Heathcote Williams
Encyclopedia
Heathcote Williams is an English
poet
, actor
and award-winning playwright
. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror. He is perhaps best known for the book-length polemical poem Whale Nation, which in 1988 became "the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling." In the early 1970s, his agitational graffiti
were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill
district.
, Cheshire
. After his schooldays at Eton
, he changed his name to Heathcote Williams. His father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer. From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book was The Speakers (1964), an account of life at Speakers' Corner
in Hyde Park
. In 1974, it was adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company
.
His first full-length play, AC/DC (1970), a critique of the burgeoning mental health industry, includes a thinly veiled attack on his fellow denizen of 1960s alternative society
, and doyen of the anti-psychiatry
movement, R. D. Laing. Its production at the Royal Court Theatre
, did not, however, appear to impede cordial relations between the two in later years. AC/DC won the London Evening Standards Most Promising Play Award. It also received the 1972 John Whiting Award
for being "a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society." It was described in the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page review by Charles Marowitz
as 'the first play of the twenty-first century.' AC/DC was produced in New York in 1971 at the Chelsea Theater Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Other plays include the one-act monologue Hancock's Last Half Hour, The Local Stigmatic
, The Immortalist, and the impossible to categorise Remember The Truth Dentist — an early effort, again at the Royal Court, directed by fellow-contrarian Ken Campbell
.
The inaugural issue of the London Review of Books
included an effusive profile by fellow Etonian Francis Wyndham titled The Magic of Heathcote Williams. His foremost fans among the famous are the late Harold Pinter
and Al Pacino
.
's PR department. This episode, though having undeniably fortunate consequences for the poet's bank balance, was to havealmost as though to confirm his own worst assumptionsagonizingly unfortunate consequences for his private life. Not that this was Williams's debut 15 minutes
, exactly. An affair some years earlier with the model Jean Shrimpton
, an icon of 60s Swinging London
, had resulted in the writer setting himself alight on her doorstep. Whether intentional or the upshot of a magical stunt gone wrongWilliams at the time being an ardent fire-eaterwas never entirely clear. It was not unreasonably supposed to be a case of the supermodel dumping the scrivener. Somewhat astonishingly, however, in her autobiography published in the early 1990s, Shrimpton asserted that it was Williams who had in fact walked out on her.
Energetic publicity efforts on Williams's behalf, spearheaded by Cape's Polly Samson
assisted him to achieve the mass audience he'd sought for his trilogy of book-length polemical poems on environmental themes.
Each was packed with detailed research and scores of photographs. Written some years earlier as visionary propaganda, they were probably the most lavishly illustrated English poetry since William Blake
. They had otherwise been gathering dust in a corner of his then agent's office. The North American rights for the poem Whale Nation (1988) alone were sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair
for $100,000. A more recent writer on the subject has described it as an "epic plea for the future of the whale, a hymn to the beauty, majesty and intelligence of the largest mammals on earth, as well as a prayer for their protection... Whale Nation became the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling, and for a moment, back in 1988, it seemed as if a shameful chapter in human history might finally be drawing to a close."
Whale Nation was followed by Sacred Elephant (1989) and Autogeddon (1991). The latter still ranks as the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date. It characterizes the motor car's global death toll as, "A humdrum holocaust, the third world war nobody bothered to declare." Each poem was made into a film by BBC Television
, Autogeddon performed by Jeremy Irons
who, somewhat to the chagrin of its author, turned out in promotional interviews to be an unabashed car-lover.
Williams is a consummate reader of his own poems, as well as of the literary classics. His performance of his Buckley-esque Jumping Jesus was characterised by an eminent London literary critic as 'like Alexander Pope
on speed.' His public readings of Whale Nation have been known to reduce some members of the audience to tears. His recordings for Naxos Records
, which include readings from the Buddhist scriptures, Dante
and the Bible
, have won awards.
In 2011, Williams began a new collaboration with Roy Hutchins, who had performed Whale Nation, Autogeddon and Falling For A Dolphin in the 1980s. The result was Zanzibar Cats, a performance of recent short poems. In What's on Stage, the reviewer Michael Coveney wrote, 'These wonderful poems seize on political absurdity, planetary destruction and social injustice with relish and delight, as well as great erudition and verbal dexterity.'
, at the latter's home on the edge of Bodmin Moor
. The result was an out-pouring of hundreds of canvases, including satirical pastiches of the works of Van Gogh, Claude Monet
, Stanley Spencer
, Lucian Freud
and others. He also produced a number of sculptures of great piles of books, tottering and damp-swollen, elaborately hand-carved in wood.
's 1979 classic album Broken English. Williams's words were enough to cause a walk-out by the female workers on EMI's
production line.
during the 1970s, to the radical vegetarian magazine Seed and to The Fanatic, issues of which would appear sporadically and provocatively in different formats and various countries of Western Europe. In 1974, he launched his own mimeographed underground newspaper, The Sunday Head. It was published from his home in Notting Hill Gate, London at the time when he was also the impresario for Albion Free State’s Meat Roxy, a series of music, dance and poetry events held in a squatted, redundant bingo hall near the Portobello market.
An anthology of his tracts and manifestos from this period, Severe Joy, was announced by his then publisher but, to the disappointment of his fans, for some reason never actually appeared. A sampling did appear in a bi-lingual, limited edition titled Manifestoes from the Rotterdam-based Cold Turkey Press
as well as in the Manchester literary magazine Wordworks in 1975.
, with financial assistance from Jon Voight
, would perform it off-off Broadway before he himself achieved what the play pillories. In later years the film version became known as 'Pacino's secret project,' representing the actor's debut as a director. It was released as part of the Pacino: An Actor's Vision box-set in 2007.
Williams's own film performances include Prospero
in Derek Jarman
's version of The Tempest
(1979), Wish You Were Here (1987) and Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). His portrayal of the central character's psychiatrist in Wish You Were Here became something of a YouTube favourite. Williams has more recently enjoyed a steady stream of bit-parts in big-budget Hollywood productions, such as The City of Ember
and the ill-fated Basic Instinct 2
.
His first brush with TV overlapped with community politics. It came courtesy of a 1970s experiment by the BBC in what became known as "public access television". Williams, in the dubious if green
guise of a tree somehow blessed with oratorical powers, regaled the watching millions for a full fifteen minutes on the virtues of life without Westminster. Albion Free State was his name for a utopian vision of an England free from government and bosses. Williams was one of 120 or so squatters who had commandeered a small chunk of West London, just about visible from Television Centre
itself. Frestonia
, as the extensive squat was known, had declared itself independent of Great Britain. The actor David Rappaport
was proclaimed Foreign Minister and Williams served as ambassador to the UK. Postage stamps were issued bearing the face of Guy the Gorilla
instead of the Queen
; they made no mention of currency, but simply carried the legend, God Will Provide. The whole rebellion, which exasperated the authorities for years, entailed much litigation before the bulldozers were finally able to move in.
Williams later applied his abilities as a conjurerhe has long been a member of The Magic Circle
to come up with a Christmas
play based on the little-known fact that Charles Dickens
used to revel in performing magic shows for his friends and extended family. What the Dickens! depicted the novelist, with the likes of Thomas Carlyle
and Thackeray standing by to assist, as he manipulated "airy nothings" and assorted props to the delighted squeals of foundling
children from the Thomas Coram Home. The production featured a young Ben Cross
as Dickens, with a supporting cast that included Dinsdale Landen
and Kenneth Haigh
. It was broadcast by Channel 4
in Christmas 1983, with a repeat screening the following Christmas.
In March 1993, Williams was the not entirely enthusiastic subject of a spoof arts documentary titled Every Time I Cross the Tamar I Get Into Trouble. Screened by Channel Four in its Without Walls slot, it implicitly sparred yet again with the recurring theme of the fatality of fame, its hollow allurements and the nature of fandom. In this instance, just for a change, a twinkling Pacino appeared happy to cast himself in the role of fan, implying his own supposed discomfiture with the whole grisly business of showbiz renown. The BFI
movie database characterizes the film thus: "An account of Heathcote William's work, and Al Pacino's obsession with his writing. Includes an interview with Harold Pinter and footage from Pacino's film The Local Stigmatic."
The half-hour film was presented by the comedian and musician John Dowie
, amply cut out for the part by dint of his own declared anorakish urge to collect all available Williams memorabilia. The fruits of his scouring the auction lists and the second-hand bookshops, he revealed, he kept in a special large wooden box. The element of spoof revolved around the conceit that the film's subject didn't turn up until the very last minute, and then only to decline to take part. In fact, he had appeared earlier, but in a variety of ludicrous disguises. The title alluded to the fact that Williams, living at the time in Cornwall
just the other side of the River Tamar
, seemed twice over the yearsfirst after AC/DC, and then in the wake of Whale Nationto have come to grief as a consequence of having succumbed to the temptations arising out of not just one, but from a second 15 minutes of fame.
In 1998, he appeared in an episode of the US TV sitcom Friends
.
with his wife Diana Senior.The couple have two daughters together, China and Lily, now both adults. Lily is a literary agent at Curtis Brown.
His son, Charlie, was adopted by the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour
and given the surname Gilmour after the latter married Charlie's mother, the writer and journalist Polly Samson
, in 1994. In 2011 Charlie Gilmour was sentenced to 16 months in prison for his behaviour during the 2010 student protests
. He admitted the offence of violent disorder
. He had also been photographed swinging from a Union flag
on the cenotaph
war memorial in Whitehall
. In court Gilmour said he'd been on LSD
and valium at the time. He claimed that his drug use had been precipitated by an "emotionally painful" meeting with Heathcote Williams a few months earlier.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
and award-winning playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror. He is perhaps best known for the book-length polemical poem Whale Nation, which in 1988 became "the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling." In the early 1970s, his agitational graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill
Notting Hill
Notting Hill is an area in London, England, close to the north-western corner of Kensington Gardens, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea...
district.
Early life and career
John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams was born in HelsbyHelsby
Helsby is a large village and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire West and Chester and the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England. At the 2001 Census, Helsby had a population of 4,701.-Geography:...
, Cheshire
Cheshire
Cheshire is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although its largest town is Warrington. Other major towns include Widnes, Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow...
. After his schooldays at Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
, he changed his name to Heathcote Williams. His father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer. From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book was The Speakers (1964), an account of life at Speakers' Corner
Speakers' Corner
A Speakers' Corner is an area where open-air public speaking, debate and discussion are allowed. The original and most noted is in the north-east corner of Hyde Park in London, United Kingdom. Speakers there may speak on any subject, as long as the police consider their speeches lawful, although...
in Hyde Park
Hyde Park, London
Hyde Park is one of the largest parks in central London, United Kingdom, and one of the Royal Parks of London, famous for its Speakers' Corner.The park is divided in two by the Serpentine...
. In 1974, it was adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company
Joint Stock Theatre Company
The Joint Stock Theatre Company was founded in London 1974 by David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark and David Aukin. The director William Gaskill was also an important part of the company. It was primarily a new work company....
.
His first full-length play, AC/DC (1970), a critique of the burgeoning mental health industry, includes a thinly veiled attack on his fellow denizen of 1960s alternative society
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
, and doyen of the anti-psychiatry
Anti-psychiatry
Anti-psychiatry is a configuration of groups and theoretical constructs that emerged in the 1960s, and questioned the fundamental assumptions and practices of psychiatry, such as its claim that it achieves universal, scientific objectivity. Its igniting influences were Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing,...
movement, R. D. Laing. Its production at the Royal Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
, did not, however, appear to impede cordial relations between the two in later years. AC/DC won the London Evening Standards Most Promising Play Award. It also received the 1972 John Whiting Award
John Whiting Award
The John Whiting Award is awarded annually to a British or Commonwealth playwright who, in the opinion of a consortium of UK theatres, shows a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society...
for being "a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society." It was described in the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page review by Charles Marowitz
Charles Marowitz
Charles Marowitz is an American critic, theatre director, and playwright who has been a regular columnist on Swans Commentary—a cultural-political bi-weekly—since 2004...
as 'the first play of the twenty-first century.' AC/DC was produced in New York in 1971 at the Chelsea Theater Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Other plays include the one-act monologue Hancock's Last Half Hour, The Local Stigmatic
The Local Stigmatic
The Local Stigmatic is a short film directed by David Wheeler and produced by and starring Al Pacino. It was filmed and edited during the late 1980s. It had a showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in March 1990, but was never released theatrically...
, The Immortalist, and the impossible to categorise Remember The Truth Dentist — an early effort, again at the Royal Court, directed by fellow-contrarian Ken Campbell
Ken Campbell
Ken Campbell was an English writer, actor, director and comedian.Ken Campbell may also refer to:* Ken Campbell , Canadian evangelist* Ken Campbell , former Scotland international goalkeeper...
.
The inaugural issue of the London Review of Books
London Review of Books
The London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
included an effusive profile by fellow Etonian Francis Wyndham titled The Magic of Heathcote Williams. His foremost fans among the famous are the late Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
and Al Pacino
Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy, Tony Montana in Scarface, Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice in Dick Tracy and Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way, though he has also appeared...
.
Poetry
Williams himself is said to regard fame as 'the first disgrace,' a phrase Pacino from time to time quotes in private. He has been notoriously reluctant to cooperate in the promotion of his work on a commercial level, refusing, for example, to go to the US to promote AC/DC. He has been the despair of his publishers. The only book-signing tours he has ever done'enough,' he complained, 'to cripple a rock-star'were merely the result of relentless pressure from Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
's PR department. This episode, though having undeniably fortunate consequences for the poet's bank balance, was to havealmost as though to confirm his own worst assumptionsagonizingly unfortunate consequences for his private life. Not that this was Williams's debut 15 minutes
15 Minutes
15 Minutes is a 2001 film starring Robert De Niro , Edward Burns and Karel Roden. It is about a homicide detective and a fire marshal who must stop a couple of Eastern European murderers from videotaping their killing and becoming sensationalized by the media. Melina Kanakaredes and Kelsey Grammer,...
, exactly. An affair some years earlier with the model Jean Shrimpton
Jean Shrimpton
Jean Rosemary Shrimpton is an English model and actress. She was an icon of Swinging London and is considered to be one of the world's first supermodels....
, an icon of 60s Swinging London
Swinging London
Swinging London is a catch-all term applied to the fashion and cultural scene that flourished in London, in the 1960s.It was a youth-oriented phenomenon that emphasised the new and modern. It was a period of optimism and hedonism, and a cultural revolution. One catalyst was the recovery of the...
, had resulted in the writer setting himself alight on her doorstep. Whether intentional or the upshot of a magical stunt gone wrongWilliams at the time being an ardent fire-eaterwas never entirely clear. It was not unreasonably supposed to be a case of the supermodel dumping the scrivener. Somewhat astonishingly, however, in her autobiography published in the early 1990s, Shrimpton asserted that it was Williams who had in fact walked out on her.
Polly Samson
Polly Samson is a journalist and writer.-Biography:Samson was born to a diplomatic correspondent father and a writer mother of Chinese descent, Esther Cheo Ying, who wrote a memoir, Black Country Girl in Red China, about her time serving as a Major in Mao Zedong's Red Army...
assisted him to achieve the mass audience he'd sought for his trilogy of book-length polemical poems on environmental themes.
Each was packed with detailed research and scores of photographs. Written some years earlier as visionary propaganda, they were probably the most lavishly illustrated English poetry since William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
. They had otherwise been gathering dust in a corner of his then agent's office. The North American rights for the poem Whale Nation (1988) alone were sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Frankfurt Book Fair
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's largest trade fair for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. As to the number of visitors, the Turin Book Fair attracts about as many visitors, viz. some 300,000....
for $100,000. A more recent writer on the subject has described it as an "epic plea for the future of the whale, a hymn to the beauty, majesty and intelligence of the largest mammals on earth, as well as a prayer for their protection... Whale Nation became the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling, and for a moment, back in 1988, it seemed as if a shameful chapter in human history might finally be drawing to a close."
Whale Nation was followed by Sacred Elephant (1989) and Autogeddon (1991). The latter still ranks as the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date. It characterizes the motor car's global death toll as, "A humdrum holocaust, the third world war nobody bothered to declare." Each poem was made into a film by BBC Television
BBC Television
BBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
, Autogeddon performed by Jeremy Irons
Jeremy Irons
Jeremy John Irons is an English actor. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969, and has since appeared in many London theatre productions including The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the...
who, somewhat to the chagrin of its author, turned out in promotional interviews to be an unabashed car-lover.
Williams is a consummate reader of his own poems, as well as of the literary classics. His performance of his Buckley-esque Jumping Jesus was characterised by an eminent London literary critic as 'like Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
on speed.' His public readings of Whale Nation have been known to reduce some members of the audience to tears. His recordings for Naxos Records
Naxos Records
Naxos Records is a record label specializing in classical music. Through a number of imprints, Naxos also releases genres including Chinese music, jazz, world music, and early rock & roll. The company was founded in 1987 by Klaus Heymann, a German-born resident of Hong Kong.Naxos is the largest...
, which include readings from the Buddhist scriptures, Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
and the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, have won awards.
In 2011, Williams began a new collaboration with Roy Hutchins, who had performed Whale Nation, Autogeddon and Falling For A Dolphin in the 1980s. The result was Zanzibar Cats, a performance of recent short poems. In What's on Stage, the reviewer Michael Coveney wrote, 'These wonderful poems seize on political absurdity, planetary destruction and social injustice with relish and delight, as well as great erudition and verbal dexterity.'
Painting and sculpture
Williams's second bout of fame caused him to cease writing in effect, and turn to painting and sculpture full-time. Leading the life of a would-be recluse, he received prolonged tuition from the 'New Ruralist' artist Graham OvendenGraham Ovenden
Graham Ovenden is an English painter, fine art photographer, writer and architect. His estranged wife is the artist Annie Ovenden. Their daughter, Emily, is a writer and is a singer with the Mediaeval Baebes...
, at the latter's home on the edge of Bodmin Moor
Bodmin Moor
Bodmin Moor is a granite moorland in northeastern Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is in size, and originally dates from the Carboniferous period of geological history....
. The result was an out-pouring of hundreds of canvases, including satirical pastiches of the works of Van Gogh, Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
, Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer was an English painter. Much of his work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life...
, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
and others. He also produced a number of sculptures of great piles of books, tottering and damp-swollen, elaborately hand-carved in wood.
Song-writing
Williams's occasional but typically anarchistic forays into the realm of lyric-writing include Wrinkly Bonk, yet to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, and Why D'Ya Do It?, a sexually explicit exploration of carnal jealousy, for Marianne FaithfullMarianne Faithfull
Marianne Evelyn Faithfull is an award-winning English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades....
's 1979 classic album Broken English. Williams's words were enough to cause a walk-out by the female workers on EMI's
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
production line.
Magazines
Williams was for a time associate editor of the literary journal Transatlantic Review, as well as being one of those responsible for the notorious alternative sex paper Suck. He was a frequent contributor to the London underground paper International TimesInternational Times
International Times was an underground newspaper founded in London in 1966. Editors included Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Pete Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath...
during the 1970s, to the radical vegetarian magazine Seed and to The Fanatic, issues of which would appear sporadically and provocatively in different formats and various countries of Western Europe. In 1974, he launched his own mimeographed underground newspaper, The Sunday Head. It was published from his home in Notting Hill Gate, London at the time when he was also the impresario for Albion Free State’s Meat Roxy, a series of music, dance and poetry events held in a squatted, redundant bingo hall near the Portobello market.
An anthology of his tracts and manifestos from this period, Severe Joy, was announced by his then publisher but, to the disappointment of his fans, for some reason never actually appeared. A sampling did appear in a bi-lingual, limited edition titled Manifestoes from the Rotterdam-based Cold Turkey Press
Cold Turkey Press
“Classic Gerard Bellaart - fine ambitious spiritmind and meticulous loving eyehappily surprised”Allen Ginsberg The Cold Turkey Press motto is CONCEDO NVLLI,with the admonition:“He who hides his madmen dies voiceless.”...
as well as in the Manchester literary magazine Wordworks in 1975.
Film
The theme of Williams's early one-act play The Local Stigmatic is fame and its adverse consequences, possibly a reason why Al PacinoAl Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy, Tony Montana in Scarface, Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice in Dick Tracy and Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way, though he has also appeared...
, with financial assistance from Jon Voight
Jon Voight
Jonathan Vincent "Jon" Voight is an American actor. He has received an Academy Award, out of four nominations, and three Golden Globe Awards, out of nine nominations. Voight is the father of actress Angelina Jolie....
, would perform it off-off Broadway before he himself achieved what the play pillories. In later years the film version became known as 'Pacino's secret project,' representing the actor's debut as a director. It was released as part of the Pacino: An Actor's Vision box-set in 2007.
Williams's own film performances include Prospero
Prospero
Prospero is the protagonist in The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare.- The Tempest :Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, who was put to sea on "a rotten carcass of a butt [boat]" to die by his usurping brother, Antonio, twelve years before the play begins. Prospero and Miranda survived,...
in Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman
Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author.-Life:...
's version of The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
(1979), Wish You Were Here (1987) and Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). His portrayal of the central character's psychiatrist in Wish You Were Here became something of a YouTube favourite. Williams has more recently enjoyed a steady stream of bit-parts in big-budget Hollywood productions, such as The City of Ember
The City of Ember
The City of Ember is a post-apocalyptic novel by Jeanne DuPrau that was published in 2003. Similar to Suzanne Martel's The City Under Ground published in 1963, the story is about Ember, an underground city that is slowly running out of power and supplies due to its aging infrastructure...
and the ill-fated Basic Instinct 2
Basic Instinct 2
Basic Instinct 2, also known as Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, is a 2006 German/British/American/Spanish thriller film and the sequel to 1992's Basic Instinct. The film was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and produced by Mario Kassar, Joel B. Michaels, and Andrew G. Vajna. The screenplay was by...
.
Television
Green politics
Green politics is a political ideology that aims for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, social liberalism, and grassroots democracy...
guise of a tree somehow blessed with oratorical powers, regaled the watching millions for a full fifteen minutes on the virtues of life without Westminster. Albion Free State was his name for a utopian vision of an England free from government and bosses. Williams was one of 120 or so squatters who had commandeered a small chunk of West London, just about visible from Television Centre
BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre at White City in West London is the headquarters of BBC Television. Officially opened on 29 June 1960, it remains one of the largest to this day; having featured over the years as backdrop to many BBC programmes, it is one of the most readily recognisable such facilities...
itself. Frestonia
Frestonia
Frestonia was the name adopted by the residents of Freston Road, a street at the north western boundary of Notting Hill, London, also known as Notting Dale, when they attempted to secede from the United Kingdom in 1977. Actor David Rappaport was the Foreign Minister, while playwright Heathcote...
, as the extensive squat was known, had declared itself independent of Great Britain. The actor David Rappaport
David Rappaport
David Stephen Rappaport was an English actor, probably one of the best known dwarf actors in television and film...
was proclaimed Foreign Minister and Williams served as ambassador to the UK. Postage stamps were issued bearing the face of Guy the Gorilla
Guy the Gorilla
Guy the Gorilla was a Western Lowland Gorilla who was London Zoo's famous resident, something of a celebrity in the 1960s–70s and was often profiled on kids TV shows and natural history productions...
instead of the Queen
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
Elizabeth II is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize,...
; they made no mention of currency, but simply carried the legend, God Will Provide. The whole rebellion, which exasperated the authorities for years, entailed much litigation before the bulldozers were finally able to move in.
Williams later applied his abilities as a conjurerhe has long been a member of The Magic Circle
The Magic Circle
The Magic Circle is a British organisation, founded in London in 1905, dedicated to promoting and advancing the art of magic.- History :The Magic Circle was founded in 1905 after a meeting of 23 amateur and professional magicians at London's Pinoli's Restaurant...
to come up with a Christmas
Christmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
play based on the little-known fact that Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
used to revel in performing magic shows for his friends and extended family. What the Dickens! depicted the novelist, with the likes of Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
and Thackeray standing by to assist, as he manipulated "airy nothings" and assorted props to the delighted squeals of foundling
Orphan
An orphan is a child permanently bereaved of or abandoned by his or her parents. In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents is called an orphan...
children from the Thomas Coram Home. The production featured a young Ben Cross
Ben Cross
Ben Cross is a British actor of the stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of the British Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams in the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire.-Early life:...
as Dickens, with a supporting cast that included Dinsdale Landen
Dinsdale Landen
Dinsdale James Landen was a British actor known mainly for his television appearances.Landen was born at Margate. He made his television debut in 1959 as Pip in an adaptation of Great Expectations and made his film debut in 1960, with a walk-on part in The League of Gentlemen...
and Kenneth Haigh
Kenneth Haigh
Kenneth Haigh is a British actor. He played the central role of Jimmy Porter in the very first production of John Osborne's seminal play Look Back in Anger in 1956. His performance in a 1958 Broadway theatre production of that play so moved one young woman in the audience that she mounted the...
. It was broadcast by Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
in Christmas 1983, with a repeat screening the following Christmas.
In March 1993, Williams was the not entirely enthusiastic subject of a spoof arts documentary titled Every Time I Cross the Tamar I Get Into Trouble. Screened by Channel Four in its Without Walls slot, it implicitly sparred yet again with the recurring theme of the fatality of fame, its hollow allurements and the nature of fandom. In this instance, just for a change, a twinkling Pacino appeared happy to cast himself in the role of fan, implying his own supposed discomfiture with the whole grisly business of showbiz renown. The BFI
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
movie database characterizes the film thus: "An account of Heathcote William's work, and Al Pacino's obsession with his writing. Includes an interview with Harold Pinter and footage from Pacino's film The Local Stigmatic."
The half-hour film was presented by the comedian and musician John Dowie
John Dowie (humourist)
John Dowie is a British comedian, musician, and writer. He began performing stand-up comedy in 1969.-Career:Dowie was among the inaugural acts on Tony Wilson's Factory Records label. In 1978 he contributed three comedic songs to the first Factory music release, A Factory Sample, along with Joy...
, amply cut out for the part by dint of his own declared anorakish urge to collect all available Williams memorabilia. The fruits of his scouring the auction lists and the second-hand bookshops, he revealed, he kept in a special large wooden box. The element of spoof revolved around the conceit that the film's subject didn't turn up until the very last minute, and then only to decline to take part. In fact, he had appeared earlier, but in a variety of ludicrous disguises. The title alluded to the fact that Williams, living at the time in Cornwall
Cornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...
just the other side of the River Tamar
River Tamar
The Tamar is a river in South West England, that forms most of the border between Devon and Cornwall . It is one of several British rivers whose ancient name is assumed to be derived from a prehistoric river word apparently meaning "dark flowing" and which it shares with the River Thames.The...
, seemed twice over the yearsfirst after AC/DC, and then in the wake of Whale Nationto have come to grief as a consequence of having succumbed to the temptations arising out of not just one, but from a second 15 minutes of fame.
In 1998, he appeared in an episode of the US TV sitcom Friends
Friends
Friends is an American sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004. The series revolves around a group of friends in Manhattan. The series was produced by Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television...
.
Private life
Williams lives in OxfordOxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
with his wife Diana Senior.The couple have two daughters together, China and Lily, now both adults. Lily is a literary agent at Curtis Brown.
His son, Charlie, was adopted by the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour
David Gilmour
David Jon Gilmour, CBE, D.M. is an English rock musician and multi-instrumentalist who is best known as the guitarist, one of the lead singers and main songwriters in the progressive rock band Pink Floyd. In addition to his work with Pink Floyd, Gilmour has worked as a producer for a variety of...
and given the surname Gilmour after the latter married Charlie's mother, the writer and journalist Polly Samson
Polly Samson
Polly Samson is a journalist and writer.-Biography:Samson was born to a diplomatic correspondent father and a writer mother of Chinese descent, Esther Cheo Ying, who wrote a memoir, Black Country Girl in Red China, about her time serving as a Major in Mao Zedong's Red Army...
, in 1994. In 2011 Charlie Gilmour was sentenced to 16 months in prison for his behaviour during the 2010 student protests
2010 UK student protests
The 2010 UK student protests were a series of demonstrations that began in November 2010 in several areas of the United Kingdom, with the focal point of protests centred in London. The initial event was the largest student protest in the UK since the Labour government first proposed the Teaching...
. He admitted the offence of violent disorder
Violent Disorder
Violent disorder is a statutory offence in England and Wales. It is created by of the Public Order Act 1986. Sections 2 to of that Act provide:...
. He had also been photographed swinging from a Union flag
Union Flag
The Union Flag, also known as the Union Jack, is the flag of the United Kingdom. It retains an official or semi-official status in some Commonwealth Realms; for example, it is known as the Royal Union Flag in Canada. It is also used as an official flag in some of the smaller British overseas...
on the cenotaph
The Cenotaph, Whitehall
The Cenotaph is a war memorial located in Whitehall, London. It began as a temporary structure erected for a peace parade following the end of World War I, but following an outpouring of national sentiment it was replaced by a permanent structure and designated the United Kingdom's official war...
war memorial in Whitehall
Whitehall
Whitehall is a road in Westminster, in London, England. It is the main artery running north from Parliament Square, towards Charing Cross at the southern end of Trafalgar Square...
. In court Gilmour said he'd been on LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
and valium at the time. He claimed that his drug use had been precipitated by an "emotionally painful" meeting with Heathcote Williams a few months earlier.
Further reading
- Whale Nation, London, Jonathan Cape; New York, Harmony Books, 1988. ISBN 9780517569320
- Sacred Elephant, London, Jonathan Cape; New York, Harmony Books, 1989. ISBN 0517573202
- Falling for a Dolphin, London, Jonathan Cape, 1990. ISBN 0224027891
- Autogeddon, London, Jonathan Cape; New York, Arcade, 1991. ISBN 1559701765
External links
- List of stage works on doollee.com - The Playwrights' Database
- Film appearances; list of writings
- Mini-profile, The Independent, 15 August 1995
- Comedian John Dowie on directing Whale Nation
- The Australian stage version of Autogeddon
- Webpage on Pacino's version of The Local Stigmatic
- Pacino speaks at length about The Local Stigmatic
- Zanzibar Cats, performed by Roy Hutchins (2011)
- Interview with Heathcote Williams in Herald Scotland, August 2011
Audio
- WILLIAMS: Sacred Elephant – NA209712 clip read by Heathcote Williams
- YouTube – "Tell me all the swear words you know" Williams in movie Wish You Were Here
- YouTube – Marianne Faithfull – Why d'ya do it (live) Marianne Faithfull, Hollywood, 2005