Heathcote Williams

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Heathcote Williams
Williams in the 1987 movie Wish You Were Here
Born	15 November 1941 Helsby, Cheshire

John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams (born 15 November 1941) is an English poet, actor and playwright. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror. After his schooldays at Eton, he hacksawed his surname's double-barrel to become Heathcote Williams, a moniker more in keeping perhaps with his new-found persona. In the early 1970s his agitational graffiti were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill district.

Contents 1 Early life & career 2 Poetry 3 Painting & sculpture 4 Song-writing 5 Journalism 6 Film 7 Family 8 Listen to 9 References 10 External links

[edit] Early life & career

Williams was born in Helsby, Cheshire; his father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer.^[1] From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book,The Speakers (1964), a virtuoso close-focus account of life at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim. It was later successfully adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company. His first full-length play, AC/DC, (1970), a splenetic savaging of the burgeoning mental health industry, includes a thinly veiled but merciless attack on his fellow denizen of 1960s alternative society, and doyen of the anti-psychiatry movement, R.D. Laing. The onstage onslaught at the Royal Court Theatre, crucible of much that was 'angry' in post-Suez English culture, did not, however, appear to impede cordial relations between the two in later years. AC/DC won the London Evening Standard's Most Promising Play Award. It was labelled by the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page review as 'the first play of the twenty-first century.' The inaugural issue of the London Review of Books included an effusive profile by fellow Etonian Francis Wyndham titled 'The Magic of Heathcote Williams.' His foremost fans among the famous are Harold Pinter and Al Pacino.

[edit] Poetry

Williams himself, however, regards fame as 'the first disgrace,' a phrase which Pacino from time to time quotes in private. He has been notoriously reluctant to cooperate in the promotion of his work on a commercial level, refusing, for example, to go to the US to promote AC/DC. He has been the despair of his publishers. The only book-signing tours he has ever done - 'enough,' he complained, 'to cripple a rock-star' - were merely the result of relentless pressure from Jonathan Cape's PR department. This episode, though having undeniably fortunate consequences for the poet's bank balance, was to have - almost as though to confirm his own worst assumptions - agonizingly unfortunate consequences for his private life, Not that this was Williams's debut 15 minutes exactly. An affair some years earlier with the model Jean Shrimpton, an icon of 'sixties Swinging London, had resulted in the writer setting himself alight on her doorstep. Whether intentional or the upshot of a magical stunt gone wrong - Williams at the time being an ardent fire-eater - was never entirely clear. It was not unreasonably supposed to be a case of the supermodel dumping the scrivener. Somewhat astonishingly, however, in her autobiography published in the early 90s, Shrimpton asserted that it was Williams who had in fact walked out on her.

Energetic publicity efforts on Williams's behalf, spearheaded by Cape's Polly Samson, toast at the time of the literary division of London's wine-and-twiglet circuit, assisted him to achieve the mass audience he'd sought for his trilogy of book-length poems on environmental themes. Written some years earlier as visionary propaganda, they were probably the most lavishly illustrated, albeit photogaphically, English poetry since William Blake. They had otherwise been gathering dust in a corner of his then agent's office. The North American rights for the poem Whale Nation (1988) alone were sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair for $100,000. It was followed by Sacred Elephant (1989) and Autogeddon (1991). The latter is regarded by some as the most all-out assault on the motor car (and everything it stands for) written thus far. Each was made into a film by BBC Television, the third starring Jeremy Irons who, somewhat to the chagrin of its author, turned out in promotional interviews to be an unabashed car-lover.

Williams is a consummate reader of his own poems, as well as of the literary classics. His performance of his Buckley-esque^[2] Jumping Jesus was characterised by an eminent London literary critic as 'like Alexander Pope on speed.' His public readings of Whale Nation have been known to reduce some members of the audience to tears.^[3] His recordings^[4] for Naxos Records, which include readings from the Buddhist scriptures,Dante and the Bible, have won awards.

[edit] Painting & sculpture

Williams's second bout of the first disgrace (see above) caused him to cease writing, in effect, and turn to painting and sculpture full-time. Leading the life of a would-be recluse, he received prolonged tuition from the 'New Ruralist'^[5] artist Graham Ovenden, at the latter's home on the edge of Bodmin Moor. The result was an out-pouring of hundreds of canvases, including satirical pastiches of the works of Van Gough, Claude Monet, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud and others. He also produced a number of sculptures of - as irony would have it - great piles of books, tottering and damp-swollen, elaborately hand-carved in wood.

[edit] Song-writing

Williams's occasional but typically anarchistic forays into the realm of lyric-writing include Wrinkly Bonk, yet to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, and Why D'Ya Do It?, a rabidly obscene rant on the theme of sexual jealousy, for Marianne Faithfull's classic 1979 Broken English. Williams's words were enough to cause a walk-out by the lady packers on EMI's production line. Perhaps not entirely surprising from someone who had been sent down from Oxford for turning up to take his law finals dressed in an SS uniform.

[edit] Journalism

Williams was for a time associate editor of the literary journal Transatlantic Review, as well as being one of those responsible for the notorious alternative sex paper Suck. He was a frequent contributor to the London underground paper International Times during the 1970s, and to The Fanatic, issues of which would appear sporadically and provocatively in different formats and various countries of Western Europe. An anthology of his tracts and manifestos, Severe Joy, was announced by his then publisher but, to the disappointment of his fans, for some reason never actually appeared.

[edit] Film

The theme of Williams's early one-act play The Local Stigmatic is fame and its adverse consequences, possibly a reason why Al Pacino, with financial assistance from Jon Voight, would perform it off-off Broadway before he himself achieved what the play pillories. In later years the film version became known as 'Pacino's secret project,' resulting in Michael Corleone's debut as a director. It was released as part of the Pacino: An Actor's Vision^[6] box-set in 2007.

Williams's own film performances include Prospero in Derek Jarman's version of The Tempest (1979), Wish You Were Here (1987) and Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). His portrayal of the central character's psychiatrist in Wish You Were Here became something of a YouTube favourite. Williams has more recently enjoyed a steady stream of bit-parts in big-budget Hollywood productions, such as the ill-fated Basic Instinct 2.

[edit] Family

Williams lives in Oxford with his long-term partner Diana Senior.

[edit] Listen to

Sacred Elephant^[7] clip read by Heathcote Williams

Whale Nation^[8] excerpt

'Tell me all the swear words you know': Williams in movie Wish You Were Here^[9]

Why D'Ya Do It?^[10] Marianne Faithfull, Hollywood, 2005

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• List of stage works
• Heathcote Williams at the Internet Movie Database
• Film appearances; list of writings