Amid the hustle of New York's urban core on one spring day in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a coffee chain, glued his hand to a counter, and protested about the surcharges on vegan milks. “How long until you cease making excessive earnings while customers, creatures, and the planet suffer?” Cromwell declared as fellow activists streamed the demonstration live.
But, the unconcerned patrons of the coffee shop paid scant attention. Maybe they didn’t know they were in the company of the most statuesque person ever nominated for an Academy Award, performer of one of the most memorable monologues in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a Star Trek production. Police arrived to shut down the store.
“No one listened to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the top of my lungs talking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would go around to the far corner, get their order and wait looking at their cellphones. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have very little time!’”
Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more fitting. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance protests over creature welfare and the environmental emergency. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been detained, and has even spent time in jail.
But now, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disillusioned generation that demonstrated for global harmony and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their twilight years, a former president reverse the clock on reproductive rights and many other achievements.
Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an old lefty who might have a revolutionary poster in the loft and consider Bernie Sanders to be too soft on the economic system. When visited at his home – a log cabin in the farming town of Warwick, where he lives with his third wife, the actor his partner – he stands up from a seat at the fireplace with a warm greeting and outstretched hand.
Cromwell stands at 6ft 7in tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The key is in the lock. All they have to do is a single action to turn it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every exception, every loophole that the Congress has written so assiduously into their legislation.”
Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood filmmaker and actor, was banned during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party praising aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.
This apparently harmless comment, coupled with his presidency of the “a political group” which later “shifted somewhat to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to give evidence to the government panel on alleged subversion. He had little of importance to say but a committee representative still demanded an expression of regret.
He refused and, with a generous payment from a wealthy businessman for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a theater honor. James muses: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – cut him out and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was guilty or not – sort of like today.”
Cromwell’s mother, Kay Johnson, and his stepmother, another actor, were also successful actors. Despite this deep lineage, he was initially reluctant to follow in their footsteps. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”
However, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a picture with a famed director’s crew, proved to be a turning point. “They were creating something and my father was involved and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I have to do this.’”
Creativity and ideology collided again when he joined a theatre company founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play a classic work for mainly African American audiences in a southern state, another region, a state, and Georgia. Some performances took place under security protection in case white supremacists tried to attack the theatre.
Godot struck a chord. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the social advocate a historical figure urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not waiting for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”
Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ A wonderful Black lady took us to our rooms.
“We went out to have dinner, and the owner of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been thrown out of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something stupid. John O’Neal informed the man that he was violating our legal protections and that they would get to the bottom of it.”
However, mid-story, Cromwell stops himself and breaks the fourth wall. “I’m listening to myself,” he says. “These are not just stories about an actor doing his thing maturing, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were dying, people were being assaulted, people were being fired upon, people had symbols of hate on their lawns.
“I feel uncomfortable recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”
Subsequently, his wife will confide that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has little appetite for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be formulaic and “because my father tried it and it was so poor even his wife, who adored him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, John.’”
The conversation continues with his story all the same. Cromwell had been notching up film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in a beloved film, a 1995 movie about a pig that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a unexpected success, earning more than $250m worldwide.
Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $sixty thousand to hire a PR representative and buy industry ads to promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The gamble paid off when he received the honor, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to go through tryouts.
“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so tired of the dance that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a filmmaker: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no otherwise than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘James, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend four weeks with.’
“It was the insecurity which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a stranger who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not worthy, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”
The recognition for the movie led to roles including presidents, popes and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ a film, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In a sci-fi installment he played the interstellar pioneer Dr Zefram Cochrane, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”
Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “avarice” and “the bottom line”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of social media popularity on hiring choices. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of arguing. I do too much shouting.”
He offers the example of LA Confidential, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s intimidating Captain Dudley Smith asks an actor’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a valediction, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an award recipient, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what Vincennes should reply. A quietly defiant Spacey won their battle of wills.
This prompted Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson objected. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘James, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s background and his propensities, I said: ‘You motherfucker, fuck you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive
