The face is familiar, and now perhaps the name will be too. As James Cromwell rehearses in Galway he tells Donald Clarkeabout autobiographical parallels in Long Day's Journey Into Night, a play he sees as Irish without the humour
James Cromwell is a thespian of the old school. Massively tall, with the head of a retired eagle, he greedily seizes any opportunity to deliver anecdotes about, say, taking tea with the Oliviers or gossiping with an elderly Sean O'Casey. Slap a smoking jacket on him and press a sherry into his hand and, I suspect, he could keep any theatrical green room entertained for weeks.
For the first four decades of his career the American actor was, indeed, mainly known as a man of the theatre. He did make frequent appearances in films - and even had a recurring role in the sitcom, All in the Family - but he was the sort of character actor who was usually recognised as "oh yeah, that guy; you know, the fellow in the movie with the train". It was, of all things, a film about a talking pig that finally drilled his name into movie-goers' brains. Or did it? Many people do still refer to him as the farmer out of Babe.
"Actually, I think it was a bit later that people got to know my name," he says. "They began to actually see me and they slowly got to know me - not necessarily as a star, but, I hope, as a guy who is in good pictures. People say to me: 'If I see your name I will go to the movie because I know it will be a good picture.' That's good enough for me. Hey, why should they remember my name? I am just an actor."
Still, despite his success in fine films such as LA Confidential and The Queen, Cromwell, now 67, remains an unapologetic enthusiast for the stage. Later this month, under the direction of Garry Hynes, he is set to tackle one of the most taxing roles in American theatre at Galway's Druid Theatre. James Tyrone snr, the broken paterfamilias in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, is an ageing actor whose commercial success in a popular play never quite compensated for his failure to triumph in any of the great classical roles. Over the space of one day, lesions open between the old man and his two sons - one tubercular, the other alcoholic - and the universal hypocrisies of family life are spewed up before the audience.
"I said to my friend Charles: 'I've started to work on this play and I am surprised how Irish the cadences are, especially in James. It's an Irish play,' " Cromwell remarks. "And he said: 'It's not an Irish play, because there is no humour in it.' It's true. You do not have that thing where, when things are at their bleakest, the humour comes in and offers release. Here there is no release."
One can't help but think that the production, which later moves to the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, must have particular resonance for James Cromwell. His father, John Cromwell, was an actor and director, and James admits that the relationship between the men was often tense and sometimes hostile. The older Cromwell, who, after directing such well-remembered films as The Prisoner of Zenda and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, was blacklisted during the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, divorced Kay Johnson, also an actor, when their son was still a toddler.
"James Tyrone is a big financial success, but never succeeded on his own terms," he says. "My father's story was different. My father didn't actually have success as an actor until after he got blacklisted. He happened to win a Tony for his first play back on stage. Then he ended up in two long-running plays and never looked back."
So he didn't really see too many similarities between his upbringing and that of the Tyrone boys?
"Oh, there are certainly parallels," he says. "The same dynamic is there. But we weren't compressed together like they are in the play. My rebellion against my father happened when I was six years old. You don't know why a divorce happens. First you think you are responsible, then you think he is responsible."
Cromwell goes on to detail his stubborn refusal to answer his dad's letters and to describe how he would grumpily plod five feet behind the older man when they met in New York. It sounds as if he has thought a lot about this recently. Most actors would draw on these experiences when attacking a role such as James Tyrone. Others might say, however, that the business is all make-believe and that one's own memories should be of no consequence.
"Those guys are either lying or they are just phoning it in," he says. "You have to put something of yourself into the role."
GIVEN HIS BACKGROUND, you might have thought that Cromwell was always destined for a stage career. Nonetheless, he spent a while studying to be a mechanical engineer. His ambitions to design sports cars were, however, put on hold when, visiting his dad on set in Sweden, he became captivated by the bohemian conversations of the actors and crew. This looked like a life worth living.
Following a spell touring Waiting for Godot in the segregated southern states, Cromwell embraced left-wing politics and a combination of social bellicosity and bolshie radicalism has stayed with him ever since. He admits he is not always easy to work with.
"Well, I had an advantage in the early days," he says. "My mother and, later, my father helped me along. But I did end up working in a lot of different theatres, because I would always burn my bridges. I just had trouble with authority. I had trouble with directors and rules. And I had trouble with the ladies. I would invariably pick the director's mistress to have an affair with and that would not go down well. Then, once, I cut off a guy's finger in Cleveland during a stage fight. They sewed it back on again, but that caused some problems too."
In the 1960s Cromwell dallied with the Black Panthers, the radical African-American group, and, by his own reckoning, helped "bring Washington to a standstill" during the protests against the Vietnam War. Only a few years ago, the actor, a committed vegan, was arrested for protesting outside a fast-food restaurant. Did the memory of what happened to his father - denied work for six years following a dubious accusation of dallying with communists - have an influence on his drift to the left?
"Well, I didn't understand the mechanisms at the time," he says. "I did understand that politics had affected my father's life. I knew his story: how he was misused and what roles my stepmother gave up to support him. But going down south during the era of segregation is definitely what started my radicalisation. It was really about the injustices in my country. I came to believe that the source of injustice in the world was not my father; it was the government. Then, eventually, I realised it was just people."
For all his spikiness, James Cromwell has never spent much time out of work. It was, perhaps, to his advantage that directors classified him as that strange, indefinable beast, The Character Actor. Too tall and angular to secure the romantic leads, he quickly found himself being asked to play teachers, presidents, scientists and admirals.
Happily, the withering effect of time does little to damage the career prospects of the character actor. The great Eli Wallach, now well into his 90s, still appears regularly in movies.
"Yes, and I saw him recently getting an award and he shouted 'I can still work!' " Cromwell says. "Look, I would love to have got the girl more often. But I was not often considered for the lead. But the great thing about being a character actor is that everybody is a character. It is very dangerous in acting to play the guy you actually are. I get to do a very broad range of human beings. I don't use make-up. I don't use funny walks. They are all recognisably me, but they are all different."
Cromwell seems like a decent fellow, but he is, I would guess, not a total stranger to the perils of self-regard. It is interesting to note that the successful campaign to secure his Oscar nomination for Babe was financed out of his own pocket. It's one thing for the studio to plant advertisements asking academy members to vote for an actor. It is quite another for the performer himself to fork out.
"My mother had been in Awakenings with Bobby De Niro and somebody said: 'I can get you a nomination and it will only cost you $20,000.' She was appalled. Then this guy, a sound engineer, suggested to me the performance in Babe was worthy of a nomination. So I thought why not. I spent 60 grand taking out advertisements. The studio had no interest in me because I had fallen out with [Babe's producer] George Miller, so I had to do it myself."
Kevin Spacey won the Oscar for best supporting actor that year, but Cromwell's investment paid dividends. He reckons the nomination helped secure him that powerful role in LA Confidential and propel him towards later triumphs such as his Duke of Edinburgh in last year's The Queen.
"I am glad the recognition came late," he says. "I think it would have overwhelmed me if it had happened in the 1970s."
SO HE IS now a less unhinged fellow? He no longer cuts off actor's fingers and chases the director's mistress? Twice married, James Cromwell has recently removed himself to Connecticut to contemplate the trees. A recent interview in the Daily Telegraph suggested he was romantically attached to an old friend. At the mention of the Conservative Party's favourite newspaper, he stiffens.
"I didn't care for that interview," he says. "Sometimes I talk too much into the wrong ears. That relationship was with a long-standing friend and didn't work out romantically. Now, I have another lady and I am thinking very seriously about getting married again." Oh really? Who is she? "Well, she's a woman, obviously. I think I will just hold off on talking about this."
Very wise. James Cromwell may, at 67, finally be contemplating maturity.
• Long Day's Journey Into Night opens at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on Wed and transfers to the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on Oct 3 as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival