By Gill Pringle and John Noonan
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool tells the real-life story of Gloria Grahame, her relationship with the much younger actor Peter Turner and her battle with breast cancer. Based on Turner’s own memoirs of that period, the film is directed by Paul McGuigan (Sherlock, Luke Cage) and has been nominated for numerous awards, including three at the year’s Brit Awards.
There’s some amazing chemistry between you guys?
Annette: Thank you. It’s all Jamie.
Jamie: (Laughs) Yeah, I don’t know. We just kind of acted it, really… It’s trust, isn’t it? You have to trust the person that you’re in a scene with. And you want to feel supported by them, and that they have your back. I felt like that very quickly with Annette. We did a lot of work with the script, charting the trajectory of the relationship. This movie takes place over a long period of time. It’s condensed into these moments, these memories, of this period in time. So, it’s tracking like ‘Okay, they’re in New York. How long have they been in New York? What point of their relationship are they in now? Everything isn’t so rosy, maybe. Irritation or mistrust, or whatever, is bleeding through’. It’s about trying to navigate all that stuff we did earlier on with Paul, our director, and Matt [Greenhalgh], our writer.
Paul McGuigan told us that Stephen Frears, when you did The Grifters, told you to look at Gloria Grahame as an influence for that character. Paul said that when he put together two photos of you in The Grifters and Gloria Grahame, you were indistinguishable. Do you remember all that?
Annette: Yeah, Stephen did point to her as a reference point when I was working on The Grifters. So, I’d seen the films back then. [Gloria] was a Film Noir femme fatale, and the character I played in The Grifters was in that ballpark. So, that was fun. That was when I really watched her. And when we were working on this, I went back and watched everything. It was really fun to watch all her movies, The Big Heat, In a Lonely Place… And then some of her cheesier ones, which were really fun. The thing that struck me – no pun intended – when I watched these was how often she was getting beaten up in these. Because she was the bad girl, right? And so, in that period, in those films, if you were playing THAT woman, if a guy gives you a smack, no one batted an eye.
But you must have looked at her with really different eyes, when you came back to the role having known her 20 years ago for The Grifters? You must have had such a different experience, understanding her life, and what she’d been through?
Annette: With Jamie, with both of us, the real Peter Turner was so much a part of what we were doing. When you look at his book, it’s all kind of inspired by that; the way that he examined his experience, and the way he loved her. And when you meet Peter, I understood Gloria because I felt like she had never had a relationship with a man like him. He’s a beautiful man. She’d been with really interesting guys. Nick Ray, wildly interesting. Smart, but wild. As was she, I think. I know people who knew her third husband [Cy Howard], and he was very funny and a Hollywood guy. They lived in a big house in Hollywood. So, Peter’s just like this regular guy from Liverpool, who’s an actor – so he’s in her business – but he was nice and loving. He adored her in a way I suspect no one ever had. So, I certainly used that, and we talked to Peter a lot about how they were together.
Barbara Broccoli, who produced [the film], knew them when they were together, and she said, ‘Oh yeah, when you were around them, it didn’t seem like a strange relationship. It just seemed very organic and natural.’
Did you find any real footage of her that you could use for the character?
Annette: I watched a lot of her films and I thought about a lot things, but then I just put it together in a way that felt right to me. There isn’t very much from Gloria’s point of view that I could find. I would love to have seen interviews. I love watching all those celebrity interviews on YouTube. The Dick Cavett interviews are so great, and a lot of the English interviewers from before, but Gloria never made it. She wasn’t that big of a star, even though she did win the Academy Award. She was in some big movies, but…
That’s the amazing thing, when you see that footage of her getting up to accept the Oscar, you think she was at the top of her profession at some point.
Annette: Yes, that was The Bad and The Beautiful. She was so charming in that moment too. The way she did it was so great. It was before that, or after, when you watch the Oscars and they make those speeches that seem so phony, they were actually redoing them. They’d actually reshoot it, so you had to fake it and pretend you’d just won it. But that one was real. So, the way she comes down the aisle in her dress, I love it.
Was she nervous, do you think?
Annette: I think she was nervous. She probably didn’t expect to win. She was up against some really formidable people. To be honest, I’d have to guess but I think she was probably really surprised. She was pretty humble.
One aspect of it is that, although she won an Oscar and was successful at the time, she had that classic ‘just disappeared from view’ kind of thing. How does that sit with you, because you must have come across this with other people that you know? Is it always in the back of your mind how far you can fall?
Annette: Yeah, I do know people who feel that way. I think for Gloria, it was tough, because she needed to make a living, quite frankly. She was very sensible, she really wanted to work and I don’t think she looked down on what she had to do. She went to do theatre in Wisconsin, she did some TV that was pretty cheesy. Some of it wasn’t bad. Then there’s a ‘70s horror film that is really cheesy [Mansion of the Doomed aka The Terror of Dr. Chaney], but there’s a scene in it in which she’s really good. So, there’s a part of her that I respect, that said, ‘I have to get on with it. I have to do what I can do. I have kids, I need to make a living.’
I think the business is tough on women. I’ve been able to kind of keep going. I stop and start a lot, I have four kids. So, I’ve been lucky and sometimes I think to myself, ‘well, I’ve been so lucky, and I’ve got to do all of these really interesting projects, if I couldn’t work anymore, it’d be hard.’
How do you think Peter reacted to watching part of his life being dramatised?
Jamie: I think it was quite overwhelming for him. A lot of it is still fresh in his mind and he recounts things incredibly vividly. It’s all there in that book, it’s all remembered so well and so specifically. It doesn’t dull in his memory at all. He’s very emotional about it.
We had a screening in Toronto and he was there for that. And I saw him visibly weeping. He was so grateful to us. I think all you want to do – especially for me as I’m playing him – is represent him well and respectfully and try and capture an essence of how he felt about his woman, who was someone who changed his life forever. Still to this day, I still think she’s one of the most important people he ever came across.
Do you think their relationship was generally accepted by others? There shouldn’t be a stigma attached to an older woman going out with a younger man, but there is. Do you think they had problems in that sense?
Annette: I didn’t hear so much about that. His family totally accepted her, which is the thing in the story that was so important and was important to her. She just came in like anybody else. I think that for Gloria, she was vulnerable, which is a sloppy word. I wish I had a better word. I think she was conscious of the fact that she was older, and Peter could be with a younger woman. But nonetheless, I think she knew she was pretty special. And I think they had a good time. When you meet him, that’s when it all makes sense to me. He’s very sweet and genuine. He’s a very genuine person. When that kind of person falls in love with you, it all makes sense.
She’s the original cougar…
Annette: I suppose you could say that, but I think there’s a weird double standard, isn’t there? No, I think what was happening between them was very, very significant. What gets me about Peter, and his continued interest in it, is there are certain relationships that always stay with you. Some people do more than others; all of them inhabit a part of you. Then there might have been one person who was kind of like a bit of a mystery, and nothing else kind of touches that. So, with this, I always feel like that’s Peter. What I relate to in the story is that Peter has this thing he really did deeply investigate. After the relationship, he told me the book just poured out of him because it meant so much to him. It was very, very important thing to him. As you say, it’s still very much alive in him.
And finally, Jamie, what was it like working with Julie Walters again?
Jamie: When I found out she was going to be playing my mum, I was surprised by the casting choice because isn’t that going to draw comparisons? But, she’s brilliant. One thing I did realise was how naïve I was as a fourteen-year-old, when I worked with her the first time. I mean, my mum bought me a nice shirt that day when I met her. [puts on a nagging mum voice] ‘You have to wear a nice shirt when you meet Julie Walters. You can’t wear your Arsenal shirt.’ I was aware of her fame when I was growing up.
But this time around, I was amazed. I saw Stephen Graham, who is a fierce actor and mostly portrays fierce people, reduced to a child when Julie Walters came around. The reverence and love people have for her, I was kind of overwhelmed by. I experience it myself also, but I know Julie as Julie and we did this weird movie together when I was a kid.
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is in cinemas March 1, 2018
