A Memoir by George CoulourisI went back to New Yor - George Coulouris (Thatcher in . . . KANE

[Glenn Anders]

Working on another project, I stumbled across a Website maintained by the son of George Coulouris, now a computer scientist at Cambridge. It includes a lot of interesting stills and biographical material.

One gets the impression that neither the senior Coulouris nor his son had much respect or realization of the importance of Welles or CITIZEN KANE. Caught up in English Country Life, almost as an afterthought, George, Jr. adds that he and his wife recently discovered that Dad had received the Best Actor (character actor, surely) from the American National Board of Review in 1941!

Coulouris, the son of Greek "shoddy merchants" in Manchester, seems to have had that longing to "return to the Old Country" so common among Britons of his generation. And so, from 1949 on, he lived and worked in Great Britain.

I had rather thought that he was a victim of the McCarthy "Red Scare," and that political problems hastened his return to the Old Country, but from the memoir he contributed to the BBC late in life, he appears to have been always rather conservative, even reactionary.

-------------------

Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the above memoir concerning George Coulouris's experience with Orson Welles:

". . . I went back to New York to be in plays. I was in a flop with Orson Welles. It was called "Ten Million Ghosts", it was about the munitions industry and one of the causes of the flop was that we had a whole munition factory going full blast in the first scene and consequently nobody could hear a word the actors said. There was a huge cannon about twenty feet long and machinery of all kinds. I dressed in the same dressing room as Orson and he's made a great success by doing a coloured version of "Macbeth" on the Federal Theatre. I'd heard about this boy genius and it rather annoyed me, all the publicity, so I spent a lot of time in the dressing room saying to him, why did you do "Macbeth" with coloured actors? Just to be different, wasn't it, Orson? It was just to be different, wasn't it? So Orson was obviously quite annoyed. This play was a complete failure, we went there on the second night and the theatre was locked up. The play had finished but nobody had told the actors.

"Then after that Orson went back to the Federal Theatre which was a theatre organised by the Roosevelt government because there was such depression and the actors were starving. They had to rehearse these plays and they got the same money when they rehearsed and when they played, consequently it was possible to rehearse interminably - I think they got 57 dollars a week whether they were rehearsing or playing. So I saw a production of his, of Marlowe's "Faustus" - he called it "Forstus", and I thought it was wonderful. So I kept ringing him until I got him on and said, Orson, I think this is absolutely marvellous what you've done with this play. And I think the fact that I, who'd been teasing him so much in the dressing room, thought it was good, intrigued him quite a lot. So when he started his Mercury Theatre he sent for me and he said, I'm doing three plays, "Julius Caesar" in modern clothes, "Heartbreak House" and "Shoemaker's Holiday" - what parts do you want to play? Well, I thought that was marvellous, just to offer me a choice of parts. He said, if you want to play Anthony I'll play Brutus; if you want to play Brutus I'll play Anthony. So I said “I'll play Anthony”, naturally, it's the showiest part. So we started the rehearsals and we had very little money. Orson was paying us very little, the whole thing was a desperate venture. We rehearsed in all kinds of places - in an abandoned brewery in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a huge place completely in ruins, and as we were rehearsing big flakes of ceiling would fall on our heads. And Orson always had a lot of sort of office boys and things around that he insulted consistently. He had one man - I think his name was Allen - he was an absolute stooge and ran around like a maniac and Orson insisted on calling him Vaktangoff, because Vaktangoff was a name from the Russian theatre that Orson liked the sound of, so it was always Vaktangoff, Vaktangoff.

"We opened in "Julius Caesar" and it was a tremendous success - it sort of went to pieces three days before the opening, I thought it was going to be terrible. I was very upset because we were going to have a baby, I had no money and I thought this is going to be a failure. The previous night Tallulah Bankhead had opened in "Anthony and Cleopatra" and had spent about $100,000, whereas we spent $10,000, if that. And the critics had been very scathing about her - they said she - Miss Bankhead got into a barge and went along the Nile and promptly sank. And. a man named Dwight Fiske who was singing rather risqué songs at the Savoy Plaza was seen to come out of Bankhead's show in the first interval screaming. "I want my telleger back". The critics said that these people hadn't got as much money as Bankhead, but they've got brains which is more important. So the thing settled down for a run.

"It was in modern clothes so Orson thought that as it was in modern clothes he could take a few liberties. So he always went to the restaurant on the corner, and timed his dinner so that he would arrive in the middle of the orchard scene just before his entrance where the actors were petrified waiting for him, wondering if he would come at all - with a big cigar in his mouth, dressed in a big blue suit, saunter through the auditorium and jump on to the stage from the side steps, and the scene would go on. Well, one night - he was always playing jokes so one night I went to do this speech over Caesar's dead body "O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth" - and I saw all over the stage patches of red. So I thought oh, this is another of Orson's jokes, it's tomato ketchup or something, he's fooling around again. I went through the speech over Caesar and then later on I was doing the big speech, "Friends, Romans, countrymen" and I was on a podium in the fore part of the stage with the whole back stage bare behind me, with the radiator pipes showing and everything, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Caesar being assisted along the back wall by two of the extras to the stage door. And I found out afterwards that he'd been stabbed by Orson. We had rubber daggers and Orson for some reason decided he would use a real dagger one night, so he stabbed Caesar by accident of course and severed an artery, and Caesar was in hospital for a month. Another time while I was doing the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech I suddenly saw a rain shower start, not only on me but on the audience too. The boy Lucius in the play had decided to find out if the sprinkler system really worked - so he lit a match under the wax of the sprinklers in his dressing room, and it melted the wax and of course set off the whole sprinkler system of all the theatre. I suppose this was under the Brecht business of alienation of the audience.

"After that I was in "Heartbreak House" with Orson and played Mangen, and he played Shotover. There was one line I had to say - when he gets the girl - "and him an old mummy" which for some reason got a terrific laugh. So I said to Orson, I think Shaw's lines are stupid, you could put other lines in and they'd be just as good. "And him an old mummy", what's funny about that? So one day I said, "and him an old piece of cheese" and of course there was a dead silence, and Orson has never forgotten this, he always talks of the time I tried to rewrite Shaw.

"After that I left the Mercury and did other plays on Broadway - I thought it was such a wonderful chance to start a permanent theatre in New York, because we had this Princes Theatre where all the Wodehouse reviews were before - I think it's been demolished now. And it was a very low rent and I think we could have stayed there for a long time, but Orson got sort of I don't know, he felt that it was too small for him or something, he wanted to go on to bigger and better things. It's really folded up after the next season, after "Danton's Death" which wasn't a success. Then Orson asked me to go back to do "Citizen Kane" . His career had been in the balance because his radio show had not been sponsored commercially, and then he did this Martian broadcast. Of course that was absolutely accidental, and I mean it wasn't a planned thing. He was doing the show of the Wells' story of the landing of the Martians and they kept announcing that it was fiction and not a news broadcast. but of course for some reason there was a mass panic, somebody said this was the first time an actor bad commercial sponsorship of his radio programme - and they were absolutely dying to get him because they knew he was world famous. He decided he would go to Hollywood - and he had more freedom than I think any other director has ever had. He was allowed to pick his own actors, he could have taken anybody and asked for them to be taken and paid what they wanted. So he asked a lot of his Mercury people and he also got new people like Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane who weren't actually in the Mercury plays, about three of four of us were the Mercury people - Joseph Cotton was one of them, I was one, Erskine Sandford, people like that.

"So he was going to do a Conrad story, "The Heart of Darkness" - that's the thing we went out for, and we were given five weeks guarantee by RKO to go out there, and we went out. And nothing happened - we just got to Hollywood and we kept going to the studio week by week and getting this cheque. Then Orson called a meeting and he said, we're having a great deal of trouble with the script, can't get a script out of "Heart of Darkness", but we're going to do "Smiler with a Knife" and that may take about six, eight or ten months to get a proper script. You are all going to remain on the payroll until we get the script, and I want you all to regard me as your father. You're here with me, and when anything goes wrong, any time of the day or night you must ring me. So I sent for my wife and two children, took a furnished house at rather a high rent and settled down. In the middle of the sixth week RKO called us in and said, you're off the payroll, it's all finished. We tried to get on to the father, Orson, the father figure, but nobody could find him, he had completely disappeared. No one knew where he was. Weeks went by and we would get together in the evenings, the Mercury actors, and talk about the disappearance of the great man.

"You see, we weren't in line for other jobs because we all had the same agent and Orson had told this agent that he must not offer his Mercury actors to anybody else because he wanted to keep them as a body to do his first film. Somebody would say, well, I think he picked up his laundry last week at such and such a place, perhaps if we went there we could find out where he was. Well, finally I ran him to earth, the father figure, in the canteen at RKO. So I went over to him and said, Orson, I'm in a very bad position because I've taken a house and I've got a wife and two kids, and I'm not being offered for MY jobs. Do you mind if I look for other jobs while you're getting a script? He said, no, no, no, you can't do that. I must have new faces for my film. So I said if I play small parts will my face be damaged enough to stop me being in your film? He said, well, I don't know, it's a problem, but I don't know what we can do about it. So I took a chance and appeared in some other films and it didn't seem to damage my face because he had me after all.

"But it was about ten months afterwards that he called me one night and said I want to see you, and I went up to his mountain top house and we - he said come out and look at the lights - this was in the war. He said this is one of the few cities in the world, there are only about two left, where you can see lights this like, this blaze of light down below, Los Angeles. And then he told me the story of "Citizen Kane" and told me I was going to play this lawyer in it, Thatcher, who was the guardian of the boy who goes from about 25 to 80 in the film. And when it got to the 80 part we had a very strange make-up man - Orson had discovered him - Wally Siderman. And I had to go to the make up about five in the morning and have my make- up done, and he started by - I got into the chair and then I would have some kind of mask made of clay over my face with straws through the nostrils and all kinds of - then the rubber would be put on and then he put a silk stocking over my head and on the top of the silk stocking a bald rubber pate. It took about four hours. Then we'd start. So one day when we'd been shooting we broke for dinner. So I went home for dinner dressed as this old man. My wife was in the kitchen, it wasn't very well lit - I opened the door, and I didn't say anything, I just shambled in and went (grunt, grunt) and my wife nearly fainted. I suppose that's one of the few occasions on which an actor has had his wife not recognise him.

"There was one rather strange scene at the beginning where I find the boy in the snow and we couldn't get anything to look like snow, so we were there for days experimenting with various forms of snow being blown in our faces. Finally we decided that cornflakes were the thing, so we spent about a day having cornflakes whisked over us by these huge wind machines. Of course Orson is a great perfectionist, and some of the time when he is upset, upset at himself, he is not satisfied with himself in a scene, he sometimes takes it out on the other actors. I mean it is not something you resent because you regard it as part of his character and you just have to take it. I remember one scene we had, it went to fifty takes. And he said to me after one of them, what's the matter with you, you you're giving a terrible performance, like vaudeville, why don't you do it properly? So I said, yes, yes, Orson, all right, yes, yes. And of course he was a bit worried about something he was doing.

"After that had finished I was in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and several others. So I found I had about $26,000 in the bank and I'd played only small parts. I thought it was time to take a chance on something interesting. I had met an old codger in a film playing a small part and he had been talking to me - he was a German intellectual and he had been talking to me about how wonderful it would be to do "Richard III" in the style of Hitler. So I decided I'd do "Richard III", I would back it myself. Oh, I tried to get backing, but it's very difficult to get backing; it's very hard to say you will probably make something out of this when you know you probably won't. So I decided in desperation to use my own money. I was playing the lead of course, Richard III, and then I fired this old man because his ideas of doing it were so expensive, because of the changes of scenery, the stage hands salaries would have been too great and we would have lost a lot of money. So I ended up being the manager playing the lead and directing - the first two weeks of rehearsal went by, I thought this is very good, we seem to be doing this play quite cheaply. And then people kept coming to me and saying, I want another $2,000, another $2,000, in the last two weeks. So I unfortunately in doing the play had so much to do that I devoted no time at all to my own performance, and finally arrived on the first night realising that I didn't know how to play the part, that I was faced with a big theatre, a fashionable audience - my wife in the front row. So I gabbled through it as fast as I could, the curtain hour came down, and I sort of came to my senses an afterwards and I said to my wife, as we were crossing the stage, this is a flop, isn't it? She said, yes, I'm afraid it is. A friend of mine, John Lodge, who afterwards became ambassador to Spain with Eisenhower's government, came to me in the dressing room and looked very commiserating and said well, never mind, you're still young enough to go back to Hollywood and make some more money."

-----------------

And so, for the next seven years, George Coulouris did.

For the Webpage, and the complete transcript of Coulouris's BBC memoir, go to the following URL:

http://www.coulouris.net/gc_archive/index.html

Glenn

[Roger Ryan]

Glenn - Thanks for posting that. I believe Coulouris was the only major Mercury actor who did not work again with Welles after "Kane". Towards the end of his career he did a couple of nice character turns in films like "Papillon" and "Murder On The Orient Express".

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, Roger, you are correct. Coulouris, perhaps because he was married, had children, and was a British subject of Greek parentage, shied away from Welles' wildlly unsafe projects.

Coulouris appears to have thought Welles was a bit nuts, full of crazy ideas, but then, after CITIZEN KANE, he squandered his own good fortune on Broadway, trying to present Richard III as Adolph Hitler. Ian McKellan made the idea work, forty years later, but Coulouis could not.

He spent World War II, back in Hollywood, playing Nazis. He seems to have had less to do in America, following the War.

Eventually, he looked nostalgically back on his days on the British stage. He even appreciated the time he worked with his father, scavenging trash. He tells a story about the family firm receiving a consignment of cigarette papers soaked with sea water. He hit on the idea of spreading them out, one by one, on large furnace boilers to dry them out. He notes, however, that it was unlikely that many of them were ever resold.

Like his son, he settled into English country life, and while doing the odd character part, he brought up two successful children.

One could do worse.

Glenn

[tonyw]

I have found memories of him playing the "mad scientist" Harcourt Brown in the 1961 Saturday afternoon British T.V. series PATHFINDERS TO VENUS.

Alas, I only saw him in the trailer for WOMANEATER (1958) at the time where he is about to feed pretty English miss Vera Day to a flesh eating tree. I believe the film is now available in DVD and VHS formats for completists who wish to follow his post Welles career!

[Harvey Chartrand]

George Coulouris has a nice cameo in the excellent TOWER OF EVIL (1972). An article on the film appears here:

http://www.horror-wood.com/tower_of_slash.htm

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Tony and Harvey, for those contributions.

Hmmm (as they say), WOMANEATER and TOWER OF EVIL do sound a bit downhill from CITIZEN KANE, but the ancient premises of the latter appear good, and in addition to Coulouris, the inclusion of Dennis Price and Jill Haworth is in its favor.

I suppose that the social significance of TOWER OF EVIL could be argued: Sexual Intercourse = Unwanted Pregnancy, AIDS, Clymidia, etc; Falatio=Salvation. The film's lesson, I understand, has been picked up by a fair percentage of teenage girls who want to satisfy their boyfriends without destroying themselves!

Anyway, both these films look as if they should be explored by either Todd Baesen or Larry French. What an argument they might have over their respective merits! I look forward to a report from both of them.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

George Coulouris had a starring role in The Woman Eater (1958), reviewed at http://www.horror-wood.com/woman_eater.htm
Betcha he was glad to be back in England!

[Glenn Anders]

By Gad, Harvey, you're on to something, man!

Why would Coulouris have been so foolish to stay with Welles, with whom he might have been relegated to character parts in MACBETH, THE STRANGER, MR. ARKADIN, or TOUCH OF EVIL, when he could be back back in England, starring in WOMAN EATER? From Chrystal Guillory's exhaustive but wonderfully entertaining review, WOMAN EATER no doubt is a magnificent conflation of a vegetarian KING KONG, FREAKS, STRAW DOGS, and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

Despite indigestion from the spoilers, it is a review which set my Pulsometer racing.

Thank you, Harvey.

Did you say that the plane for Sao Paulo leaves at 9 p.m. tonight? Excellent, sir! But why do you want me to bring a spoon?

Please advise.

Glenn Anders

[Harvey Chartrand]

George Coulouris appeared as a camel driver in Nicholas Ray's KING OF KINGS (1961), which was narrated by Orson Welles (who famously pronounces the "t" in "apostle" throughout the film).
Coulouris had the lead role in THE MAN WITHOUT A BODY, a 1957 horror confection directed by Billy Wilder's less talented brother. It's all about a mad doctor grafting Nostradamus's head onto a dying businessman's body.
Coulouris had supporting roles in THE SKULL (based on Robert Bloch's THE SKULL OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE/1965); BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1971), an excellent Hammer horror based on a novel by Bram Stoker; the sci-fi classic NO BLADE OF GRASS (1970); the doomsday comedy THE FINAL PROGRAMME (1973); and the Italian blasphemy known as THE ANTICHRIST (1974).
Coulouris also guest starred in the CHECKMATE episode of THE PRISONER with Patrick McGoohan in 1967.

[Glenn Anders]

A camel driver in a film narrated by Welles does seem better than nothing, Harvey. Coulouris seems to have kept busy in England.

Perhaps, Welles was honoring Coulouris's Greek heritage by giving a "hard" pronunciation to "apostle." [More likely, he was thinking that in King James time, the "t" would have been pronounced; the "schwa" process having developed later.]

Good work, Harvey.

Glenn