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Home , James Mason, Paul Lukas

THE DEATHS OF JAMES MASON

BY ANDREW WINFIELD

©Paul Smith 2016

READINGwww.smithscripts.co.uk COPY ONLY - PERFORMANCE PROHIBITED WITHOUT LICENCE A stage. Maybe a leather armchair and a small table with a decanter of whisky or water and a glass. A screen.

James Mason enters. He is anywhere between 50 and 75. He is dead. He is smart and dapper. He watches the screen.

The screen shows a photo montage of the actor in his various film roles accompanied by music – it ends with a still of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

MASON The great classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was chosen by Disney as a lavish action film – not, thankfully, a cartoon with a talking seal and a dancing octopus. I wasn’t sure about taking the role of when offered it and my agent went through many hoops to get the contract and billing sorted out. I lost out on the top billing to . So be it. You win some, you lose some. I did, however, manage to negotiate an extra deal. This I called The Portland Clause. As this was to be a Disney picture I asked if the great man would lend me a new feature film of his choosing each week – a treat for my daughter Portland. It was meant a little bit tongue in cheek, but Walt agreed to it! I was happy and went ahead with the film, though it was far less fun to make than you might think, seeing the end result. Douglas himself got to go on some fancy locations, whilst Paul Lukas and I were more or less confined to ordinary studio work. But the final cut was pretty good. The studio set up a special screening for the team and I took my wife, Pamela, and Portland along. They enjoyed it. READING COPY ONLYHowever, - PERFORMANCE Portland seemed PROHIBITED a little angry WITHOUT after it was LICENCE all over. She had a bit of a go at me over the regularity in which I ended up dead in my films. It was a funny thing for her to come out with and I hadn’t really thought about it, but I didn’t dismiss it. So I had a look back at my film career and started making a list of the films where the character I played died and the ways in which I had been killed off. I must say I was rather startled by the results and added to the list over the years that followed. So, I will, with your indulgence, outline a number of instances where I met my maker on screen. Possibly some may find this rather macabre, but this is fantasyland of course. Somewhere I have spent all my adult life. This is amusement and entertainment and I think it maybe goes to show what a very odd world I have inhabited. So in the Verne I was shot and drowned. I had been shot before in ‘I Met a Murderer’ directed by my wife’s then husband. Pamela was in it too and we collaborated on the script. I was the murderer. Being shot just by itself is a little dull and doesn’t necessarily cause death, so being finished off in another way makes it far more satisfactory. Of course, there is being shot and being shot. In period pictures like ‘’ and ‘Fanny by Gaslight’ it’s far more glamorous to be fired at by a splendid and decorative pistol. In the latter it was in a duel and there were all the lavish costumes and so on to help you take your mind off actually dying. In the more contemporary dramas like ‘’ and ‘The Mackintosh Man’ it was less flashy I suppose, though the former did provide me with one of my better parts and I am rather fond of it. Drowning is rather less common than being shot, though I have done my share of it too. ‘Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’ saw me make a pact with which READING COPY ONLY - PERFORMANCE PROHIBITED WITHOUT LICENCE had us ending up in the water. And although you don’t actually see his last throes, Norman Maine in ‘A Star is Born’ just wandered out into the sea when he lost all hope. A low- key death and happening off screen. A Greek tragedy. The reaction of the critics was similarly tragic – a big thumbs down. Difficult to believe isn’t it. A fine film and a performance I really enjoyed putting on screen. Both of those were a suicide, something which must be so difficult to do. As an actor one can only go so far as to experience what your character is thinking. What goes through the mind when contemplating and carrying out the act of suicide? We can never really know. I don’t think an actor can get near it. Yes, people have suicidal thoughts, actors have done and have committed suicide; George Sanders, Jean Seberg….. Kenneth Williams? But to carry out the act itself – nothing can be recounted about the experience. So, apart from drowning myself, my other suicidal ends include jumping off a cliff in ‘The Upturned Glass’, taking poison as Rommell in ‘The Desert Fox’, another poison in ’11 Harrowhouse’ and another jumping death, this time off a roof in ‘Child’s Play’. So I have tried to offer variety in my suicides. I should add here another to the list, but there was a slight difference to it as I had an accessory in the act of suicide. In ‘’ we reach the sharp end of the story, if you will excuse the pun, when the assassins of the Roman Emperor are being variously dispatched. After , as Cassius, was extinguished, it came to my turn, as Brutus, to meet my fate. The young British actor, Edmund Purdom, was playing my servant Strato, a ridiculously handsome man he was too. Purdom – not Strato. It was a small role but part of it was to hold the hilt of my sword while I fell on to it. Which we achieved reasonably realistically. At a special screening it was Purdom who caught the eye of READING COPY ONLYthe screenwriter- PERFORMANCE and producer PROHIBITED Jerry Wald. WITHOUT ‘Give me LICENCE the name of the guy who just killed James Mason’ he reportedly said on the telephone. Purdom went from this early film in his career to become something of a heart throb. Some deaths are more unusual and, therefore, more interesting. They don’t crop up that often. Although made for television, ‘ – The True Story’ was a very cinematic piece of work, though what was true about it I don’t know. I played Dr. Polidori, a role which ended with me being strung up on the mast of a boat and being struck by lightning. It takes all your acting skills to bring that off! Spectacular none the less. If it had actually been filmed, my death in ‘Genghis Khan’ would have been equally spectacular, but you just saw the aftermath of me being chopped up, dumped in a sack and dragged across wasteland by horses. I played an advisor to the Emperor of China, bewilderingly played by who made no attempt to be in the least bit oriental. He played it like, well, like Robert Morley! I, on the other hand, appeared with made up eyes, an upper set of protruding teeth and an accent last heard in a pantomime version of Aladdin. Utterly ludicrous. If you watch the film I appear to be about to burst into giggles throughout. Maybe I was. The last you see of me is in a bloodied sack. Ah well. Another eye-catching death and just as unusual was in the film version of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ in which I starred with Peter O’Toole. A decent part which didn’t warrant mention in my autobiography for some reason, I played Gentleman Brown, a bible-thumping pirate. Killed off courtesy of a canon filled with gold coins. Not many actors can boast that end. Of course I have been in films where death is all around me. ‘The Last of Sheila’ was a murder mystery penned by the unlikely duo of Anthony Perkins and – although nearly strangled towards the end I did survive. ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ has a very significant death, but again, not mine. And in ‘The Boys From Brazil’ in which I played READING COPY ONLY - PERFORMANCE PROHIBITED WITHOUT LICENCE another Nazi, the very wonderful was mauled to death by Dobermans. I was a suspect in the Agatha Christie ‘Evil Under the Sun’ and survived intact. In my last film for the cinema there was a mass murder – of game birds. ‘The Shooting Party’ is a very beautiful film and I rather owe being in it to whose role I took over when he was injured in early filming. Dear Gordon Jackson was the only onscreen victim. It also gave me the chance to be reunited on screen with my dear old friend John Gielgud. At the time I had a bit of balancing act between it and the filming of ’s ‘Dr Fischer of Geneva’ for television. I was pleased to have managed both. Oh I shot myself in Dr Fischer. I was not, however, going to see the premiere of ‘The Shooting Party’. Having had a major heart attack in 1959, in July 1984 I had another one. It was my last. For one who had experienced death so many times and in so many ways, and I haven’t mentioned death by spear, sinking in a submarine, bandits or being shot while dancing, I died in a rather modest fashion. Probably appropriate for one who had lead a quiet and celebrity free life for the most part. And although I would have liked to have lived longer than my 75 years, I don’t regret the life I have lead, but maybe, somewhere inside, I wish my death could have been just a little more noteworthy.

He raises a glass as the light fades to blackout.

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