HOW HANDSOME THE HERO - TIMOTHY DALTON WANDERS THE ENGLISH MOORS SWEARING ETERNAL PASSION IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Seventeen, December 17, 1970

On the set of Wuthering Heights in a studio near London Timothy Dalton has the look of a wild fox. Clad in a ragged coat and breeches grimy with the mud of the Yorkshire moors, his narrow, handsome features flaring with inarticulate passion, his body charged with tension, he is Heathcliff come to life, playing opposite Anna Calder-Marshall's Cathy in the nineteenth-century classic.

"Emily Bronte's imagery is so superb, so moving, so grand," Timothy says in awe.

"She wrote such a gigantic, powerful novel. Some people think it all beautiful and romantic, but her characters are the product of a strange, disturbed mind. It's a deeply disturbing book, black and sadistic, and at the same time such an incredible story of a great love. What those people go through - oh, it's extraordinary!

"The old film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon was like a drawing-room romance, nice and polite, nothing to do with the actual story. I think Heathcliff is something inhuman, something other than reality. On a superficial level one knows what Heathcliff looks like, how he changes, but that's not enough. One has to explore and understand him and share his emotions and feelings. He's so cruel and hard, yet he has this overriding love for Cathy. You can't play a role like that intellectually. It's not a thing one understands or can really put into words. It's a happening inside of one's body. You read the book, you read the script and they entwine themselves together inside of you.

"I am constantly grasping, groping, emotionally searching for little bits and pieces of character. All the elements are there, but as an actor, I don't really know what's going to happen, which creates a great sense of excitement." Timothy speaks with intensity and a ripple of humor, taking pride in his position and pleasure in finding himself there. Sometimes an actor gets to the point, he says, where even walking down the street or going out at night he doesn't know whether he is reacting as himself or as the person he's playing. "I can suddenly feel very strongly about something, then two seconds later I look back and I think 'that's what Heathcliff would do!' Some of the time I get a great, evil pleasure out of being the character. I can get away with so much because everybody says, 'Ah, he's being Heathcliff!' At times I have a very strong sense of identity - that is, of being a person with ideas. At other times there's the question, 'What is one? What are we doing here, anyway? What are we living for?' But this is my life. I've been like this ever since I started acting.

"You never know where the earliest beginnings come from. When you're five or six or seven and you go to the Saturday morning pictures to watch Captain Whatever zeroing in on the moon, and pirates - I loved the pirates - and cowboys, you become aware that there is something people do called acting. As a kid, I lived in a fantasy world. I imagined myself walking across the fields as the great explorer with mud-caked boots.

"I was a gauche teen-ager, very enthusiastic, always at the middle of things, always shouting, and trying to get things going. I was good at sports, played on the school teams, but I never enjoyed anything else in school. I was terrible in French, yet it's the only thing in my education I've been able to use!

"When I was fifteen, I discovered the theater. But although you know what you want to do, you don't know if you'll be any good. You can paint a painting and think, 'well, I like it, even if everyone else says it's rubbish,' but they might say it is marvelous. Doing a school play, who's to know what's good or bad? It might be good to one hundred people, but to be a good professional you have to be marvelous to the world.

"I grew up in the North Midlands of England, although I was born in Wales where my mother was living out the war, while my father was in the army. There are five of us children. I'm the oldest. My father was an artist, a painter, and then he went into commercial advertising. He has his own business now in Manchester.

"When you are growing up, you have no idea of what is dreary and what isn't dreary. You make your own excitement. We always lived on the outskirts of town, and we used to wander around the countryside, running and playing games. But as time went on and I became involved with acting and actors, I lost other interests. The great recompense is that acting awakens your mind to other people. Because you are going to play many different characters, you have to know how they'll work, how they'll react. The more you can understand about people, the richer you become. You can help others because you can understand them, and you become a better person yourself.

"After I finished regular school, I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Although I stayed a little more than two years, I hated it. You can be taught how to project your voice, you can learn more about your body and about movement, but you cannot be taught acting. A true teacher of anything creative has the sensitivity to realize that you are the artist with your own form. He can look at what you're doing, your talent all burning and bubbling about, pouring out of you unchanneled and undefined, and he can help shape it. You don't know what you can really do at that point, and you're so vulnerable because you've never proved yourself. It took about a year to undo the psychological damage that was caused by oppressive teachers. I left school four years ago - I'm twenty-four now - and went into provincial repertory companies. You can play marvelous parts in repertory, and you change around every three weeks and get much more experience. It's exciting.

"My first movie was The Lion in Winter with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn. Then I played Rupert the Round, a great cavalry-man, in Cromwell, which stars Richard Harris and has Alec Guinness as King Charles. I'm just in the battle scenes, really. It's a flashy, dashing-about sort of movie, big feathers and long hair and swords." With Timothy's dark good looks and lithe build, he looks like a cavalier, and would make a perfect D'Artagnan. It seems he should always be seen wearing high boots, a rapier buckled at his side.

"Before starting Wuthering Heights," he goes on, "I made a movie called The Voyeur with Marcello Mastrioanni and Virna Lisi. It's about people-watching, or looking at other people, striving to find a reality, a truth."

In the studio stands a Yorkshire barn, ominous and bleak in its simulated granite construction, piled high with straw. A black horse twitches nervously. Anna Calder-Marshall, as Cathy, fiddles with his bridle while Timothy, as Heathcliff, pleads with her not to visit a neighboring squire. There's a quick flare of passion. Cathy pummels Heathcliff's chest and he strikes back at her in anger. But between takes, before the director cries, "Action," Anna looks up at Timothy, a tiny figure to his six feet one. "Go on," he says with a warm smile, "hit me; hit me as much as you like!" Later he remarks "Anna is marvelous as Cathy, but besides working with each other as characters, we have something between us on a purely Timothy - Anna basis. There is a bond, an indefinable communication and enjoyment. With some people you think, 'nice guy' or, 'lovely bird, exciting but nothing to do with me.' But with others you get on. You can talk together and understand.

"I live in London now and most of the people I know are in the theater. I don't particularly like many actors as people, but painters talk to painters, bus conductors talk to bus conductors, and actors are more capable of understanding other actors. People who are not actors look upon us as something peculiar, and that's no way to start any sort of relationship. They probably think we're all nuts or neurotics or whatever, and half the time we are. What am I doing - I mean, what am I really doing walking about the street thinking of Heathcliff? That's a crazy, stupid thing to do, isn't it? Who else would do anything like that? Why do we pretend? It is a strange business. I don't feel that crazy, but perhaps it takes one crazy person to get on with another.

"Then, when you get to know a character, perhaps your thinking is affected by what you learn. But you always have to come back to your own set of values. Even if you try to change, it's your own rock, your foundation that you must find. You've got to dream a little, but even that can be frightening. It's so easy to start thinking about what might happen in the future. You might get run over this afternoon, and that would be pretty awful. My ideas of the future are of gutters and destitution, so I don't think about it - I just live for now. Who knows what's to come? If you look on the black side, you might be happily surprised."

      

"I'M NO NEW OLIVIER," SAYS TIMOTHY DALTON

American International Pictures Press Information for Wuthering Heights

Timothy Dalton is tired of people trying to cast him as 'the new Laurence Olivier'. Dalton, specially chosen for the tremendous role of the brooding, violent Heathcliff in American International's new film version of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is constantly being asked if he hopes to emulate Olivier, who first won international stardom in the same role some forty years back. "Why does everyone want to compare us?" asks Dalton. "Sure, Sir Laurence played Heathcliff and now I'm playing him, but the characters are really completely different people. His Heathcliff was a romantic, mine was a bit of a moody bastard. I hope mine will be more in keeping with Emily Bronte's book, although Sir Laurence's was right at the time and in the mood of the film as it was made for audiences of the 1930s. But they are still two different roles, even if they have the same name." In the new version, American International is being honest with Emily Bronte's classic novel. Wuthering Heights, 1970-style, will be exactly as she wrote it, shot in authentic settings in Yorkshire on the moors where the Brontes lived. "It's pointless comparing the two Heathcliffs," adds Dalton. "As far as I'm concerned, I can only do my best. I can't work looking over my shoulder. I just hope I do well, and that young people will then know me as the actor who made Heathcliff a character with whom they could identify."

ACTING: THE SPARK OF UNCERTAINTY

The spark of uncertainty that exists when two actors face each other in front of a motion picture camera is what makes great talent. So, at least, thinks Timothy Dalton, currently facing diminutive British actress Anna Calder-Marshall as the tempestuous lovers of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in a new film version being made by American International Pictures. "Acting," says Dalton, "is exciting when you have two actors who know exactly what they are doing, but who have a certain amount of uncertainty about what the other person is going to do." The little unrehearsed scenes are making the sparks fly in tremendous form on the Yorkshire moors where location shooting is being carried out in Bronte country. "You get surprised, then it is up to you to surprise right back," says Dalton. "Then there's a flash - a spark - and characters begin to emerge." Anna agrees with her screen 'lover'. "We both started with our own conceptions of the characters we were to play," she says. "Robert Fuest, the director, helped us to establish them, but then the conflict that makes us all people began to take over and the characters began to form themselves - in our bodies. I didn't know what chemical changes Heathcliff had made to Tim and he didn't know about Cathy and me." As it happens, it's turned out not to be a verbal kind of relationship between them. The spark that Tim mentioned has made it into an extraordinary mental thing. It's very exciting.

EVEN THE SLEET IS HORIZONTAL

To ensure complete authenticity for their new film version of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's classic novel of love, hate, and passion, American International Pictures set up a unit on location in the Bronte country, on the Yorkshire moors in England. And the Unit ran into trouble. Weather trouble! "You get four seasons every ten minutes," claims Timothy Dalton, who's starring as the fiery lover Heathcliff. He's right. In turn, hail, snow, sleet, and rain have played havoc with a shooting schedule, with outbreaks of brilliant sunshine interspersed with patches of gray overcast skies. "It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have to match up scenes," says director Robert Fuest. "We've had a wonderful crew, and an heroic cast, but no one anywhere could hope to cope with sleet and snow that won't even fall straight down, but comes down horizontally. It's unbelievable. We've shot some footage just to prove to ourselves that it really happens." To cope, director Fuest has had to work with 'a labyrinth of lighting'. It's meant extra work for all concerned but he claims, "It is adding to the atmosphere." And executive producer Louis M. Hayward adds, "Actors don't have to shiver unless there's a reason. These people don't have to act cold. They are cold."

    

A DEMON IN A MAN'S SHAPE

ABC Film Review October 1970

by Iain F. McAsh

From the first moment you set foot on the soggy moorland soil at Blubberhouses in the West Riding of Yorkshire, there can be no doubt that you are standing in authentic Bronte Country. It is wild, solitary, wind-swept. The place devours you. Mere mortals seem to have no place here, or if they do, they blend into the landscape and appear to become part of that unspoiled terrain.

It was here that the filmmakers, American International Pictures, came for the first British version of Emily Bronte's passionate romantic classic, Wuthering Heights. Strange though it may seem, this is the first time that the cinema, has turned to this powerful novel since Samuel Goldwyn first brought it to the Hollywood screen (at the suggestion of Bernard Shaw) in 1939, and that made stars of the then youthful Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. But the new film will not boast any big names. "These roles make stars," claim A.I.P. (American International Pictures). Timothy Dalton of The Lion in Winter fame portrays Heathcliff; his Catherine is diminutive Anna Calder-Marshall. She is small is stature but big in talent, as the publicists are so fond of saying. But this time they are fully justified. Anyone who saw her triumphant, award-winning T.V. performance in Alun Owen's triple-play success, 'Male of the Species,' in which she co-starred with Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Paul Scofield, can be in no doubt that Anna is the ideal young actress to play Miss Bronte's turbulent Catherine.

The 1970 film of Wuthering Heights is calculated to bring world stardom to both Dalton and Miss Calder-Marshall. Scenically, it will have everything described so faithfully by Emily Bronte in her famous novel, beautiful yet at the same time strangely wild and sinister. For the first time it will present the bleak splendor of the Yorkshire moors to audiences around the world. The all-British supporting cast includes such notable performers as Harry Andrews (Mr Earnshaw), Pamela Browne (Mrs Linton), Judy Cornwell (Nellie), James Cossins (Mr Linton), Rosalie Crutchley (Mrs Earnshaw), Hilary Dwyer (Isabella), Julian Glover (Hindley), Hugh Griffith (Dr Kenneth), Morag Hood (Frances), Ian Ogilvy (Edgar), Peter Sallis (Mr Shielders) and Aubrey Woods (Joseph).

Already Timothy Dalton is being hotly tipped as the new sex symbol of the seventies. After only three previous films, The Lion in Winter, Cromwell, and The Voyeur, his acting reputation is spreading fast. At twenty four, he is tall, ruggedly good looking, extremely masculine, with tousled dark hair, piercing blue eyes, and cleft chin of the sort which shot the young Olivier and Kirk Douglas to stardom. He has all the attributes which woman fall for.

We first met on the wild moors at Blubberhouses, as the wind howled around us. Dalton, trying valiantly to keep warm in his flimsy open-neck shirt and knee breeches, which comprised his costume, strode over for a chat. I asked whether filming on authentic Yorkshire locations was adding extra realism to his performance as Heathcliff.

"Being here on the moors is a whole physical experience," he replied. "You can't tell what it's actually like until you get here. It makes you realize just how hardy the people that Emily Bronte wrote about must have been. We've filmed under weather conditions that were absolutely ghastly, yet whenever it rained, and we all got soaked through, everyone laughed. That's the sort of extraordinary effect the place has on you. The physical presence of the Bronte country strikes you with tremendous force and the weather is quite unbelievable. It changes about every ten minutes. On any one day you can almost guarantee you'll get the complete four seasons!"

I asked Dalton if he was in any way influenced by the Olivier performance for his interpretation of Heathcliff.

"Why does everyone want to compare me with Sir Laurence?" he shot back "But I suppose this is inevitable. Sure he played Heathcliff in the Hollywood film, and now I'm playing him. He has the same name Heathcliff, but the way we're playing him is like as if the character was two different people. Neither Anna nor I have seen the previous film. I believe this is a great advantage, because it allows us to approach our roles without being biased in any way. "Heathcliff as portrayed by Sir Laurence was totally romantic. Now I am playing him as a rebellious, brooding character. There's really no resemblance between the two. His performance suited the mood of the 1930's. It was right for what audiences wanted at that time. I am hoping that my Heathcliff will be more in keeping with the character as he is described in Emily Bronte's book. She called him 'A man's shape dominated by demon life'. And that's how I'm aiming to play him on the screen. They are two different roles, even if they have the same name."

"Then it's really pointless making comparisons between the two Heathcliff's." I remarked.

"That's right," Dalton agreed. "As far as I'm concerned as an actor, I can only do my best with a role. I can't work by looking back over my shoulder. In any case, most things have been done before. I can only hope I do well with my interpretation and that young audiences of today will know me as the actor who made Heathcliff come to life as a character with whom they can identify in 1970.

"As an actor lives on characterization," Dalton continued, "I work at it all the time. I never have time off. That means I work whenever I see people. I'm working in the streets, eating meals, even sitting having a beer. All the time my mind absorbs other people. My mind works until the character becomes within me, and I am able to bring it out when needed. Actually doing it on a stage or in front of a movie camera is easy. Then you're simply bringing the person out from your mind and physically doing it. If the character isn't there in the first place, it doesn't matter what you do on a stage.

"With Heathcliff, it's slightly different," he admits. "Emily Bronte did all the hard work, and I'm simply re-creating what she fashioned. My hard work in this film is in reading and re-reading her great novel every evening to make sure I do get what was written into the character. Let's remember that we have a great debt to Emily Bronte for writing these wonderful characters for us play-actors to perform. It takes a great deal of courage to make a challenging classic like Wuthering Heights, and I am grateful to American International for giving me chance to be part of the challenge."

As Timothy Dalton was called back to enact another strenuous scene, I had a chat with his co-star, 'Cathy', of the story, Anna Calder-Marshall. "Wuthering Heights is only my second film," she told me. "But I think it is one of the most powerful roles an actress could wish for. Emily Bronte fascinates me. I have read her book eight times since I got the part. I find the character of Catherine absorbing, doubly so being out here on the moors. Yet I doubt if we would get on together if we were to meet in real life. There is something bitchy and selfish about her. We're so different really. There are so many sides to her character. Cathy is a tough girl. She's not sweet; she's dangerous. If I met her at a party I don't think I'd get on with her at all.

"We've had a wonderful crew and an heroic cast," is how director Robert Fuest, a former Royal Academy painter, summed up his experiences of making Wuthering Heights. The real star of this film is the Yorkshire moors where Emily Bronte set her characters. It's been wet and cold all right, but to soften the conditions would be to lose the whole point of the story, which is about people living a very harsh isolated life. Her people became part of the landscape. They're so strong that I feel if Heathcliff and Cathy were to stand still for long enough, then they'd turn into trees.

Emily Bronte's story is about the growth of a tremendous love affair," Fuest explained. "As soon as you stand out here on the moors, in costume, you get the mood exactly and know how it should be played. The weather has been troublesome, particularly when scenes have to be matched up. But it's all been so very worthwhile."

Exteriors for this movie were shot at Brimham Rocks, near Hammerbridge, which became the famous Pennistone Crags of the Bronte story. The unit also filmed at nearby Dancing Bear Rock and Hay Slack, scene of the climatic moorland funeral. "It's like Boot Hill in Yorkshire," was Timothy Dalton's wry comment while shooting those scenes.

Filming of Wuthering Heights was not entirely without its share of mishaps to the cast. Dalton slipped and badly twisted his knee when helping co-star Anna Calder-Marshall off her horse. Another time Anna crushed a finger and tore the nail off when she accidentally shut a door on her hand as the cameras turned. And Hilary Dwyer had to be rushed to hospital with a suspected broken back after she was thrown from her horse. She had to spend the rest of the location filming with a rubber air cushion strapped under her long crinoline gown. But, like true professionals, all completed their acting tasks without complaint to ensure that the 1970 all-British film of Emily Bronte's world-famous classic remains true to its creator in every way.

     

"MOVIE NEWS"

May 1971

"It's no good looking over your shoulders - most things have been done before. All you can do is your own interpretation, as any actor does with any role.

There was no water, no telephone, no electric fight, It WAS 'Wuthering Heights'. The weather was bitterly cold, wet and windy, with snow, too - we filmed through the lot. As soon as you stand out there on those moors in costume, you know how to play it.

I liked the others players in 'Wuthering Heights'. We were a team, all working one for another and for the final result. I had to really make myself to hate them. Had to work at it so that I could not see the actor's face, but that of the character he played. I found that muttering swear words about them helped. But it was really Heathcliff hating a character rather than me, Tim Dalton, hating the other player.

I'm not emulating Sir Laurence in my portrayal, and it's pointless comparing the two Heathcliffs. Olivier's Heathcliff was a romantic... It was right at the time and in the mood of the film as it was made for the audiences of the 1930's. My Heathcliff is more as Emily Bronte wrote him - a bit of a moody bastard." (Timothy Dalton)

 

A TALK WITH TIMOTHY DALTON

 

 

New York Post Saturday, February 13th 1971

 

By Beverly Solochek

 

Stormy Heathcliff, growling, running the moors. Dark. Wretched. Utterly romantic. In 1939 Laurence Olivier played the despairing lover and made Bronte's Wuthering Heights into a film classic. Well, 1939 was 32 years ago, and that's a long time by Hollywood standards to let a film sit. Ladies and gentleman Wuthering Heights is back, freshened into a 1971 re-make by American International Pictures. Anna Calder-Marshall plays the unfortunate Catherine. Our new Heathcliff is the English unknown, Timothy Dalton. And this is the picture that will Make Him.

Timothy Dalton, though new to the trade, does not, we'd been led to believe, take well to interviews. He was in New York recently, to plug his picture, holed up at a posh Park Ave. hotel. He entered the lobby on a cold, wintry day, cheeks flushed. In tennis shoes and a brief leather jacket. Running the moors? No. This Heathcliff had just come in from his daily jog. "I don't make a fetish of it," he said not smiling. "But I do think it is important to keep fit."

Upstairs in his suite, he took off his sneakers, went off to a bedroom to change into a black silk embossed shirt, and still not smiling, accepted star treatment. There is a rip in his jacket, and his agent called the house seamstress. Breakfast? The agent took care of that, too. It was a little bit new to him - all of this - and he was trying to adjust.

Wuthering Heights was shot with an all-British cast in Yorkshire, England. "I had to wear an open shirt," Dalton said "and it was so cold I couldn't move my fingers. People had to put cigarettes in my mouth.

"It took nine weeks to shoot. The effort, the bloody hard work and time - and in that weather - well, everybody was extraordinary. Perhaps once we went over three takes. Everybody is English, you see, and has that good acting training. There just wasn't time for anyone who couldn't do it. I don't think there's a bad performance in it."

Playing Heathcliff is an actors dream come true. Said Dalton. "The power, the magnitude, the immense proportion is so evocative. How people can fail to be disturbed by it, I can't understand. Someone else might read it, dream about him, or want to paint him. I wanted to play him."

There's a Heathcliffian note to this 26-year-old actor. His blue eyes slant above high cheekbones; there is a marked cleft in his chin. He speaks with intensity, his eyes firing up or falling into opacity. They get particularly opaque when personal questions are directed at him. And he broods.

Timothy Dalton is perhaps unknown just now, but he is not untried. He had a role in The Lion In Winter. He has done British stage and television and was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). "There was never a conscious decision on my part to act," he said. "You never know if you'll be any good at all, but there's only one way to find out and that's by doing it. This is my life now... but there's so much you have to improve on." Later on, his eyes bright, he added, "I'm doing it for myself. You don't think I want to be an actor because I want to make you happy? If I make you happy, OK"

He went on, "Some people want to be stars... women especially. The minks and flashy cars. Men, too, I guess. They're only thinking about the medium which gets them there, which is film. Well, they're shallow to start with. If I find myself living a false life. I'm just selling myself. My soul, and I can't do that.

 "In England, they want to act, and in England, acting only means doing plays and doing them well, and stretching and experiencing and discovering..."

His hands were moving about with excitement now and he hunched up on the edge of the couch, where he had previously been stretched out. "We don't speak in verse these days - not in the poetic images of Shakespeare or Marlowe. When I act, I go out and do it. What is acting? By definition, it is not being yourself, but pretending to be many different things. God, it would be awful to be yourself... just in a work sense. How boring."

And the real Timothy Dalton, the one not "just in a work sense?" Well he was a mite reluctant to stand up. He was born in Wales but raised in Manchester, England, the son of a successful advertising man. (Dalton is his real name). The actor is unmarried, his grandparents were musical, he likes early Goddard, and he watched Flash Gordon flicks when he was a little kid. "I've gotten very boring," he said. "I do all sorts of things. Oh, I don't know. Listen to music. I play football, soccer to you."

Just about now, he is appearing in a London play called A Game Called Arthur, he expected to like it very much. "I play a 24-year-old virgin - he couldn't make it. He's looking for beauty. It's very funny and very sad. He's looking for the ideal in life, in women, and this trendy bird comes to him on a bet and he loves her and he's so happy..." Timothy Dalton started acting out some lines, his eyes closing as he sees her approaching, his voice turning softer, gentler..."He is looking for beauty and truth," he said now back in the Park Ave. suite. "The good thing about it is that you've been through some aspect of it yourself."

He was about to leave New York to do Macbeth in Hawaii. And he had done a part in an Italian film, which he so much regretted that he wouldn't name the picture or the director. But he had his share to say about it. "The Italians want to get their soul on film, which I think is the height of pompousness." Apparently there was a communications problem on that set. No one spoke the other fellow's language. And the director antagonized so many people, said Dalton, that "even the crew was going 'Oh Christ!' I do think it was exceptional."

He's not much for television, either. "I hate the cold deadness of the studio. It's so boring. I prefer the theatre. There you're doing a whole thing and if you screw it, you screw it. But you have had some sort of catharsis. You've finished it." In London he keeps a small flat.

 "But in a way, I'd rather live in hotels," he said. "Everything is there and you can move if you want. But I suppose I must buy a house." Must? "Yes, well, the only advantage of having it is when I lose all my money. Then at least I will have it. I don't really see myself being old, rich and famous."

Money has not affected him one way or the other, it seems. It has just made some things possible. "I've been able to come here and eat in the best restaurants...well I can't. I don't have a tie. I hate forms and papers. Our whole life is dominated by bloody bits of paper." Now, Timothy Dalton is starting to brood. "The whole world is dying," he said. "It's dying its own death. Words are sterile. We are translating all our feelings into language. Humour, aggression, hang ups - you've got nothing of you in life. All you've got is rotten language. I would much rather be me with all my hang-ups, I would rather laugh and hit someone...it's all life, and it's kind of human." He considered, "They do know how to laugh here. That's why you make good movies. You've got so many hang-ups. Your 'M*A*S*H' and your 'Easy Rider.' You've got a lot more frustrations and anxieties to fight against then we have. Yes we get pissed off. I tell you," his eyes now crackled. "I hate people getting together in common united cause, because there is always someone who wants to lead it, you know. Human nature is universal. You should just go on with your own life. Don't look over your shoulder.

"The future is not that important. You've got to live for now. People spend far too much time speaking about the past or future. Wishful thinking and regrets get nowhere."

Does the real Timothy Dalton live in the blazing NOW with no wishful thinking or regrets? He smiled one of his rare smiles and almost looked sheepish. "Oh, come on now. This is me idealizing. Of course, I have my moments." But he went on anyway "We all know it's a waste of time being here because you're dead at the end. So your decision is either be a bum or to enjoy, do well. You die your death; you live your life. You die your death. And it's the most important moment of your life because it's the end of it. Your death is yours and your life is yours."

His leather jacket returned, perfectly mended. He got dressed, went down, and stepped into the company limousine to meet some more press. This picture is the one that will Make Him. It has opened already out-of-town and some out-of-town teenagers have never heard of Laurence Olivier. But the reports are that they are swooning over Timothy Dalton.