me down if I didn’t get offered another role with no make-up or accent – the Queen’s pilot Ric Olie.
It was exciting to be in a Star Wars film, even though some of the stardust had worn a little thin even by then, it was still a massive franchise. { The money was miserable though, with a full buyout – no residuals which we could all have retired on. I was reminded that there were 40 people behind me waiting for that part. } And I accepted. I stayed at Jenny’s ma and pa’s house in Wembley for the gig and every morning David drew up outside the house in his black Mercedes and I got driven in to Leavesden which was an old airfield near Watford converted into a studio.
The first hint of a problem for me was when my dressing room turned out to be a container on the floor of the studio. It was very noisy and clanged if you tapped the wall, had no air, and the studio was outside with all the construction and machinery. I had lines to learn and an American accent to rehearse and these were not good working conditions. I was Bravo Leader and met the other pilots : Clarence Smith and my darling Celia Imrie who’d been my wife in the film Say Hello To The Real Dr Snide, directed by Peter Cattaneo when we were all children. Celia had a dressing room away from the studio floor so I went on a queenie flounce and got transferred up there. And then we started shooting.
It became immediately apparent that George Lucas wasn’t that interested in directing the actors. His classic note was “one more : faster, more intense.” It became monotonous fairly quickly, exactly how you imagined a franchise film would feel like. One afternoon we were doing spaceship interiors in the vast studio and we had ten minutes to wait for a light to be altered, not enough time to walk half a mile for a cigarette so we all hung out a bit. I was next to Lucas so we did small talk then I asked him if someone couldn’t refer to me by name – Ric Olie – so that the audience would know who I was. George said “Ralph, there will be websites dedicated to your character. Everyone will know who you are.” I’ve never actually found one of these websites, but I haven’t looked very hard to be fair.
Later that day at lunch in the large canteen, we had to wait on line and choose something from the menu, get a tray, knives and forks, a drink – very like school dinners to be fair, then go sit where you like. I had shepherd’s pie and veg with vanilla ice cream greediness for pudding and whoops there is Samuel L. Jackson coming to sit at the table where I was eating and it quickly filled up. There were about 12 seats, and he was being friendly and connective, bright-eyed and somewhat bushy-tailed. I told him that I’d seen an interview with Lawrence Fishburne on TV the previous night when Larry had looked directly into the camera at one point and said “If George Lucas wants to cast me in Star Wars he can just pick up the phone“. The table was by now reasonably full of people collecting ‘I had lunch with Sam Jackson’ anecdotes. “Well,” said Sam, “You got to put it out there.”
It’s true of course. You do have to put it out there. I’m not sure that I ever have, or that I have ever used enough charm when doing so. Charm to me always felt like lying, ass-licking, play-acting. I’m not good at greasing the wheels. More clues.
And there was Hugh Quarshie / Captain Panaka whom I had worked with the previous month on A Respectable Trade, now a friend. Later I met Ahmed Best playing Jar-Jar Binks, a cartoon-face creature and Liam Neeson (Qi Jon) and Ewan MacGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), playing themselves more or less as Jedi Knights. Natalie Portman was a young but very bright-eyed and gracious Queen Amidala – and I was her pilot. We stood in the ferns under the greenwood trees in the local woods with all the crew and make-up and wardrobe, sound and camera crew, props and special effects wizards. Back at Leavesden we stood on a plastic and wooden spaceship set hammered together by British carpenters and spray-painted with metallic greys and silver blues in front of a giant blue screen which would become Space. We had to look at it and see it. How many ears has Captain Kirk, I thought to myself. Answer : Three : a left ear, a right ear and SPACE – the final frontier. My favourite TV show ever. The glorious racially mixed future. The Federation. And here were Liam and Ewan moaning about the stupid lines they had to say.
We’re losing droids fast!
Unless we repair the shield generator we’re sitting ducks!
Had they never heard of dilithium crystals? I relished all my sci-fi dialogue. Just be deadly serious and mean it guys. I taught Jake Lloyd how to fly a spaceship. He would grow up to be Darth Vader. One more, faster more intense.
The following week the pilots took turns to sit in a full-size mounted N-1 royal Naboo starfighter which tilted up down, left and right and they filmed us against bluescreen flying through space, swerving and talking about deflector shields and stuff. I climbed up a ladder to get into the cockpit, and there was R2D2 in the jump seat. The shoot, including the dialogue “Fighters straight ahead” & “Roger Bravo Leader” etcetera took about four hours, someone brought me a cup of tea at one point, then half an hour after that I had to take a piss. Reminds me of shooting a vast exterior scene somewhere, in something, there were loads of us and it was a hot day. “Stop giving the bloody actors water!” said the 1st AD within earshot of me, “they’re taking the epic piss and holding up the shoot “
I climbed down from the starfighter – and said to George as I removed my goggles and helmet “Well, that was great fun, thank you” and it was. He smiled at me and said “Wait til you see how fast it goes!” Celia still calls me Bravo Leader to this day.
Ahmed Best had a birthday and booked a restaurant in Covent Garden for the party on Saturday night. Loads of people came, including George Lucas. I met a group – two couples – who ran Stomp the percussion ensemble where Ahmed had worked in a previous life – Luke Cresswell & Steve McNicholas and their wives Jo Cresswell and Loretta Sacco. We’d moved to Brighton the previous year – and these folk actually lived in Brighton. Remember this is 1997 before the great DFL invasion (Down From London). At that point I was driving a Jaguar – a blue Sovereign – and I gave them all a ride home down the M23 at 2am. They are still our close friends.
Then on the final few days we were shooting the scenes of triumph, the hooray scenes, the great parade of yea unto us and Ewan McGregor and I ducked behind the palace walls at one point to smoke a doob and have a giggle. Yea unto us, in fact.
It was 1999 when The Phantom Menace premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square. I wasn’t invited. Neither was Hugh Quarshie. We were gobsmacked. The premiere is the completion of the film, the final act in the process, really, truly, what it’s all been for. Without a public screening a film is just a concept. Various minor celebrities got tickets, actors from Brookside or EastEnders. Not us.
So rude. Along with the lack of residuals this really burned me. To the extent that when I took my film New Year’s Day to Sundance two whole years later in February 2001, a journalist asking me about what I’d been doing in the last few years got the full tirade : “George Lucas has no common human decency.” Wow I was still screwing and had clearly lost a great deal of respect for the film industry so was practising self-sabotage.. He may not have written the invitations but it is his universe and there the buck stoppeth. A week later a piece in the New York Times quoted me and named me verbatim and I didn’t get to fly to New Zealand or pilot another spacecraft. I wasn’t surprised. And I didn’t care.
I was more surprised when I got invited to Celebration III, a giant Star Wars convention in Indianapolis in 2002, Jenny and I were both flown out and I had the opportunity to sell my autograph on a photograph supplied by The Empire for a piece of dollar. Four days of this. We met some wonderful people who’d just filmed the next one, and promised we’d visit them in South Island NZ – in particular two Maori actors from the film Once Were Warriors, Rena Owen and Temuara Morrison.
Indianapolis : us with Rena Owen and others I simply cannot remember forgive me – except Jenny is at far right)
I’ve done a few conventions. Personal highlight was meeting Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhuru from Star Trek) who signed a picture for Jen and I. I’ve been grumpy and I’ve been charming, but they’re not hugely enjoyable for me. The people who come by and want a picture or an autograph are inevitably warm, chatty, genuine fans, scared that I might bite their head off, or trying to ask something no one else has thought of, or opening with “you must be really tired of hearing this…” but in general just happy to get five minutes with an actual actor. It’s just love at the end of the day. They’re giving me love. So why don’t I want it ?
So sick and tired of all these pictures of me – Elliott Smith
Just when I think I’m King – I just begin – Kate Bush
When you’re at the top is when the devil shows his face – Denzel Washington to Will Smith
Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight? – Lonnie Donegan
I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book called The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk about hidden trauma, how it manifests, and how we can heal. It resonated with me, every page. It was about me, my mum, my brothers, my wife, everyone I’ve ever met, everyone. Trauma is war or rape or car accidents or murders. It also includes witnessing domestic violence, having “mental illness” in your family, being fostered out to other homes. Tick, tick tick. I write “mental illness” in quotes because some people are starting to try and redefine it as “feelings”. Feelings that we all have especially after something bad happens. Or during something bad happening over time, weeks, months, years. And the body remembers even when the mind freezes and blanks it out.
I’ve been doing therapy for a few months now trying to understand why I had a seizure in September 2021. A non-epileptic psychogenic seizure. The body wants to let go of stress, and it does this in a variety of ways. Exercise. Gym work and running, cycling. Drugs both prescribed and illegal. Alcohol. Violence. Shouting at people. Crying. Cutting yourself. Thoughts and feelings of low self-esteem that can’t be waved away. Seizures. Migraines. Obesity. Anorexia.
I’m also reading about the huge variety of ways that have been tried to relieve these feelings, from talk therapy to chemistry, to ECG – (induced seizures (!) via Electro-Convulsive Therapy which my mum had in 1965!!) to EMDR – eye movement desensitization and reprocessing – and yoga, to singing and dancing and yes acting.
And thus it is finally confirmed that all my professional career I have been escaping from my trauma by becoming other people. The further away from myself the better. Wigs, tattoos, funny beards, voices, prosthetics, what have you got? And at the same time, receiving love in exchange. Custom-made for non-interference trauma. Not dealing with the trauma, just the symptoms of it, which is also to say I don’t actually love myself, I need others to supply that element.
Going back to Help! by The Beatles when my Mum first entered a psychiatric institution, I talked about building a wall around my heart made from the mud of Selmeston village. It was a child’s version of emotional survival – don’t show pain and hurt, survive, be strong and be successful. I added battlements and other structures to this wall as I grew older and didn’t it work well? But where is the love Roberta Flack? I forgot to add the love inside. So my prime focus was making sure I had love – safety – a home where I felt safe – and a home where I felt loved.
The various foster homes I lived in during my childhood did all these things, and especially the mothers in those dwellings, but they were all, eventually, dysfunctional. The fathers were absent or left. And I went from hating marriage as a concept – “I’ve been to four of my parent’s weddings…” I would boast as a shock stat – to only wanting one marriage because it was divorce I hated, not marriage.
So my romantic associations have always instinctively, correctly, been prime target agenda. I couldn’t actually function without love. Then the love of friends and from work keeps the charade going and I don’t have to love myself much. Except that I actually started unravelling all this over fifteen years ago. I’m not stupid, I knew that I needed to unwrap the cocoon, open the gates, become gently more vulnerable and let the feelings out, name them, notice when they come, let them become a manageable part of my personality rather than a trapdoor ever ready to open. And yet even with this gentle unwinding of the armoured defence unit, I still had the seizure.
My therapist indentifies a great well of sadness inside me. Sounds about right. She wonders why I don’t express it more. I think she means crying. I have cried a lot since last September, in the theatre (Caroline or Change) listening to Nanci Griffith on the day she died (Love At The Five & Dime), or just connecting with the sadness as I cook something for myself while Jenny is at work on Broadway. But somehow this isn’t enough to stop the feeling of sadness that clouds the vast majority of my mornings. Is it unemployment, old age, buried family trauma, years of holding it down or just waiting for the sun? Probably all of it.
Star Wars is part of the sadness yes. But looking back I can see that it was just another disappointment that didn’t kill me. And c’mon, it is a good credit and I am a part of that huge film franchise – I may not have been cast in the Harry Potter film series, or Star Trek, but I’m in this one (and Alien) and look, I got a little figure which looks remarkably like me.
And I know that George wasn’t really to blame for the Premiere fiasco, of course he wasn’t. And he cast me and I am grateful for that, so I forgive him for for all his trespasses, indeed I bless him and move on, again. And now on my tableI have 2000 cards to sign for $12000. The residuals I never got. So neither a triumph nor a disaster then, just another gig, so what is this stress I am under all the time which causes seizures? And who am i ?
A couple of things seem clear to me. My career as an actor has been at least partly about seeking that lost parental affection from outside sources. I need love. Allied to this is the number of times I feel depressed or hopeless and look to my wife for solace and love. It feels as if I haven’t really grown up emotionally since I was seven years old. Now it feels like all these factors are crashing into one another as I resist the very concept of retirement, and refuse to accept that anything must change or fade away. Every day feels like a tightrope walk, but more than usual because now my whole soul is on the line wobbling away, still pleading for love and attention, still writing a book, still feeling incapable of loving myself.
It all comes back to my plea to Tony Armatrading in 2021 after his cancer diagnosis. I said Tony, I want you to love yourself, that is all. He said with tears in his eyes, yes, but it’s so hard.
So hard.
Why is it that I always yearned for success but avoided fame? Chose to disguise myself where possible to avoid attention, while realising that it wasn’t a great move in the game. It’s weird being defined by your work, it being a strong part of my identity, when that work is an actual escape from myself. When I’m doing an audition and using my own voice it always sounds wrong. Always. Another clue…
But imagine. The notion that as my career idles to a gentle stop, nurturing the fantasy that anyone will be vaguely interested in this book, and sitting down to write it. Optimistic. Entitled. Delusional. But what else is there to do?
I find it considerably less painful to look back over these chapters than to watch myself on celluloid. I am comfortable with the person I read about, it feels like me. Not the characters, they’re all diversions, camoflauge, escape. I think with this book I’ve come back round to myself as I really am. Maybe less of the reaching out, more of the reaching in. Learning to be. And I reckon that on the whole, that he’s all right.
I’m all right.
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