Martin Shaw - The Biography. Stafford Hildred
particularly when the word got around that Polanski was planning to place emphasis on youth and was seeking largely unknowns.
Martin knew one thing for certain: Polanski’s pedigree as a film-maker would ensure that his Macbeth would be markedly different from any other Shakespearean plays which had previously made the transition from the stage to the cinema. Polanski was by now an A-list director and if the chance to work for him presented itself, he would grab it with both hands.
In 10 years Polanski had come a long way. In the early 1960s he had frequently been dismissed by Hollywood as the stereotypical short – he stood 5 ft 5 in tall – tyrannical European director. But by now he was considered by some to have a stroke of genius when it came to making movies, especially macabre movies.
Polanski had graduated from film school in Lodz, Poland in 1959 and first started to gain limited but important recognition through a series of short films. Then in 1962 he made his first feature film Knife In The Water which, significantly, was the first post-war Polish movie not based on a war theme.
In the quirky art film, Polanski conjured up some truly scary moments involving a couple who find themselves out at sea on a sailing boat and in danger from a teenage hitchhiker they have picked up. The movie earned the diminutive director some worthy credibility and he went on to make a horror film parody The Fearless Vampire Killers. It was during the filming of this movie that he fell in love with its star, Sharon Tate, and they subsequently married.
Next, he moved over to London to make Repulsion, a disturbing tale of madness and alienation that turned out to be a classy, truly horrific psychological drama. Polanski skilfully contrived to build up a tense atmosphere of evil while drawing out a remarkable performance from his young star, French actress Catherine Deneuve, playing a young, sexually repressed beauty who sinks into insanity as loneliness and her fertile imagination take hold.
Polanski’s reputation was growing fast, and the following year he rapidly followed up 1965’s Repulsion with Cul-de-sac, a study in kinky insanity. The success at the box office of these two movies earned him an invitation to move to Hollywood to make his first picture for the major American studio Paramount. This was to be Rosemary’s Baby, a superior film version of Ira Levin’s diabolical chiller novel for which Polanski himself wrote the screenplay. It starred Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, both giving outstanding performances as a happily married young couple who take a flat in a run-down New York apartment block. They become involved in witchcraft and Satanism, and after being prescribed some strange pre-natal nourishment by a sinister obstetrician,
Rosemary proceeds to give birth to Satan’s child. Polanski’s film managed to be frightening without using explicit gore or violence, relying instead on the blurring of reality and nightmare. His direction showed a precise sense of visual composition: ‘An evil-smelling tannis-root charm, disturbing next-door neighbours, a nightmare rape by the Devil, even innocent puffs of cigar smoke rising up from behind occupied armchairs bring menace and terror,’ was one assessment. For Polanski, it all made for a cinematic triumph and it changed Hollywood’s perception of him forever.
His career might have taken a different turn but for the terrible death of his wife. In his grief, his friends urged him to throw himself into work to try and put the ghastly tragedy behind him. All, that is, except fellow film-maker Stanley Kubrick, who counselled him differently, strongly advising him to go away and do some sports and eventually he’d feel like ‘getting out of the room’.
Polanski took his advice and eventually decided his therapy would be to take a long skiing holiday with friends in Switzerland. He skied almost every day for 4 months, and it was on the ski slopes of Gstaad that he had the idea that he should turn his attentions to Macbeth. Ever since he was a young man in Krakow, he had always dreamed of making a film of a Shakespearean play. Now he had gained great clout as a director, he felt he could seize the moment to achieve his long-held ambition.
Not everyone thought it was a great proposal. Polanski later recalled that when he phoned his agent to tell him about his plans, he sighed: ‘What are you doing to me?’ And Hollywood was also less than impressed. ‘Roman, you know Shakespeare is box office poison,’ one high-ranking studio boss rebuked him.
Undaunted, Polanski pressed on. He flew to London, enlisted the help of Ken Tynan in collaborating on a screenplay and secured a loan as pre-production seed money from his friend Victor Lownes, London boss of the Playboy organisation, who eventually also came up with the money to make the movie.
Naturally there was much press speculation as to who would play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, particularly as Polanski and Tynan wanted to forsake tradition and portray them not as middle-aged but as a good-looking young couple. ‘Usually Macbeth is played as an unpleasant bearded chap,’ Polanski pointed out, ‘and Lady Macbeth as a nagging bitch, and both are middle-aged.’
Tynan was also anxious to dispel the cloak of doom that usually hangs over the couple. ‘They don’t know they’re involved in a tragedy – they think they’re on the verge of a triumph predicted by the witches,’ Tynan explained. It was his view that in attempting to fulfil the witches’ prophecy, they uncovered a dark side to their nature they never knew existed.
The name of Martin Shaw was never seriously considered for the lead role, but he was nevertheless overjoyed to secure the substantial part of Banquo, even if he was at first somewhat mystified to be chosen to play a high-ranking Scot almost twice his age as well as being father to a teenage son, Fleance. But if Polanski, who had cast Martin after seeing him on stage at the Royal Court theatre, believed he could pull it off, then that was good enough for him. Keith Chegwin was cast as Banquo’s boy. ‘Cheggers’, as he popularly came to be known on TV many years later, was then just into his teens and hoping to build on a career as a successful child actor.
Banquo is a key figure in Shakespeare’s plot. He is with Macbeth when they encounter three witches who prophetically hail Macbeth as ‘King’, but Banquo as ‘father of kings to come’. This places the virtuous Banquo firmly in the path of Macbeth’s ruthless ambition sparked by the witches’ prophesy. On the eve of Macbeth’s coronation celebration, Banquo is subsequently murdered upon his friend’s command to prevent his sons ever becoming king in the future.
The role placed great responsibility on Martin to deliver. ‘I hope it doesn’t sound like an ego trip, but I was only 25 at the time and I was playing a burly Scottish general of 40-ish.’ he would later reflect. ‘To make that work in a Polanski movie of Shakespeare was, I felt, quite an achievement.’
At the end of October 1970, the blue VIP room at the top of the Playboy Club in London’s Park Lane, Mayfair was the venue aptly chosen for Polanski to announce the cast of his Macbeth to the press. A host of Bunny girls busily ensured that the glasses of the show-business journalists were topped up until Polanski arrived – one hour late.
Jon Finch, a virile-looking young actor whose path would very significantly cross with Shaw’s in a few years’ time, was unveiled as Polanski’s Macbeth. Finch had been hired just a few days previously after Polanski met him on a plane. But what intrigued Martin and the rest of the signed-up actors was that there was no trace of a Lady Macbeth at the launch. Filming in Wales was due to begin on 1 November and she had yet to be cast.
In fact, Polanski had been hoping to sign the American actress Tuesday Weld, but she was balking at appearing in the nude in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. After she finally turned the role down, the part was offered to another promising young actress but her boyfriend was having none of it. Shooting was already in progress by the time the role was eventually given to Francesca Annis, a 25-year-old beauty who was starting to make a name for herself as an accomplished actress.
Polanski hired her after seeing her in The Heretic and, importantly, she understood and readily accepted why she needed to be filmed nude. ‘Roman doesn’t exploit nudity for its own sake,’ she insisted. ‘He doesn’t go in for pornography. What he says is that in Lady Macbeth’s time people simply didn’t wear nightdresses so when she got up to sleepwalk she’d have been naked.’ It was, Polanski concurred, just part of his drive for an authentic look to the film ‘… so that