: It's hard to get. : So I did the next best thing – I read the play. In it, you and Laurence Olivier are playing a couple, and your relationship intersects with another couple, Alan Bates and Helen Mirren.
The work seemed to me to be about two domineering personalities – the Olivier and Bates characters – lording their power over two more delicate souls, you and Mirren. : Well, it is about control and menace and the enigmatic things that go on in that atmosphere: very much Pinter at his best. Olivier was magnificent.
He was back from a serious illness for the first time, and he was determined. It was difficult for him to learn lines but he did get there eventually. He has to make a long speech near the end, the "slum slug" speech in which he berates me, and he's the only actor I've ever worked with who made the hair on my neck stand straight up.
We all had such a great deal of reverence for him; he was more than a legend to us. : Was he intimidating to act opposite? : He was more intimidated by me, and by Alan and Helen – the young ones coming up.
He wasn't too thrilled about that. I thought if he could smell intimidation, he'd go for the jugular. But to me, he was adorable.
I know he could be a very difficult man, a person of great contradictions. When he was on though, no other actor could hold a candle to Olivier. You were either a disciple of John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier, and I was Gielgud's, because I knew John and had worked with him before.
He was such a refined gentleman and a hoot! He could always put his foot in it and find his way out somehow. What I admire about Gielgud is that he changed his style of acting over the course of his career.
Stage actors in England between the wars were snooty about film. They thought you don't have real actors in the cinema and that sort of crap. And John's early film appearances were too theatrical, and he learned from this.
By the time he made Charge of the Light Brigade in the late 60s – a sensational performance – he'd got it. He knew how to act on film then. : Olivier has been quoted as saying, of , "I don’t think I've ever been so happy in any job before.
" When you consider the range of his work, that's quite a statement. Why do you think that playing Harry Kane was so powerful for Olivier? : It's a great role for him.
Bill, the character I played, is an opportunist who'll do anything to get anywhere. The whole point of Harry is that he's living the life of a London toff, one of those Englishmen who you're never quite sure what they are. On our first read-through of the script, Olivier played it as if he was swinging a handbag in high heels.
Pinter was fuming, and our very young, very good director, Michael Apted, didn't know how to approach toning down "Sir." Olivier would start with wide brush strokes, then chip away, whereas we, the moderns, worked exactly the inverse. Helen, Alan, and I started very simple and added on and on as we found the performance.
I don't know why he felt the way he did about the part; I'd never heard that quote until now. : Whom do you consider to be the brilliant performers of today? : I’m dying to see Helen in : It's hard to get.
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