David Hemmings has been a star for most of his life, but after years behind the camera as a director, his new role in Last Orders finds him 'absolutely loving acting to bits' again, he tells Donald Clarke
It's not that David Hemmings has aged badly. Indeed, if you saw his well-filled frame propping up a golf club bar you would not be in the least surprised to learn that he has just hit 60. But that's just it. Hemmings, who for a brief moment was "the face of Swinging London", now looks like just the sort of figure one would discover sucking down slim panatellas at the 19th hole. This image is confirmed when I mention that I will be seeing his Gladiator co-star Russell Crowe at a press conference later in the day. "Give him my love," he guffaws. "And tell him that he's absolutely rotten at cricket and that he ran me out. Haw! Haw!"
Goodness, I think I might be in genuine danger of having my back slapped.
That slightly florid face and beery voice are perfect for his role as one of the old buffers in Fred Schepisi's first-rate adaptation of Graham Swift's Booker-winning novel, Last Orders. But one can't help but search his face for the wide-eyed pixie who played the camp photographer in Blow Up. All that rock 'n' roll, all that sex, all that lavender wallpaper - for those of us too young to remember, Antonioni's 1966 film encapsulated how we wanted the 1960s to be.
"Oh, Swinging London was a joke," Hemmings says. "Time magazine foisted that nonsense on us. Now, Peter Blake or Ken Russell would argue a lot of creative talent came to the fore. Maybe that's true. But if there were people running around taking drugs and having sex I believe there were two simple causes. Firstly, National Service had just been abolished, so young people had more money to spend at an earlier age. Secondly, we were under a terrible threat of nuclear war, so there was no savings policy on people's part. It didn't matter if you were out shagging. You didn't give a shit because you could be dead in a week."
Aha! So he did spend the decade taking LSD and cavorting with nude ladies?
"Absolutely not at all. Not even remotely. Well, apart from anything else, I worked all the way through the 1960s. And I certainly was never part of the drugs scene. In fact, I never saw any of that until I got to Los Angeles in 1967 after Blow Up," he says.
He claims not to have seen Mike Myers's hilarious parody of his Blow Up persona in Austin Powers. All that "ooh baby, make love to the camera" stuff is an only slightly heightened version of what he got up to in that film. Rumour has long had it that Hemmings's own performance was a send-up of celebrity snapper David Bailey. He snorts out a cloud of Silk Cut smoke angrily at the suggestion.
"It absolutely is not based on Bailey," he splutters. "The person who makes this claim most strongly is Bailey himself. I know Bailey terribly well, but it is not based on him. It is a compilation of people, but the person who most influenced me was \notorious photographer of scantily-clad women on bicycles David Hamilton. He explained that the difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that a professional has absolutely no respect for the camera that he holds; he just treats it as an extension of his arm. And that's why I just sling the camera about like that."
The film makes perfect sense now as a cultural artifact, but Hemmings confesses that, at the time, he was baffled by the experience. The bizarre stories surrounding its making are manifest: extras were plied with bags of marijuana and whole swathes of parkland were painted a lurid green.
"Antonioni painted everything he saw. At one stage he painted the whole of the Elephant and Castle and never even shot it," Hemmings says.
For some years afterwards the actor was red-hot. But he made some unusual career choices: neither the camper-than-camp Barbarella (1968) nor the misguided musical version of Camelot (1967) have aged well. By the mid-1970s he had vanished from both cinema screens and magazine covers. Hemmings claims that this was through choice, and who are we to argue.
"Well, that was because I was directing," he says. "I have directed about 250 hours of television, so there just wasn't time to think about making films. It may be less glamorous than acting, but it can be bloody hard work. I did episodes of damn near every series that was out there: Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote, The A-Team. I didn't really appear in much,except guest roles in those series when we didn't think we could afford to get anybody out on the set."
The names alone of these guest roles say plenty about US TV's depiction of the English. He played "Dr Charles Henry Moffet" in Airwolf, "Errol Pogson" in Murder She Wrote and - my absolute favourite - "Lord Binkie Smythe White" in an episode of Magnum PI.
So when he turned up as Cassius in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, audiences squinted in amazement at the amply-stomached figure with the Dennis Healey eyebrows. Twenty-five years of directing The A-Team and Quantum Leap had rendered him virtually unrecognisable.
"Gladiator really kicked off my acting career again," he says. "A lot of my friends were working as assistant directors on the film and they were highly instrumental to getting me the job. They persuaded Ridley that it would be good fun to have 'The H' along. I've now done Spy Game, with Ridley's brother Tony, and Mean Machine as well as Last Orders. I absolutely love acting to bits."
His enthusiasm for his rejuvenated career conflicts with his claims that it was his choice to abandon acting, but we'll put that to one side. He has been plunged into a greatly changed cinematic environment, one where he has to play second fiddle to the likes of Vinnie Jones, his co-star in ropy prison-based football drama, Mean Machine.
"Vinnie's lovely, lovely, lovely. A puppy dog," he says. "He puts on this front of being tough, but someone like Ray Winstone could knock him out in an instant."
In Last Orders, Winstone joins Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins and Hemmings to play four men who set off for Margate to scatter the ashes of their deceased friend Jack, played in flashback by Michael Caine. This beautifully nuanced film must have resonances for a man of Hemmings's age.
"I suppose it does," he says. "But it is hard to relate your life to it because it is just a film after all. But, yes, lot of friends have popped off recently. \ Harry Nilsson and Mike Leander, to name but a couple. It does make you think about your own mortality.
"But what I like most about this film is the way in which, at first, the characters are not offering each other the support they require. Although we are a gang, the truth is that Michael Caine has been the glue that has held them together. Everything comes apart. It frazzles. But then it all comes together at the close when they realise how close they really are."
If we needed reminding of the contrast between the older and younger Hemmings, it is there in the presence of his son, Nolan, who plays his character as a young man.
"It was a delight to have him there," Hemmings explains. "But, annoyingly, he created his character first. Now I have a way of sitting at a bar - often my closest friend. I lean inwards. Nolan leans outwards. So I ended up having to alter my position during all the scenes in the pub. Bloody uncomfortable!"
Hemmings gets stuck into these anecdotes with a hearty gusto. He is the only senior member of the cast doing press and seems childishly delighted to be back in the spotlight. He laughs about the splendid time he had with his distinguished colleagues, even when it looked like the money might run out.
So did Bob Hoskins really threaten to go on strike? "Oh, there was bit of posturing in that regard. But I think everyone was too professional to take it to any kind of extreme."
And he lets out that saloon-bar chortle again.
But then it's not surprising that he is comfortable with fame. Essentially he has been a star all his life. As a boy soprano he sang with the English Opera Group and appeared in the first production of Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw. All this attention must make him feel like he's back home again. Can he even imagine what life would be like without fame?
"No. How could I really know?" he says. "Life deals you a set of cards and you play them as best you can. What else can I do at this stage? Go and ask for a job in a steel mill? Not really."