Still crazy

10 April 2012

Steven Berkoff - actor, playwright, angry old man - is impossible. He wears his artistic integrity year round, like a heavy old overcoat. 'I've always been too radical,' he says, if you dare to wonder out loud why such a hugely talented actor isn't, after all these years, running the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Instead, he's still ploughing away on the margins, taking his one man shows, Shakespeare's Villains, Requiem for Ground Zero and One Man to the Edinburgh Festival in August. Indeed it's easy to forget his mainstream success - apparent in his latest book about actors and directors he has worked with, from Stanley Kubrick to Christopher Walken, Roman Polanski, Eddie Murphy and Joan Collins.

Berkoff has a fearsome reputation. Over the years, he has made more than a few enemies (he once issued a death threat against a critic who dared to criticise his production of Hamlet). When one journalist gave his autobiography a bad review, he called him a 'desiccated hack'. Yet, as much as they'd probably like to, nobody can deny his talent.

He is a brilliant playwright: his early plays East, West and Greek have had some of the most glowing reviews in contemporary theatre. He's also dabbled in Hollywood, with roles in Rambo II, The Krays and Octopussy - inevitably playing the baddie. He's not proud of his foray into movies. 'I have no regard for film whatsoever,' he says grumpily.

We meet in Berkoff's office in his warehouse conversion in Limehouse. He sits down at one end of a long refectory table and plonks a pouch of tobacco in front of him. In his floppy trousers and long-sleeved Tshirt, he looks as though he might have come straight from a yoga class. He is, however, very far from relaxed; it is ten minutes before his pale eyes lock on to my own. Berkoff is almost 66.

He used to insist that his sixties would mark his retirement as an actor. Now he's there, of course, he refuses to let go. 'When I arrived at that age, I thought I'd dig in for a little while,' he says, in his odd, over-enunciated way. 'Do it while I can, while I feel I can give full satisfaction. Very often, you get better the older you get. You have a commensurate increase in sensitivity to the text and ideas at the same time as you might be getting a slight eroding of energy.'

Nor has age diminished his energy. 'I find it very challenging. I don't feel any different from the way I did ten years ago.' His eyes dart about the room. 'Well, I don't have such a drive as I once did. But sometimes, when I see, read, feel something, I am driven. There is a pool of energy on which I am able to draw.'

This energy is still drawn tenaciously to theatre. So he is concentrating on his one-man shows, performing to young people at festivals --his favourite kind of audience, if he is to be believed. 'Youth connects with the vintage I'm distilling,' he says. 'Youth is intolerant of the pseudish. They have antennae for bullshit. Older people not only accept the fake, they welcome it. They assuage cultural guilt by attending certain events. They'll never shout: "Boo! Get off!" '

Berkoff continues to feel at odds with his contemporaries. Now it's their age and stuffiness he rails against but he's always found some excuse to provoke their disapproval. Famously, five years ago, he broke a strike organised by Equity. While other stars turned down offers to make voiceovers for commercials, Berkoff decided, perversely, to make a series of ads for McDonald's. The luvvies were furious. 'I'm totally horrified,' said Derek Jacobi at the time. Berkoff, you imagine, couldn't have been happier. He said he needed the money but you feel it was the mischievous delinquent in him that just couldn't help stirring things up.

Berkoff was born in the East End in 1937. His Jewish immigrant parents loved him, he told me, though only his mother Polly made her feelings plain. His father, Albert Berkowitz, was a tailor who made 'zoot suits' for West Indians, and a womaniser, gambler and flashy dresser. Berkoff's childhood was a difficult one. Even when Albert wasn't gambling, he had little time for his young son.

Then there was the constant moving. During the war, he was evacuated to Luton, then he spent a year in America, followed by Luton, then back to the East End. So the young Steven started dreaming of a way out, of being a strong man or, more vaguely, an actor. Instead he left school at 15 and became a menswear salesman. He did, however, enjoy the work - selling cashmere - and at least it was an honest living. In his early teens, he tried his hand at being a criminal - stealing bikes and selling them down Shoreditch High Street - but a short stay in a detention centre cured him of that ridiculous notion.

What it didn't erase, however, was that stubborn rebellious streak, an impulse to shock his audience, possibly rooted in a childhood desire to gain his father's attention. 'Eventually the world becomes the father and you say I'm going to impress you,' he's said. Another consequence of his childhood was shyness, he says. 'It may come from uprooting or there may be a disinclination from the father to embrace the child fully, so the child feels alienated. When I was young, I was intensely shy.'

Maybe that's why he became an actor. 'Without question. It may seem a paradox, but shy people are shy because they aren't familiar with the melee. When you act, you can escape from yourself. It gives you a passport into association. You become a communicator.'

When Berkoff was 21, he finally landed a place at drama school, and from there he went into repertory theatre. In the Sixties, he really was where it was at - named best actor of his generation alongside Terence Stamp and Ian McKellen, and winning huge acclaim for his production of Kafka's Metamorphosis ('Everyone else was doing ironing boards and socialist twaddle. I adapted the most moving, powerful novella of the 20th century, hired the Roundhouse, directed it and played Gregor Samsa myself.'). Even so, directors and producers were often unwilling to work with him - at which point, he began writing his own stuff and running his own company.

Berkoff's personal life - about which he does not like to talk - is quiet at the moment but it hasn't always been that way. He claims to be an intensely private man yet he clearly enjoys an element of glitz and schmoozing. He is, very publicly, great friends with Joan Collins. And when Jerry Hall split with her financier boyfriend last year, her first foray out on the town was with her friend Steven. For now, though, he's happy to play the Jewish housewife: he does a devilish borscht and pickles his own cucumbers. He has been married twice and has lived with the pianist Clara Fischer for more than a decade.

Fischer stood by him during his much-publicised fling with the film producer and society girl, Julia Verdin, Elizabeth Hurley's old flatmate. 'Oh Julia, yes,' he once said in an unguarded moment. 'She's sweet, very interesting and so full of life. I suppose you could say I was going through a period in my life when I was momentarily estranged from my partner.' He has a grown-up daughter from a previous relationship, whom he apparently only sees from 'time to time'. Only once has he ever acknowledged her existence in print, and he is not, it seems, about to do so now.

For all his bravado, there is something just a little bit mournful - lonely, even - about Berkoff. Maybe that's the price of playing the professional outsider. He is tired, he says, of scrabbling around for money, finding backers, keeping his casts to a minimum to make his productions pay. But he is not - emphatically not - ready to give up yet. The delinquent in him will always crave attention. No desire to take it easy, then? He turns his brown, fleshy face towards mine. The blanched eyes regard me witheringly. 'None whatsoever,' he says. And with that I am dismissed.

MORE ABOUT

Actors And Actresses

Eddie Murphy

Festive Events (including Carnivals)

Hollywood

Joan Collins

Roman Polanski

Still crazy

Read More