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Lindsay Anderson - in his own words
Diary entry, 23 April 1962, on Richard Harris and the making of This Sporting Life (LA 6/1/33).
Five weeks into This Sporting Life - and I should of course have been keeping a record of it, the most alarming experience of my life, in so many different ways.
The most striking feature of it all, I suppose, has been the splendour and misery of my work and relationship with Richard [Harris]. I think (how can I know?) that this performance is marvellous. Certainly he is acting with a strength and a simplicity that I have never seen from him before on the screen. I have grown to love him dearly - too dearly of course, with the result that I lack absolutely the detachment that would allow me to weather the storms of his temperament without suffering. These have been fierce and shattering. First in Wakefield - the night when he insisted on getting drunk and the awful finale when he went mad after the Wigan match and announced that he would not come back to London with us. Then the first terrible day of rehearsals with Rachel [Roberts] - which I suppose was his last fling of resistance against playing the part without the protection of his mannerisms. The next one was when he shouted "cunt" at me because I wouldn't argue any further about the cheque scene in his bedroom - and then, my special birthday present, his refusal to shoot the close shot with the fir coat because he had been accused (unjustly as he estimated) of holding us up by being late.
From a certain point of view this is a personality too big by far for me to cope with. Emotionally his warmth and wilfulness can sabotage me in a moment. And of course instinctively he knows this and exploits it. I ought to be calm and detached with him. Instead I am impulsive, affectionate, infinitely susceptible. We embrace and fight like lovers: but in Richard I sense the ruthlessness that would drop me or destroy me without compunction if I seemed to fail him.
The mixture of tenderness and sympathy with violence and even cruelty is astonishing, painful and of course endlessly fascinating. The familiar combination, I suppose of pride and insecurity, of sensibility and egoism: the inescapable formula for a star. All my reason tells me that this is a fatal temperament for me to become in any way involved with. Yet I am completely helpless. This mixture of power and sensitivity, of virility and immaturity, of insinuating charm and aggressive domination - how can I be expected to resist? Whether he is embracing me physically, like some big warm dog, or ordering me to "heel" - I am at his service completely. Which of course means that I am unable at time to serve him as I really should, conniving at his self-indulgence where I should be calmly, coolly resisting it.
© University of Stirling 2004
