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A note from Jennifer: For once being an idiot has brought me luck. After complaining publicly that I couldn't find anything in print about David Warner, a nice handful of online fans came to my aid with collections that date back to the beginning of his career. We're a real trainspotters club now! Here's my measly contribution, first posted late May of '98...
Funny how one can still labor under the dual delusion that a) Web pages are lame because folks are too lazy to do research and b) finding backdated newspaper articles should be easy in the age of the Internet. Not so in researching British character actor and heavy-for-hire David Warner, the subject of a good handful of announced but incomplete fan sites.
Once determined to build a decent set of fan pages, I was blown off by The Times of London's own Web engine (since they had recently dismantled it). Unfortunately, there are three and maybe four D. Warners covered between 1966 and 1996 in the print index for that paper. I did manage to come up with a list of microfilms at the library. While slogging through them, however, I came to the disheartening conclusion that the only difference between British and American coverage of this actor is that at least there are pictures of Warner in the London film and stage reviews, instead of just passing references to him.
One little gem finally appeared on page 9 of the March 4, 1972 edition of The Times: a quarter-page interview by Ronald Hayman called "David Warner - a driving lack of ambition." It's nicely illustrated with a photo of the actor in mod specs and French cuffs, looking diffident.
Warner admits openly that while he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts he didn't appreciate it, but it sure beat his previous job as bookstore clerk in Leamington Spa. He also dismisses criticism of his casual approach to iambic pentameter and disdain for the ritualistic pomp & circumstance of Shakespearean histories with a rhetorical, "...how the hell do I know what princely is?"
Not that he was all "angry young man" bluster, either. The article leads with the revelation that Warner had spent the first few years of his theatrical career afraid to get out of bed every morning. Apparently he had squeaked by an audition to get a small role in a Royal Shakespeare Company production called Afore Night Come, but had no clue he would ever play a lead until Peter Hall shoehorned him into The Wars of the Roses as Henry VI - without any prior warning! A lack of self-confidence dogged him until setting up David Hare's The Great Exhibition, which Hayman's interview was publicizing.
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Warner is mentioned in passing in at least three books: one badly-reviewed bio of Joseph Losey subtitled A Revenge on Life, Jeremy Lloyd's autobiography, and Peter Hall's Diaries. You can see pics of him in Looking At Shakespeare by Dennis Kennedy and in Shakespeare in Performance, edited by Parsons & Mason. There are more in-depth profiles in an out-of-print title called Sam Peckinpah, Master of Violence (which you can buy used if you've got US$315.00 on hand), in one chapter of Hamlet by Anthony Dawson, and an interview for Mary Z. Maher's Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies. Reviews of his Hamlet and Henry are reprinted in Post-war British Theatre Criticism from Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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He told The New York Times in 1966 that he was the only actor in Tom Jones who performed without makeup.
He told The NY Sunday News in 1966, after a photo op in the new Vidal Sassoon salon, "What could anyone find so interesting about a man getting his hair cut?"
He told The NY Post in 1969 about his background, "I do not have roots. I'm trying to find them."
He told The New York Times in 1971 that after hearing all the gossip about an accident he suffered the year before, he decided to keep the real story a secret.
He told The London Times in 1972, "So coming to do Hamlet and Henry VI, I thought I'm on the stage, so my first objective is to make people who are bored with Shakespeare try and understand."
He told Films Illustrated in 1976 that "there are so many people I like, admire and respect who, thank god, want to ask me to work with them and can't, because of financial reasons."
He told The London Standard in 1981, "I am British. I'm not a tax exile like some of the boys."
He told The Aquarian in 1982 that Sam Pekinpah "has a great respect for actors."
He told Starlog in 1982 that portraying some of his uglier characters gave him nightmares.
He told The Daily News in 1982 that once he left his hometown he hadn't been back often since.
He told Starlog in 1989 he thinks the Pythons are "geniuses."
He told The Riverside, California Press-Enterprise in 1998, upon hearing that the producer of Three said he "brings a gravity and a class and a history" to the show, "I think that means I'm just older than the others."
He told The New York Times in 2001 that he couldn't believe it when Peter Hall cast him as Hamlet: "I had to get him to write down, 'You will play Hamlet in Hamlet.'"
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The youngest Hamlet of his day, Warner admitted to Barry Carman in 1966 that one of his biggest hassles was with the phrase "He's fat and scant of breath."
Though he would soon swear off stage performing, in 1972 the actor was involved with a "lunchtime theater" experiment and spoke about it on The World This Weekend.
While promoting his 1985 series Hold the Back Page!, Warner chose cricket at his favorite sport.
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| Rude Things He's Been Called |
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* "an angelically gawky Danish stork" - Ronald Bryden, New Statesman 8/27/65
* a sort of "naked grasshopper" (how that sounds in French I cannot guess), by a contemporary Canadian reviewer of Ragtime Summer
* "too much the Morganish simian to be anything but cloddish" - Judith Crist, Saturday Review 3/5/77
* "pencil-thin apparition" - Howard Thompson, New York Times 4/17/66
* "somebody who doesn't look as though he could possibly get any" - Tony Richardson, face to face no less!
* "weird-looking, beanpolish" - New York Times Guide To Movies On TV
* "a scruffy undergraduate" - Jackie Mcglone, Glasgow Herald 11/7/95, p. 14
* "raw-boned, harassed-looking" - Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Stars
* "coltish... and strident" - Cult Movie Stars
* "Gangling Pix Kook" - Kathleen Carroll, NY Sunday News 5/1/66, p. S32
* "cadaverous" - Himself, online, so don't blame us!
* "The ultimate garni tool" - This site, until it started getting visitors too young to remember that Ronco infomercial...
Runner-up insults:
"Couldn't the Ripper be from Boston?" - unnamed Warner exec quoted by Nicholas Meyer in Films and Filming, 1979
"[Warner] generates the dumb, wounded strength of wild animals which makes people sponsor protection societies." - author of Karel Reisz, 1980
-- compiled by Jennifer Kramer from material collected in part by Louise Hansen, Karen Lee, Neil McDonald, and Margaret Wilkie
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