Disciplined Irreverence
A BRITISH-BORN STAR OF STAGE AND SCREEN CALLS THE BERKSHIRES “HOME”
July 24
By Haas Regen
GREGORY CHERIN
THE SITTING ROOM of James Warwick’s nearly 200-year-old cottage on Main Street, Egremont, is warm, cozy, and genuinely inviting—English charm meets American hospitality. He has been a working actor and director for more than half a century and a pillar of the theater community in Western Massachusetts for 25 years. When and if you have the privilege of discussing his illustrious career on the stages of London’s West End and New York’s Great White Way, pray you have a few hours to spare. The stories are better than most BBC miniseries.
“Father really thought that I should be a landscape gardener,” Warwick chuckles. “This ‘damn play-acting,’ as he called it—‘damn play-acting!’ It was not something to be taken too seriously. And maybe being a landscape gardener was the only thing I could possibly be practical about. I used to grow my own carrots when I was 11!”
A pivotal moment came in the middle of a summer holiday when he was 16. Having just performed the role of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar at the Worthing High School for Boys, Warwick got a job calling bingo numbers at the Worthing Pier amusement arcade.
“I’d be wearing shorts and my grandmother's green-knitted sweater, calling on the red, number red, number nine, number nine, on the red, red, red, red, nine, nine, nine,” he reminisces. “A couple walked into the arcade with two small children, two daughters. And I recognized them. I thought, ‘My goodness, I know who you are! You're on the television!’ The two little girls were both very, very pretty, looking up at me thinking, ‘Who is this peculiar man in his green sweater and shorts calling bingo numbers?’ ”
As luck would have it, the man was Eric Thompson, actor and producer of the children’s program The Magic Roundabout, on which he portrayed the kind-hearted wizard, Zebedee. His wife was the Scottish actress Phyllida Law. Their two daughters: Emma and Sophie Thompson.
“‘You've got a very good voice,’ the man said. And I thanked him. Then he asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I replied, ‘Well, I want to be a landscape gardener. Or an actor like you.’ And he said, ‘Oh, well, I don't think you should be a landscape gardener. You're not really landscape garden material, are you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can grow my own carrots!’”
Their encounter proved serendipitous: Thompson and Law were both instructors at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. It was decided that young James should receive proper training as an actor. Thompson met Warwick at Victoria Station and began mentoring him. In addition to learning the fundamentals of movement, voice, and breaking down theatrical text, Warwick studied poetry, makeup, mask, improvisation, fencing, and tumbling (or “tensing and fumbling,” he jokes).
The “golden years,” though, were those spent learning his craft through professional practice. After completing his classical acting training, Warwick received a year’s contract at the prestigious Birmingham Rep—aka “The Rep”—to do a new production every three weeks. He celebrated his 21st birthday there, performing Rosencrantz to Richard Chamberlain's Hamlet. “I also played the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie,” he remembers. “What an exposure!”
In 1973, Warwick received a call that would set about an extraordinary series of events: “I was playing Leontes at Bristol Old Vic. And my agent, who was really nice—I had a wonderful agent then—said, ‘Come up to London. They're doing this show, and you've got to sing a song.’ And I said, ‘I don't really sing.’ He said, ‘Well, you've got to come anyway because they really want an actor who can sing a little bit.’ I went in to audition, sang my song, and went home thinking, ‘This is ridiculous, it’s a rock show, I can't do it. I don't even like rock, I'm a classical music nerd!’”
That “rock show” was Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show starring yet-to-be-discovered dynamo Tim Curry. The composer Richard Hartley, who collaborated with O’Brien on the score, played in the band. After two previews in June 1973, the production ran for 2,960 performances at several locations throughout London. It won the Evening Standard award for Best Musical.
“I was not the first Brad, I have to say,” Warwick admits. “That was Christopher Malcolm, who had done it at the Royal Court Upstairs. It was a little tiny theater, and nobody knew it was going to be successful. It was only booked in for a three-week run, I think. And it wasn’t really the reviews; it was the word-of-mouth. People were saying it was ground-breaking, that they’d never seen anything like it—that it was dangerous. Well, it certainly was dangerous. And that was all Tim Curry. He was absolutely nerve-wracking!”
By 1980, Warwick had done dozens of television shows and over two hundred radio plays when he landed London Weekend Television’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? It co-starred Joan Hickson, Francesca Annis, and legendary thespian Sir John Gielgud.
“He used to call me ‘Puss,’” Warwick giggles about Gielgud. “We worked togethethree times. ‘You’ve got a lovely smile, Puss,’ he would say. ‘Lovely to see you again, dear boy.’ I absolutely adored him, and he taught me a lot. He was brilliant, mischievous, masterful, full of wonderful stories—consummate, consummate.”
The Christie crime thriller caught the eye of Herbert Schmertz, then the vice president of public affairs for the Mobil Corporation and a sponsor of Masterpiece Theatre for WGBH public television. He contacted Warwick’s agent with an idea: a new series featuring Warwick and Annis. “Schmertz said he wanted ‘lots of lovely clothes and a Rolls-Royce,’” Warwick laughs.
Between October 1983 and January 1984, the series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime ran for one season (ten 50-minute episodes), including a pilot TV movie The Secret Adversary, all based on Christie short stories. Warwick and Annis starred as husband-and-wife sleuthing team Tommy and Prudence “Tuppence” Beresford, whose London-based detective agency was hired to investigate complicated cases ranging from Soviet espionage to paranormal activity. It was a publicity tour for Partners in Crime that brought Warwick to the United States for the first time. Schmertz arranged for him to visit Phoenix as his first point of entry.
“How vast America is!” Warwick says with a twinkle in his eye. “I thought, ‘Gosh, how can I get back to little old England after this?’ ”
Smitten with the rugged frontier of the West, Warwick soon found work in California. Although he was not able to obtain a work permit to live in the United States full-time until 1993, he landed a sizeable gig performing the voices of numerous characters within the Marvel Animated Universe, notably in Iron Man and Fantastic Four (and later, a slew of popular Star Wars video games).
“In our profession, continuum is one of the hardest things to achieve, but it's the thing that ultimately serves us best in a long career,” says actor Brian Cox, star of HBO’s Succession. “James is a brilliant example of continuum and how a sense of continuum has served him as a leading actor in the UK, a teacher and a theater director, all of which he has achieved to an incredibly high standard.”
Nevertheless, an enduring career in show business has troughs as well as peaks. By the mid-1980s, Warwick had watched 16 of his closest friends and colleagues die of complications due to AIDS. That’s when he suffered what he calls “a complete breakdown.” He was 40 years old.
“I couldn’t make sense of it,” Warwick reveals. “I felt I didn't know what love was. That if I'd loved them more, they wouldn't be dead. And as with any clinical depression, it became a distortion, and I lost my core.”
A turning point came while Warwick was attending day therapy at Paddington Hospital. Producer Bill Kenwright asked if he could play Philip Lombard in a nine-month tour of Christie’s And Then There Were None all over the United Kingdom.
“My agent said, ‘Oh, Bill, I have to tell you that James has just had a nervous breakdown.’ And Bill said, ‘Just the one? Does he want to do it or not?’ And I can tell you, that's what got me back. It was a clearing out of all the old rubbish, all the doubts and fear—of who I was, of whether I was ever going to be an actor again. And honestly, I thank God for Bill Kenwright. He gave me confidence after having been through something terrifying. That's why I say I know what hell is like. I mean, I think that was hell. And I have enormous empathy with people who have any mental or emotional challenge like that because I know what it's like. I have been there.”
During the 1988-1989 season, the Tony Award®-winning American producer Mike Merrick came to see Warwick as King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot at the Liverpool Playhouse. Merrick was instrumental in casting Warwick in the same role in the 1995 international touring production. The tour took him to every U.S. state except three. On his first visit to Massachusetts, he stopped in Stockbridge for lunch at Red Lion Inn. Little did he realize that his immediate connection to the Berkshires would have far-reaching and life-changing consequences.
“I was in my double seat on the back of the bus—because I was playing the king, of course!—and thought, well, if I’m going to live in America permanently, Massachusetts is certainly beautiful. But I never thought I’d be asked to work here, let alone be inspired to make a life here!”
The following year, Warwick found his name above a Broadway marquee in a revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, directed by Peter Hall and produced by Bill Kenwright. He starred as the play’s main character, Sir Robert Chiltern, alongside Madeleine Potter as Lady Chiltern, Stephanie Beacham as Mrs. Cheveley, and New York theater doyenne Kim Hunter as Lady Markby.
“What a wonderful project!” Warwick declares. “That was what cemented it. I sold my apartment in London because I knew that the horse was going in this direction, and I was still on the horse, so I might as well go in that direction!”
In the spring of 1999, Warwick was living in Los Angeles when he got a call from Kate Maguire, artistic director of Berkshire Theatre Festival (now Berkshire Theatre Group). She offered him the role of Major Alistair Ross in Crucifer of Blood, a Sherlock Holmes mystery penned by former Artistic Director Paul Giovanni. Tony®-winner Stephen Spinella played Holmes, and Berkshire favorite David Adkins was his Watson.
“James and I first met as actors in that production,” Adkins recalls. “I was immediately impressed with him: the perfect mix of a trained British elegance onstage, and a generous, witty camaraderie off. He has what I like most in an artist: disciplined irreverence. And as a director, James has that rarest of qualities: Actors really want to work with him. Not only because he understands the classic structure of playwriting—not only because he understands beauty and composition—but because he understands the actor’s process and welcomes the collaborative spirit that informs the best productions. He’s a master of his trade.”
By 2001, Warwick was a fixture at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. In that summer’s mainstage season, he directed the operetta H.M.S. Pinafore and starred as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. The latter was directed by BTG Associate Director Eric Hill, who says Warwick “is one of the best actors I have ever worked with.”
Fast-forward to 2024: Warwick lives in the Berkshires year-round with his partner, David Mead. Together, they’ve planted over 100 trees, plants, and shrubs on their property. They share their home with two “creatures”: George, a 7-year-old tabby, and Lilly, an 11-month-old beagle mix rescued earlier this year.
“Sometimes, it is hard for me to fathom just how one man can do so much with one life,” says Mead. “With such grace, compassion, and the most beautifully creative mind imaginable. I am very blessed to have him by my side. He has shaped me and my life tremendously. I am so, so grateful to call him my love.”
Regarding his theater career, Warwick remains as diligent as ever. This season, he will direct three plays: A Body of Water by Lee Blessing at Shakespeare & Company (June 21–July 21); Tom Wells’s Big Big Sky at Chester Theatre Company (August 8–18); and Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield (October 24–December 1).
“We're thrilled to have James back with us this summer,” says Shakespeare & Company Artistic Director Allyn Burrows. “He's such a delightful collaborator, a real joy to have at the center of any process. Mothers and Sons, The Children, The Chairs, A Walk in the Woods, and Lunar Eclipse are all plays that demand a keen eye and a firm hand to be properly brought to successful fruition, and James navigates all the twists and turns with tireless curiosity.”
“With James at the helm, the work will get done, the designs will come together at just the right time, the actors will arrive with their A-game, and the producers will be relieved at the outcome,” says Jim Frangione, artistic director of Great Barrington Public Theater. “James is a colleague and a good friend, an old hand—and I mean that in the best way possible—and an experienced man of the theater whom I respect a great deal.”
James Barry, co-producing artistic director of Chester Theatre Company (CTC), concurs: “This summer marks James Warwick's ninth production at Chester Theatre Company. His many CTC credits include acclaimed productions of Madagascar with Debra Jo Rupp, High Dive with Jennifer Roan, and the regional premiere of Halcyon Days by Deidre Kinahan. He is one of those theater artists whose extensive background as an actor prepared him to flourish into a wonderfully sensitive and thoughtful director. He truly understands actors and always has an eye on the big picture storytelling. James's multifaceted career in the theater is an absolute inspiration to me.”
“There is, everywhere, a pervading culture,” Warwick observes. “When I first got here, I thought it was silly marketing. You know, the number-one cultural resort in America. But then, having worked here, you come to realize there’s nowhere else like it. Not just America. There's nowhere else like it in Europe—and I've been all over Europe! And you have all the contributory factors like mountains and the lakes and the streams—but also a good social and political atmosphere. That, I think, is the great advantage to living in Massachusetts: It has one of the healthiest attitudes toward its communities.”
When he’s not directing, Warwick enjoys riding his zero-turn lawn mower and admiring the loveliness of his gardens. Despite their fondness for the Berkshires, Warwick and Mead often devise weekend trips to Cape Cod or other coastal towns—or to Great Britain to see Warwick’s family. Warwick sees every local theater production—and still lunches with friends at the Red Lion Inn—but values quiet contemplation above all. Even in rehearsal, he says he spends most of the time listening and being present.
“Something that’s become apparent to me only recently, in the last couple of years, is that I can stand next to somebody and know how they're feeling,” Warwick confesses, “and not just actors— people in the supermarket! It has become an extraordinary honor, a gift to be used carefully and sensitively. I take that very seriously. It has been part of my continual journey. I've had the opportunity to apply this gift and let it grow. You know, I think I've got another 10 or 15 years left— hopefully 20! Then again, maybe I don't. Who knows? I think that, with every job that I do, I learn more. I've nurtured that and myself to the point where I can feel secure enough to give the gift away.”
Don’t miss these plays directed by James Warwick this summer and fall:
June 21–July 21: A Body of Water by Lee Blessing, Roman Garden Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble St., Lenox
shakespeare.org
August 8–18: Tom Wells’s Big Big Sky at Chester Theatre Company, Town Hall Theatre, 15 Middlefield Rd., Chester
chestertheatre.org
October 24–December 1: Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Majestic Theater, 131 Elm St., West Springfield
magestictheater.com