Ian McKellen, Henry Woolf, David Hemmings, Michael Billington and Andrew Bradford stand
before Offa's altar
Vivien Merchant, Ian McKellen, Henry Woolf — bandits fighting for Alfred the Great
I was a bandit fighting with Alfred against the Viking
invasion. My mate was played by Vivien Merchant (then
Mrs Harold Pinter.)
Harold came out with
us to Galway in Western Ireland and the night before, he read the script.
Over breakfast
next day, he told Vivien that she was not to speak any of the unspeakable lines in the
script, so the director agreed that her part would be mute.
This meant that Vivien got
lots of BIG close-ups and that I was landed with all her lines.
Roger the Bandit (Ian McKellen) paddling his coracle in an Irish backwater.
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"Alfred"
was shot entirely on location in County Galway
where Clive Donner expected mist and rain for his gloomy epic. The previous year cereal
crops and bushes had been planted around the pre-fabricated 'pre-mediaeval' sets. 1968 was
a record-breaking sunny summer, so day after day I wasn’t called for work. I lived in
the old railway stationhouse at Oughterard, which had been converted into a
first-floor flat and a ground-level carpet factory. Friends came to stay
including Richard Cottrell with whom I was planning our stage production of
Richard II.
Ian McKellen as "Roger the Bandit" in battle
Above my out-stretched arm is Colin Blakeley, my favourite stage-actor
of the period whom I had known in Olivier's National Theatre Company at the Old Vic
Theatre.
Production Designer: Jocelyn Rickards
ALFRED THE GREAT
at TCM |
