🔗 Share this article

In the middle of the hustle of midtown Manhattan on one spring day in 2022, James Cromwell entered a coffee chain, glued his hand to a surface, and complained about the extra fees on plant-based alternatives. “How long until you cease making excessive earnings while patrons, animals, and the environment endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters streamed the demonstration live.

However, the unconcerned customers of the establishment paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the most statuesque person ever nominated for an Academy Award, deliverer of one of the best speeches in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a Star Trek production. Police arrived to close the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, hear me at the top of my lungs speaking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would go around to the far corner, get their order and stand there looking at their cellphones. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have very little time!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of the industry’s greatest activists who act – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He marched against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in civil disobedience actions over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been detained, and has even spent time in prison.

Currently, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that demonstrated for peace abroad and social advances 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 veteran progressive who might have a revolutionary poster in the loft and consider a political figure to be not radical enough on the economic system. When visited at his home – a log cabin in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his spouse, the actor his partner – he stands up from a seat at the hearth with a friendly welcome and outstretched hand.

Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody intelligent say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The mechanism is in the lock. All they have to do is a single action to activate it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every exception, every loophole that the legislature has written so assiduously into their laws.”

Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father John Cromwell, a famous Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the 1950s purge of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.

This apparently harmless comment, coupled with his presidency of the “a political group” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to his father being called to give evidence to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had little of importance to say but a committee representative still demanded an apology.

John Cromwell 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 a fellow actor and won a Tony award. James muses: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his closest companions – 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 at fault or not – sort of like today.”

Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his stepmother, another actor, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially hesitant to follow in their footsteps. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”

However, a visit to a Scandinavian country, where his father was making a picture with a famed director’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “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.’”

Art and politics collided again when he joined a theatre company founded by African American performers, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for predominantly African American audiences in a southern state, Alabama, Tennessee, and an area. Some performances took place under security protection in case extremists tried to firebomb the theatre.

Godot struck a chord. At one performance in a location, the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer 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 offering us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the southern US. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the civil war.’ A kind 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 fist balled. I would have done something rash. a company founder informed the man that he was infringing upon our civil rights and that they would get to the bottom of it.”

However, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and breaks the fourth wall. “I’m hearing my words,” he says. “These are not just stories about an actor doing his thing growing up, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his nose clean, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being assaulted, people were being fired upon, people had crosses burned 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 memoir because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of various activities as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will confide that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a memoir. But he has minimal interest for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be predictable 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 accumulating film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career took off thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in a beloved film, a 1995 movie about a animal that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a surprise hit, earning more than $250 million worldwide.

Cromwell funded his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $sixty thousand to hire a publicist and buy industry ads to publicize his performance after the studio declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the nomination, 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 sick of the routine 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: ‘Jamie, 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 chip on my shoulder 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 good enough, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The recognition for the movie led to roles including leaders, popes and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ a film, as the industry tried to categorise him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the interstellar pioneer a character, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all astronauts on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “avarice” and “the bottom line”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the business transaction”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much shouting.”

He offers the example of a film, which he describes as a “genius piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s intimidating Captain Dudley Smith asks Kevin Spacey’s a role, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before shooting him dead. Spacey, by then an award recipient, disagreed with director and co-writer a creative over what Vincennes should reply. A quietly defiant Spacey won their disagreement.

This spurred Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson objected. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘Jamie, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s background and his propensities, I said: ‘You expletive, fuck you, you insult! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive