It's the operator's job, not mine

And then tonight I've crashed, which means I'm going to be angry with myself for losing the mood of this weekend when I didn't even sleep in the car on the way to West Springfield and we parked in some auto shop's driveway and I saw fancy chickens and singing vegetables and had variously regional lunch at permanent and to-scale replicas of six state houses and rode my first coaster with rushthatspeaks and derspatchel (I mean my first coaster with either of them, not my first coaster absolute; I believe that honor belongs to Space Mountain at Disney World in 1989, when I argued and argued with my parents that I was tall enough for the ride and then spent the entire time convinced it was about to get us killed) and caught a string of green Mardi Gras beads from a float we weren't expecting in the middle of an otherwise rather True Stories-esque parade. I was in a rocky mood when I left the house this evening, and it didn't help that I was going to a mall—I hate clothes shopping—but I thought I had returned with a successfully purchased shirt until about five minutes after I got home, at which point it became clear that while the sales clerk wasn't lying when she said the shirt fit me, it is completely useless to me for the purposes I bought it for. I hate returning things. It never fails to make me feel as though I've made a mistake and now I have to go hat in hand to the people whose fault it isn't, asking them to fix it for me. Well, it's a perfectly good shirt. Well, then you shouldn't have bought it, should you? Well, why is that our problem? It was not a cheap shirt. I can't afford to buy clothes I don't wear. Tomorrow means back to the mall. But then I had a totally reasonable and even cheering conversation: I should have gone to bed humming and instead it's late at night and raw as the season that used to love me and blammo. Ahoy, miniature Ludwig. I thought I got Tiny Richardson to take a motorbike to you months ago. And it's a week from my birthday.

I think I am going to watch things on YouTube with Denholm Elliott in until I'm too tired to stare at a screen, but I have no idea how long that is going to take. I won't be able to find this even if I wanted to watch it, but it's an attractive photograph of him. I've never been prone to crushes on actors (I don't know them, only their roles) and he would have been a terrible idea in any case, but he's always interested me for the way he was every now and then very good-looking and you would never know it from most of his characters. It wasn't that he specialized in heavies—a straight-up bastard like Dr. Swaby in A Private Function (1984) was rarer than the disastrous martinet of an army captain he played in Too Late the Hero (1969), too fastidious and indecisive to inspire a suicide mission or safeguard his men home alive, or the father in the original television Brimstone and Treacle (1976) who hasn't really thought the implications of his conservative nostalgia through. He died twenty years ago, but he's one of those people whose deaths I can never quite believe in: I turn on the television, I rent a movie, and there he is in another role, quietly filling in the corners in his scene-stealing way. "I can make two lines seem like Hamlet," he said once in an interview; he could suggest creases in a character's interior life the writer never even thought to put in. Creases, bedhead, rumpled collars, hangovers: so many of his characters are a little seedy, a little slipshod, not quite up to facing the world or themselves without at least a stiff drink; he ran a marvelous line in helpless smiles and apologetic brows, wincing anxiously from the knowledge that they'll never even try to change. It took me years to notice he was decently tall, because he could hang back to be caught out and shown up like nobody's business. But he could also play tricks with vulnerability: some of those ingratiatingly flustered men are less nice than they appear, angrier, more cunning, with more on their consciences than incompetence. I haven't yet seen him in Nothing But the Best (1964), the role that confirmed him as a character actor rather than a juvenile lead. Having seen him startlingly young and tragic in movies like The Sound Barrier (1952) and The Cruel Sea (1953), I'm very curious.

He could play positive characters: they leaned toward holy fools like generous, disorganized Mr. Emerson of A Room with a View (1985) or the inimitable Marcus Brody, politely calling into the bustle of a Turkish market, "I say, does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?" I love him as John Jarndyce in the 1985 Bleak House because he brings to a character whose actions are almost impossibly saintly the welcome and wonderful sense of someone whose natural tendency in the face of challenge is to collapse or retreat (the Growlery, hiding behind furniture whenever a particularly strident charity-monger rings the doorbell with her brood), but it's not stronger than his desire to protect those without his defenses of law and class—he hates the Jarndyce name, but it does give him something to conjure with—so he makes himself face the lawsuit, the bafflement of child-rearing, even the guilt of an old friendship when it becomes parasitic, a handwringer by nature pulling himself together to advocate for others (he's no good doing it for himself), chemistry and Chancery be damned. He may be even better as bitter, determined Krogstad in A Doll's House (1973) because it's a role that exploits his gift for characters whose tarnish is showing through: the blackmail is real, but so is his willingness to drop it when asked by the woman he still loves, not because he's sentimental or she's seductive, but because she offers him an alternative, honestly, and no one has trusted him in years. He's troubled and brave and terribly out of his depth trying to interpret the actions of a spectre in the BBC's The Signalman (1976). I have a lot of sympathy for Henry Beddows in To the Devil a Daughter (1976), but I don't think I was supposed to.

I know much less about his stage work, as I know very little about his life beyond the big items: birth in London in 1922, prisoner of war in Stalag Luft VIII-B, married briefly and unsuccessfully to an erstwhile co-star, married non-monogamously and for the rest of his life to a woman who wrote a memoir of him afterward; died in 1992 of AIDS-related TB. His daughter was a casualty of The Daily Mail. He originated multiple roles for Christopher Fry: Private Able in A Sleep of Prisoners (1951), the twins Hugo and Frédéric in Ring Round the Moon (1950), Edgar in Venus Observed (1950). They're on my itinerary if I ever get that time machine. Until then, I seem to have successfully distracted myself—or at least slightly burnt myself out—with the realization that this post should have been a much longer essay about an actor who dropped suddenly into my life in the fall of 2008 and doesn't look like he'll go away any time soon, given how often he turns up where I wasn't looking for him. (Ralph Richardson does that, too.)

Maybe I'll stare at YouTube in the morning.