(Editor’s note: Brice Stratford kindly transcribed Keith Baxter’s introductory talk and Q&A session at the British Film Institute on August 3, 2015).
By BRICE STRATFORD
For the Orson Welles centenary in 2015, the British Film Institute arranged a season of his work centred around their re-release of Touch of Evil (The Great Disruptor Season). As a part of this, on August 3rd, Keith Baxter introduced a screening of Chimes at Midnight, then followed the film with a brief question and answer session. Much of the content has been covered before (and in particular at a similar talk he gave in 2007 at the American Film Institute), but there are some variations, and a few new details and titbits (in particular a piece of verse advice from Welles which directly reflects the practice of the then infant Royal Shakespeare Company); most significantly, however, it is a beautiful reminiscence of a romantic time from an engaging, eloquent man.
KEITH BAXTER: A great many people have written about Orson Welles and the making of Chimes at Midnight, but none of them ever met him or knew him, so what you’re getting is an interpretation of the truth. What I want to give you (very briefly) is the man himself; I want to just deal with how the whole thing began, and how we arrived at Sir John Gielgud saying “How now my Lord of Worcester”, which was the first shot of the film. For me it all started when I was washing dishes in a restaurant at the top of the Haymarket and one of the other waiters (who was an out of work actor) said that Orson Welles was in town, and that he was looking for actors for some production he was doing in which he was going to play Falstaff, based on the plays of Shakespeare. So I rang the telephone number and I was told to report to the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward Theatre) on St Martin’s Lane at 11 o’clock the next morning. When I get there the St Martin’s Lane was swarming with actors. They were pouring out everywhere. I finally got on stage at three o clock and I realised then… the first thing I learned about Orson Welles was his wonderful politeness and delicacy with actors. I don’t know how many actors may be listening to me now, but auditions are ghastly and very often you do your audition and somebody says “thank you, next please.” Orson let everybody finish, whatever they were doing. So when I got on, and he was a huge star then (it was right after the Third Man), he came lumbering down to the footlights – I was on the stage – he said “I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting, please forgive me. What are you going to do?” and I told him what I was going to do, and I did it, and he said “you’ll be playing Prince Hal”. I can tell you that was quite a moment in my life.
It was going to be a most wonderful gig. We were going to open in Belfast, and then in Dublin, and then in Athens, and then in Rome, and then in Amsterdam, and then in Paris, and then in London. Well, we never got beyond Dublin. The production was absolutely trashed. The actors were praised, Orson Welles particularly was praised for his Falstaff, and indeed he was wonderful. He took it all in his stride. He never complained, he joked about it. He was lonely in Belfast, because his wife and daughter hadn’t arrived, so he and I were getting on incredibly well. He invited me every night to have… there was very good food in Ireland those days… in some little boite [a small restaurant or nightclub] and he would talk, and the talk was wonderful. Then we’d move to Dublin and his wife, who arrived, and Beatrice his daughter, and his secretary Evan… it was still wonderful until, of course, the moment came when it was finishing.
I was very sad, and the next day we all had lunch with a great friend of his from the Mercury Theatre days, Geraldine Fitzgerald, who had a house outside Dún Laoghaire (which is where the ferry for Ireland sails). We all had this lunch, and then it’s time to go to the boat, and as he got onto the boat Orson had a terrible row with somebody, went to the cabin and shut his door, slammed it shut, and I went up on the deck and I thought “well, its over”, and a sort of… whole cloud of Welsh misery descended on me, and I thought “I hadn’t said goodbye to him, I’d never see him again, I’m going back to washing dishes and being out of work” and I was really feeling very sorry for myself, and I suddenly smelled this cigar smoke… and there he was about two yards from me, leaning over the rail, and he said (without looking at me) “in 1942 at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles every time they gave a nomination to Citizen Kane the whole audience booed.” He said “you’ll get over this, Keith. These things happen. It’s not important. It was foolish of me to try and cram the tapestry of those two wonderful plays into one evening, it didn’t work… but what will work, and I realised it, is that it’s a love story. There’s a love story of a boy torn between two fathers, one whom he adores who’s a terrible rogue and up to all sorts of shenanigans, and the other who’s his father, who he knows he must succeed; who’s the King with blood on his hands. That’s the story. That’s the story that I’ll make, and I’ll never make it without you.”
So I thought my life had come to a kind of an end (I’m getting this letter out just to cheer you up), and in fact it hadn’t. I went to America. I worked at Broadway, to be in A Man for all Seasons, and I realised that doors were opening. But the name on the handle of the door was always Orson Welles. Then, in 1964, I got this letter. You wont be surprised that I kept it.
Dearest Keith,
Listen boy, why don’t we go quietly ahead sometime this year with our own family-sized production of Chimes? There probably wouldn’t be sixpence in it for any of us, but it would certainly be fun and, I think, worthwhile. Always remember, your heart is God’s little garden.
Orson
And in October of that year I flew to Madrid, and I was told to get a taxi and take it to Mr Welles’ apartment. I had the address, and it would be paid for, and I got to the apartment and I got to the elevator and I could smell the cigar smoke. I was incredibly happy. So I went up in the elevator and Mrs Rogers (his secretary, whom I’d met in Ireland) grabbed me and said “the film’s been cancelled. Come into the kitchen, I’ve booked the afternoon plane back to London.” I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe it. Then I heard a great roar of laughter and Orson came in, and said “Keith!” and he said “here are the producers”, and they were two young Spanish producers and one said “Senor Baxter, Doctor Livesey!”, and I didn’t really know what that meant, but Orson said “we’re going to have lunch! Paola’s made a great lunch with squid in black ink.” I said “what was that about Doctor Livesey?” he said “Well, I’ve agreed what they want me to do, and I’ve agreed that I’m going to play Long John Silver in a technicolor version of Treasure Island, and your going to play Doctor Livesey.” I said “Really? What’s Sir John Gielgud going to play?” “Oh, he’s going to play Squire Trelawney, but he doesnt know” I said “are you going to tell him?” “I don’t think so…”
The next morning I said “how can we do it?” he said “I can do it, I can do it Keith, I can do it, really. I’ve told them that all they’ve got to build is the set for the inn in Treasure Island, and that’ll be the inn for Chimes at Midnight. So the next morning at 9 o’clock (he said “you gotta be up early”) we drove across Spain, and it was a different Spain… Franco was still in power… there were no great autostrade, so we drove all the way across Spain and he just talked about Spain. He was not a show off, you know, but his knowledge was encyclopedic, and it was thrilling to me. We drove across Spain and we arrived at Alicante at midday, and there was a small wharf and a big ship which had been used in Billy Budd. There were the producers, and champagne, and a lot of laughter – “bravo Orson!” – and Orson said “are we ready?” and somebody said “yes!”, and he said “action!” and the mainsail dropped on the boat, and somebody said “cast off aft!” and Orson said “cut!” and everybody drank some champagne, and he said “lets f-” (well, I won’t say the F-word) he said “lets clear off now, we can go”. I never saw a shot of Treasure Island ever again after that.
We drove up north to a little beach, a little place called Calpe, which is so pretty. It’s probably Miami beach now. We sat, then for the first and the only time Orson spoke about Chimes at Midnight, and he was very clear about what he wanted to do (and there was only myself and Mrs Rogers). “The first thing,” he said, “I want to make it clear. People think because it was written by Shakespeare that it was a contemporary world, but it’s not; it’s two hundred years before Shakespeare’s world. It’s about the difference between our world and the pre-industrial revolution England. This world, the world of Chimes at Midnight, is an England of forests, of castles, of meadows – and it’s, if you like, Merrie England – and Falstaff represents Merrie England, and indeed, with the death of Falstaff, as with the change of the period chronologically, England changed. It is also,” he felt, (the film) “the end of chivalry.” And that is why, when you see Hotspur (you wouldn’t notice if I didn’t tell you), Hotspur wears silver armour. He’s like Seigfried. He’s a romantic character. The King’s army, we wear black. He had this great thing that Hotspur’s death represented the end of chivalry; that’s why during the battle you will hear this wonderful, voiceless singing… it’s like a dirge, a beautiful dirge, because he felt… Orson felt that this was the end of a kind of England that he wanted to convey, and he said (and it sounds pompous, and he was never pompous) but he said “I want to call down the corridors of time with this film.” Now, he never said anything like that again. Mrs Rogers was blubbing like a baby. I wasn’t far from it, anyway.
The next day we drove to Barcelona, because we were going to await the arrival of Sir John Gielgud the next day to shoot the royal scenes, and when we arrived in Barcelona there were two people from the production who said “you can’t film here, we can’t film” and Orson said “why?”, they said “because the hotel where everybody has to stay is not winterised, and winter’s coming on, and it’s terribly cold – it’s impossible to film here!” So Orson said “tell Gielgud. Get him to fly to Madrid. I’ll shoot the battle scenes.” They said “we haven’t got any armor!” “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “we will find a way, because I’ve only got Gielgud for three weeks, because he’s due on Broadway to do a play by Edward Albee.” Orson took a plane back to Madrid, and Mrs Rogers and I drove all the way back, and when I got there there were no hotels in Madrid – but Orson’s wife, Paola, had brilliantly… because Orson had taken a big apartment building across the road from his own, where he’d installed the moviola to cut the film. Paola said “there’s two rooms there, I can furnish them” and she did. So I and Norman Rodway (who played Hotspur) lived en famille, if you like, in these two apartments.
I was terribly tired, but the next day Orson said “you’ve got to go and meet Sir John at the airport,” so I went to Baracas airport, Sir John got off the plane accompanied by his partner… lover… Martin, who was Hungarian, and who was in a foul mood. “I have a stinking cold!” – Orson said afterwards, “if you have a Hungarian for your lover you don’t need any enemies.” They were a bit put out that there was no hotel, but I said “well, we’re going to stay near Escorial, which is very beautiful, it’s 30 miles away.” So I took them to Escorial, established them, checked them in, left them at the bar, and went back to the apartment where Orson and his wife were serving everybody huge gin and tonics. I mean… huge. Orson was in such a good mood: Sir John had arrived! I said “what am I going to wear tomorrow?” He said “we will be wearing undress armor” I said “well, what is undress armor?” he said “I don’t know, but we will find out” and a boy brought in a wicker basket labelled Samuel Bronson Studios. So I stripped down to my underpants, and this is what I wore, this is what you’ll see I wore: a pair of knitted chainmail trousers and a T-shirt, and over that I wore a jerkin that Charlton Heston had worn in El Cid, and on top of that I wore a very, very nice yellow suede waistcoat which had been worn by Jane Mansfield in The Sherrif of Fractured Jaw – you’ll see this in the movie.
So everybody was very pleased, and Orson said “be up early tomorrow, first day of shooting. Will you go and bring John?” Because I knew Gielgud in England, he’d played my father in a film before. He said “will you go and meet him?” I said “yes,” and so I got a call at 8 o’clock to go down, and the car was waiting for me, and Orson was going in his car to the location, and he said (you won’t believe this) Orson said “I’m terribly nervous.” I said “why? First day? First shot?” You know, who was I? I hadn’t done a lot of movies… he said “no, it’s Gielgud. He’s the greatest Shakespearean actor in the world, and I just don’t want him to think that I’m some kind of fraud or charlatan.” I said “oh, you don’t have to think that!” Anyway, I went off to the hotel where I went up to Sir John’s room, and Martin said “it’s terrible here! The electricity, she don’t work! The elevator, she don’t work! We have to carry our luggage! I want to go home!” and John said “Oh Keith, you look rather fancy. What am I wearing? Is the armor wonderful?” And I said “well, Orson’s got this wonderful idea, John, that it’s Undress Armor.”
So at least I had a wicker basket. They brought in this very dreary… dour is a word (I’m sorry, I know there are a lot of Scots people here, but it does suit the Scots) this dour Scots boy brought in, not a wicker basket, but a big sheet with a knot in it, and he opened it and he said “there, choose what you want.” So Sir John Gielgud, the great Sir John Gielgud CH… whatever, looked at it and his friend said “oh we go home, this is stupid,” and John said “well we’re here now, we’ll have to give it a go” so he plucked out a pair of tights… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a pair of tights that have been in a dust cover for a year… it was like a concertina. He held them there and he said “ooh… shall I get crabs, do you think?” And then he said “well we’re here now, I better give it a go.” So he went to his bedroom, door open, and he ranted round – he said “oh it is such fun dressing up! I do love being an actor!” Then he came out and he’d found a pair of boots, he’d found a nice jerkin, he said “oh, perhaps I can have a great brooch?” I said “I don’t know if there are any large brooches around,” and he said “well I can have the crown,” I said “the crown hasn’t arrived from England yet,” he said “oh well, we’ll just have to do our best… I know all my lines,” and then mercifully somebody said “Mr Welles is waiting for you!”
So we got in a car and drove, Martin in this vile temper, and we drove and John suddenly saw, in the distance, banners, tents; the wind was blowing, the banners were cracking, they were long, and John said “ooh look, Martin, doesn’t it look wonderful! Isn’t it wonderful being an actor!” and we arrived in a field, and Orson was on top of the hill a long way away, and he shouted out “Jooohn!” and John said “Ooorsoon!” and one of the stage hands said “would you like a donkey, Sir John?” and John said “certainly not, they bite!” So we walked up to the top of the hill, and Orson and he hugged each other, and I thought how wonderful it was, these two great men who had been so nervous of each other. John said “oh, I know all my lines!” and he [Orson] said “look, we’ve painted a line on the grass. All you have to do is say: how now my Lord of Worcester,” and John said “but what about makeup? I’m not wearing any!” and Orson said “we’re not wearing any makeup, John” he said “what about a wig?” and Orson said “no wigs!” he said “but I’m bald!” and Orson said “well, maybe Henry IV was bald.” John thought about that. He said “my hair’s blowing. Look at Keith’s hair, its blowing all over the place! What’s it going to look like?” and Orson said “it will look real. Are you ready?” And he said “yes”, and he said “are we rolling?” and the cameraman said “yes” and he said “action! Sir John!” and John said “how now my Lord of Worcester,” and Orson said “cut.” And that’s how the film began.
***
This film was, like many Welles films, made without a great deal of money. Did that impinge upon the making of it, for you? Did it make it particularly difficult at any point?
No. I mean, we all had contracts. We were paid. I don’t know what Gielgud was paid, but I think I was paid £200 a week. I mean it was 1964, and we were also paid a daily allowance ¨C whatever you call it ¨C and Spain was incredibly cheap in those days. I mean, Madrid was wonderful. I never realized how wonderful a city Madrid was in that time, I don’t know what it’s like now. The fact that it was under Franco meant it was all very controlled, in a way; when Norman Rodway and I were walking down the grandee people stopped and stared at us, not in an accusing way, but we had long hair and nobody in Spain in those days… the men all had short hair, and we stuck out. We ran out of money just before Christmas, and most of the work had been done, but I said to Orson “I’m not being paid, my salary hasn’t come through” so he said he was terribly sorry, and I hated that I’d said it afterwards, so I went to the producer and he said “Senor Baxter” and he pulled out his pockets to show that they were empty, “I have no money”. But he said “I will pay you, when I get money I will pay you”. That was December, and sure enough the following May I was told money had arrived and I was given a cheque. I’d never seen a Spanish cheque, it was a huge cheque with a lot of zeros. So I don’t think any of us felt that we were not being paid properly. I mean all our food in the hotel was provided for. We knew it wasn’t a Hollywood movie, but it was very decent pay.
Obviously Gielgud in particular was renowned as “the” great Shakespearean actor, but was there any sort of discussion about “oh, but this is how you should read your line” ?
No, not at all, no. In fact there was not much rehearsal. We rehearsed for the camera ¨C there’s a scene in the tavern right at the beginning ¨C normally in a film either the actors move or the camera moves, but in the first scene in the tavern (when we’re accusing him of “you owe us money, Sir John”) we’re all moving; we’re moving around the camera. We rehearsed that all day, but most scenes we didn’t rehearse at all, and certainly with Gielgud having the long soliloquys… I mean he just stood there and did them. No, no we were never given directorial ideas at all, I think. Well we weren’t, I think. It made a very happy set.
You felt you could trust?
Oh yes, I mean I think we all felt… whoever you were, whether you were Gielgud or Jeanne Moreau, you were all in the hands of someone who was a great director. We just gave ourselves into his hands, which is a wonderful way to work. I mean if you’re an actor you can be mucked around by a director, and you know you don’t want that either, but Orson never did that. He loved actors, he loved being an actor himself. He once said to me (I was going to direct a play), he said “you know, directors have to be a different director for every actor. A director is probably the biggest acting job of all, because you can’t reveal if things are going badly, you’ve just got to get on and do it.” When we ran out of money it was around Christmas, and everybody else had gone. He wouldn’t let me go to England (I don’t know why. He thought I wouldn’t come back, I suppose), he said “you go to Morocco, go to Morocco, it’s only 45 or 40 minutes away. As long as you promise to go to American Express every Monday and every Friday to see if there’s a message”, and I went in Tangiers every Monday, and there never was, and one day it said “The money’s arrived. Come back.” I went back.
I think this is one of the great Welles films as well as one of the great Shakespearean films, and it has a depth of feeling that Welles himself admitted to. I think he often said that it’s perhaps his best film, and he clearly identified very strongly with Falstaff.
Yes. I talked earlier about the death of Merrie England, and he felt that Falstaff was the representative of that more idyllic time. That Falstaff was Merrie England. After everybody had gone, or practically everybody had gone, we were driving to the set and he said “it’s much sadder than I meant it to be. The funny scenes aren’t as funny as I’d hoped they would be, and there are no really summery scenes in there”. We were passing a meadow where there was a tree in full flower. I said “so why don’t we shoot that little scene we’d never shot?” he said “it’s too late. It’s too late, the film has taken on its own life”. Everybody liked each other. Everybody respected John Gielgud, we were all very proud, and you know the public image of Olivier and Gielgud was that Olivier was kind of a matey, blokey sort, and Gielgud was aloof. Well, he wasn’t. The reverse was true. He was very silly, Sir John. Not foolish, but silly. I mean, famously, in the war (he wasn’t called up because of his feet and his age, whatever) there was a society man called Chips Channon. He gave a big lunch party, and there was a map, a huge map, with all the Nazi armies, the Russian armies in red and black, and British and friendly all in blue, and Chips Channon came in and said “by God, what have you done!? You’ve got the Russians in Ireland? You’ve put the Nazis in Tunbridge Wells!” and John said “yes, but it’s so pretty this way!” I don’t know if you’ll ever find, when actors get together (of my age) who worked with Gielgud, I mean the stories are endless. Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, you name it; they’ll all talk about the fun they had working with Gielgud. Olivier… well I never worked with Olivier… but he wasn’t quite so fun as John was.
Welles had this longstanding desire to do something around Falstaff right from his teenage years.
Yes, yes
What was it that he personally found so fascinating do you think?
I think that he felt, first of all, that it was a wonderful, wonderful role. Very often it’s played for comedy, and there is a lot of comedy (actually I don’t agree with Orson; I think he’s very funny, and I think it’s extraordinary that he can get laughs being the fat man in a tin suit, and the next moment you’re terribly moved by the death of Hotspur), but I think he just felt… well, I’m sure he felt it was such an extraordinary role that you could “do” things with it. It explores almost every emotion. He felt that Falstaff was a Good Man, really. He felt that Shakespeare had written a Good Man. Not just a likeable man or a funny man but a Good Man, and I think the film, because you can film in close up… watching today, when I renounce him, and he’s on his knees… he wore his makeup for when I was doing my speech. Normally a director, if he’s not in that scene, he could have stood behind the camera and I would have been made up, and then he’d dress up for his scenes. But he dressed up for my scene, and knelt in front of the camera and played it extraordinarily. I mean he loves long, low shots, so that the king’s image is shot from below, and then the reverse. I find the look on Orson’s face, Falstaff’s face, when I reject him… I find that close up of him incredibly moving, because he’s hurt, cruelly hurt, but at the same time he looks to me with a sort of pride. “That’s my boy! He’s come into being the king.” I get many touches like that. I don’t think we ever, any of us, thought it was going to be as moving. We didn’t think either that it was going to be such terrific fun. It was really wonderful fun. I mean, when we started in October, the weather in that old castle! That’s where we did those two days with Sir John (“how now my Lord of Worcester”), and then mostly it’s a double for Sir John, every time you see the back of him. We went up to do the royal scenes; we’d start working about 9 o’clock, I suppose, when we got there. Lunch would happen when Orson felt like it, and we’d all sit outdoors and they’d bring food, and there were lots of stories, from Gielgud and Orson, and then after they’d clear the food away, and Orson would lie on the the table and fall asleep. We’d all go and do the crossword or something, and he’d wake up and say “Right, work!” and we would work, and we’d work til late. Nobody ever complained. The only problem with working in that castle was where to find a loo. There were no loos, and it was quite difficult because we were all… I had to wear three layers of tights, it was so cold. It wasn’t easy. The crew found their own place where they all went, and Sir John would wander off to have a pee, and he often was wearing his crown, and you’d see him disappearing behind brambles. Once he came back and he said “Oh! I found such a wonderful place! There were four nuns squatting in there”. I mean it was a castle; they didn’t have plumbing back then.
As an actor, what was your experience with Welles as a stage director?
When we did Chimes at Midnight on the stage in Belfast, he really left the direction to Hilton Edwards. Mainly it was very simple staging, even in Belfast. He never said “oh, will you try”, or stopped you; he was always the actor when were in Ireland, and he never interrupted as director. We’d just get on. I don’t know how to explain it. We’d never… people said to me “what was it like being directed by welles?” I can’t think of a single instance of direction that he gave me, either in the film or on the stage, and yet I know my performance… his imprint is on every inch of it. He was not a dictatorial director at all, and he never showed off about being a director either. A lot of directors (believe me, I’ve met a lot of directors…), a lot of them like being directors, and they’re sort of authoritarian. He had so much more talent than any of them, and he never bothered to show it off. One just did what he said. The only time… when I was doing my confrontation with the king, when the king is accusing me of whatever, and I have to say “do not think so you shall not find it … I will redeem all this on Thursday sir” and Sir John said “oooh” (we were doing just the run through for camera) he said “I’m terribly sorry Keith, I’m terribly sorry Orson, I lost a line” and I said “I don’t mind, Sir John”, and Orson said “just breathe on the end of the line or on the punctuation – if you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you’ll lose all the sense of what you’re saying – if you breathe you’ll find that Shakespeare’s verse is like a surf board.” And I think that’s almost the only piece of direction that I received. But one was conscious all the time who was in control. I don’t know… I wish I could tell you “yes, he had said do this”, but he never… he never did. The scene in the tavern where the camera’s moving, that we did rehearse all day, yes. No, he never said to me or to anyone “well I’d like you to try it a different way”, ever. It was a very happy shoot.
I understand a lot of the film’s audio had to be re-recorded, with Gielgud and Rutherford dubbing large parts of their own parts. Did you have to dub a lot of your own performance?
Well there was no sound. Every line of the film is dubbed, and the sound was variable when it first came out. I mean, they’d done a wonderful job on it, but I dubbed in three different studios in Madrid, and I also dubbed in London, Wardour Street, I went to Paris to dub with Jeanne [Moreau], she was doing a film, Sir John dubbed in New York, he was doing a play, so… it’s been wonderfully improved, but there was a certain kind of discrepancy because we shot without sound. I mean there was a recorder there to record what we were saying, but we were all out there; the only set was the tavern scene, but that wasn’t really a film set, so the sounds all had to be dubbed. It was it was quite fun doing it. Micheal Aldridge, who was a wonderful actor, who played Pistol – he dubbed Worcester, he dubbed one of the soldiers… I mean it was very larky. We never thought we were making a masterpiece. We hoped we were making a good film, but we knew we weren’t working in the same kind of circumstances as if we were in Pinewood, or at MGM in Los Angeles. And of course I think the film shows that. What it doesn’t look like (I said earlier, when Gielgud asked “what about this hair, it’s going to blow everywhere” and Orson said “it’ll just look real”), I don’t feel when I’m watching that, that im watching a costume movie ¨C like the Olivier films, which are wonderful, but they date ¨C and I don’t feel that this film has dated like that. Very often you’ll see a film that was made in 1947, and now you can see it was made in 1947. The simplicity of the clothing lent a great deal.
As well as dubbing other characters you also, in effect, played other characters occasionally?
Oh, I played… you see, Sir John was only there for three weeks; every time you don’t see his face, when I hold up the crown and say “now we called yet and ¡K the kings” it’s not Gielgud at all. Orson was a wonderful magician, and magicians know how to make you look at the wrong thing. So when I’m holding the crown, and they’re all kneeling down, that’s not Gielgud – he’s on Broadway doing a play eight times a week by then – and every time you don’t see his face it’s me; I was doubling for him. Every time you don’t see Margaret Rutherford’s face it was one of the crew (a short, fat man who was in), but it didn’t upset one at all. There is a scene where, after Welles pretends that he’s killed Hotspur, and there’s Hotspur on the ground lying, and they see the king coming… well, Sir John shot all those faces before he went to America, much earlier, and with Orson saying “look here, look there John, look cross, look there” – but in the actual scene you would notice, if you were looking, that that’s not Norman Rodway as the dead Hotspur, thats a double; that’s not Sir John walking through either, it’s his double; the only person who really is… it’s me, it’s my face and it’s Orson’s face. But that’s the brilliance of being a magician. Magicians who make you look at what they want you to look at so you don’t see the tricks.
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