By LESLIE WEISMAN
The distinguished Welsh actor and director Keith Baxter may be best known to – and most fondly remembered by – Wellesians as Falstaff’s royal sometime partner-in-crime (and both rued for his actions and respected for his acting chops as Falstaff’s ultimate betrayer) in Orson Welles’s masterpiece Chimes at Midnight.
So when this devoted Wellesnetter had the opportunity on February 1 to hear Baxter – whose tour-de-force cameos / incarnations of the Ghost, Player King and Gravedigger in a production of Hamlet at Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre made my mind reel in Wellesian circles (on several levels) – in conversation with Shakespeare Guild president John Andrews, I jumped at it.
While I’d planned on taking notes, I found myself so utterly riveted by the exchange, I barely put pen to paper. That being said, here are a couple of relevant tidbits:
Baxter and Welles “loved” John Gielgud. “We were all in awe of him.” Of course, that didn’t keep them from finding amusement during the frigid shooting when Gielgud complained of the cold, “and we knew he had a hot-water bottle underneath him.”
Indeed, despite their disparity in age and eminence, Welles almost invariably treated Baxter (and everyone, from the grips to the folks who delivered the food) with respect and warmth.
“To have a good time, Orson and I had a gramophone” on which they played Lena Horne records. Of course, that wasn’t the sole source of fun: during the dubbing in Madrid, Baxter enjoyed the attentions of Jeanne Moreau, “who for five minutes was in love with me.” (I couldn’t help but think of the flame-haired, feisty Moreau and imagine the two of them together now – and her conceivable response.)
“Orson Welles was a great American” who was treated badly by his own country. Baxter’s sadness and anger were evident as he described the visit by IRS agents who came to seize Welles for unpaid taxes as he was upstairs, with his cherished Moviola, desperately trying to finish the cutting.
The last time Baxter saw him was even more dispiriting: “It was near the end of Orson’s life, as he was leaving Ma Maison. “He was gargantuan,” trying to get into the stretch limousine whose capacious dimensions could barely contain his girth. “And I couldn’t say anything. The tears . . .” His face reddened; he paused, then continued: “Even now.”
Baxter, now a decade older than Welles was then, is still a vital, commanding presence on stage, even in “bit” parts that recalled for this Wellesian the ones Orson took on, from the start of his career to its end, for different reasons and with different results, all the while being at once each of those characters and, in the end, the (in all the ways that count) inimitable, indomitable artist Wellesnet, and we, celebrate.
(Leslie Weisman writes for DC Metro Theater Arts and for 10 years wrote for the Washington DC Film Society, where her articles on the Berlin and Munich film festivals appeared regularly in the Society’s online newsletter, Storyboard.)
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