Martin Shaw - The Biography. Stafford Hildred
review in the London Evening News was even topped off with the headline ‘Macbrilliant!’
Certainly, Macbeth was one of the most talked-about films of the year even if it didn’t set the box office alight and, for Martin Shaw, the role of Banquo was a great career move. He had third billing in a major international movie helmed by a top director at a time when Britain barely had a film industry worthy of the name.
‘I’m particularly proud of Macbeth, because it was my first film,’ said Martin. ‘It brought a lot out of me and was very demanding.’ In years to come, he was only too happy to talk about the movie during frequent interviews about his role as Doyle in the TV series The Professionals. ‘Macbeth had a profound effect on my career,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I can’t think of any other filmmaker I would rather work with than its director Roman Polanski – it was one of the high spots of my career.’
The whole Polanski experience whetted his appetite for working in movies, but a combination of circumstances, bad luck and bad timing meant that he did not build on Macbeth in the way he might perhaps have hoped. It should have been a springboard to higher things but instead Martin spent the next 12 months waiting for the phone to ring. He didn’t even have an interview, and nothing came his way. For him, it was a confusing and difficult period at a time when he had so many expectations.
‘The Polanski thing led to interesting enquiries,’ he said, ‘and there were two or three extraordinarily “unlucky” occurrences right afterwards. It wouldn’t be right to say what they were because other actors were involved. But I was there and I was cast in major films and then, just at the last minute, something happened or somebody changed their minds, or the producer fell out with the director or the money got lost.
‘And so I carried on with TV and theatre, and then the British film industry had one collapse after another. Then The Professionals came up, and during the time that I was doing The Professionals, the British film industry went through one of its periodic revivals. Then, when I finished The Professionals, the film industry was flunking again. So it has not been an area where I’ve had a great deal of success. I’ve had some, but not enough for me. I would certainly like to have film success but I would like to do it in British films.
‘The difficulty with the British film industry is that it is under-funded and nobody helps. The Government doesn’t realise what a cultural resource they have in this country; we’re the world’s worst at cultural recognition. We have got the best technicians in the world and the Americans love to come here and make films because of the quality of our technicians. Steven Spielberg tried desperately to keep EMI open in Elstree because he liked to come here and work.’
Two interesting, and very different, film opportunities which did, however, come his way in the mid-1970s were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Operation Daybreak.
The latter was directed by Lewis Gilbert, a veteran of several notable war movies including Reach For The Sky and Carve Her Name With Pride, as well as the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Gilbert returned to his war film roots to make Operation Daybreak, based on a true story of a secret mission to assassinate maniacal German commander, Reinhard Heydrich, whom the Nazis had positioned in the Czechoslovakian capital of Prague. Allied intelligence feared that if Hitler should be toppled, Heydrich would continue the expansion of the Third Reich.
Martin, enjoying second billing to American actor Timothy Bottoms, played the duplicitous Czech ex-patriot Sgt. Karel Curda, one of three parachutists sent in to perform Operation Daybreak – the assassination of Heydrich at any cost. But the mission runs into trouble when Martin’s turncoat character switches from Allied spy to Nazi informer, in the process giving away details of the location of the headquarters of the Czech liberation movement.
As with Polanski, Martin learned a great deal under Gilbert’s measured direction and attention to detail as they filmed in the depths of winter in Prague for three months in 1974. Czechoslovakia was then still a frontline Soviet state and Martin and his fellow cast members were put up in the Alcron hotel, which had been the Gestapo headquarters in the World War II. They were given little chance to explore the magnificent city and, for Martin, seeking out vegetarian fare was far from easy. He discovered there was not even a word for vegetarian in the Czech language. ‘It was incredibly difficult to find anything to eat other than pickles, processed cheese and bread,’ he later recalled.
But it was a very different story when Martin returned to Prague some 25 years later to film The Scarlet Pimpernel. With thousands of Americans now living in the city, he was not observed with suspicion on his shopping expeditions to seek out vegetarian food. ‘Vegetarianska’ was by now a word in common use. Even so, he was not taking any chances and he carefully packed away some appropriate food and clothes for the three months he expected to be filming on location. When he landed in Prague, however, his luggage went missing for four days and during that time he had no change of clothes or a toothbrush – and, to make matters worse, finding acceptable food was still something of a challenge.
One night while he was in Prague filming Operation Daybreak, he picked up the book Heart of the Hunter by Laurens van der Post, the South African educator, explorer, conservationist, philosopher and humanitarian. Since the 1950s, van der Post had become well known for his advocacy of the Kalahari desert and the culture of the Bushmen in southwestern Africa and Martin was captivated by his descriptions of the magical properties of the desert where you can ‘hear the light’.
The author’s prose captured his imagination and he was dreaming of visiting just such a place when the telephone rang with a call offering a star part in Burke and Wills to be made in the Australian desert by the BBC. This was an episode for a documentary series called The Explorers which used actors to portray the lives of famous adventurers. Soon afterwards, he found himself leaving behind the Prague winter to film in Alice Springs where it was a sweltering 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. ‘Only there was no shade, but everything van der Post had said was true,’ he commented. ‘I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the desert and its purity. You can feel the life force.’
Burke and Wills followed the fanciful and awful story of the journey made in 1860 by legendary Aussie explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. The two men set out on their ill-fated expedition after the government of South Australia offered a prize to the first expedition to cross the Australian continent from south to north.
Martin was cast as Burke, an Irishman who had emigrated to Melbourne and joined the police force, and who eventually died of starvation in 1861. The film was shot in Australia’s glorious outback and directed by Lord Snowdon, erstwhile stills photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones, who was then best known as the husband of Princess Margaret.
As Martin was just about the only Englishman in the cast alongside a bunch of Australian actors and film crew, Martin and Tony – as Lord Snowdon preferred everyone to call him – enjoyed a natural affinity and developed a close friendship throughout the duration of the shoot. Martin found him to be a warm, sensitive and intensely private man, and enjoyed working with him.
It was far from easy filming in such sweltering heat. Among cast and crew there were some tetchy moments but Snowdon managed to keep the production moving forward and happy, and ultimately to do the story justice. At first there was some resentment in Australia’s acting fraternity that Pommie Martin should star in a film based on such quintessential Aussie explorers, but as the camera rolled, the Pom won them round with his dedication to his work as the cameras rolled.
The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, filmed in and around Mallorca with a screenplay by Brian Clemens, creator of The Professionals, could hardly have been more different from Operation Daybreak. This was an adventure story told with some opulence about Sinbad the Sailor coming across a golden tablet, which turns out to be one third of a puzzle.
Martin played Rachid, Sailor Sinbad’s first officer, but with limited opportunity for him, as it was John Philip Law as Sinbad and Tom Baker (later to become TV’s Doctor Who) as Koura the wizard who caught the eye, as well as the clever tricks of co-producer and special effects artist