Category Archives: Alter Ego

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Kevin Maher is Alisdair Stewart from The Piano

The Piano
The Piano

Journalist Kevin Maher was born in 1972 in Dublin and headed over to London in 1994, where he wrote about film for The Face, The Guardian and The Observer. While his debut novel The Fields explained 80s Ireland, his latest, Last Night on Earth (Little Brown, £14.99), gets to grips with millennium London in a dizzy, fizzy rush of words as a young Irish man reveals himself to be at the mercy of his own unwise impulses in the heady, druggy world of TV. Eithne Farry

My screen alter ego is Alisdair Stewart, the 46-year-old English planter from The Piano. Fact. There’s no contest. It’s always been that way. From the moment I saw the film, in Dublin in 1993, I knew that he was the man for me. Or, at least he was me. Or, maybe better still, he was us. For, as played beautifully by Sam Neill, he is the real-time alter ego to all of us, us men. He is the great tentative, unsure, lip-trembling, confidence-faltering, error-prone, angst-ridden reality of modern man in an increasingly phony and delusional world of fake-fronted masculine yawps. I’m talking here about Harvey Keitel’s George Baines, the other male protagonist from The Piano, and a character that I’ve always loathed, and done so with the same degree of passion with which I feel my love for Stewart. For Keitel’s Baines, with his muscles, his tattoos and his pervy surety (‘There’s things I’d like to do while you play!’), comes from a long line of specious romantic heroes that include everyone from Achilles to Heathcliff to Ryan Gosling to the swarthy berk in TV’s Poldark. These are masculine phantasms, governed by ancient codes that exist only in story books. They are, to paraphrase Yeats, men who are but a dream, men who do not exist.

Stewart, on the other hand, is painfully real. He is the Lockwood to Baines’s Heathcliff. He is gorgeously fragile and noticeably vain (proud of his achievements as a planter, careful about his appearance, he assiduously combs his hair before the ‘wedding’ photograph). He is sexually unsophisticated (Ada’s hand to the buttock gesture almost blows his mind). He feels the pressure of providing (he’s land-grabbing from Baines). He’s complying to social norms (as exemplified by the snooping Aunt Morag). But mostly, simply, he’s trying. He’s trying so hard to understand who he is, and what’s expected of him, in the specific context of the world around him. And for that reason alone I can’t ask for a better alter ego. Naturally, I could’ve done without the axe-wielding finger-chopping finale. But, hey, nobody’s perfect.

Kevin Maher

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Lisa McInerney is Hazel Motes in Wise Blood

Wise Blood 1
Wise Blood

Lisa McInerney is a sweary writer of contemporary fiction who comes from Galway via Cork. She likes video games, Vincent Cassel, and being on time for things. Her first novel, The Glorious Heresies (published by John Murray 9 April 2015), tracks the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-boom badlands, from 15-year-old drug dealer Ryan, who’s escaping his father’s fists, to Maureen, the accidental murderer, who is back at home at the behest of her gangster son, Jimmy, after a 40-year sojourn. Lisa’s alter ego is Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. Eithne Farry

It’s a disconcerting thing to be a logical writer. It’s put to you as an apostasy. Common sense is for paramedics, farmers and the Famous Five; writers should be impulsive, emotional and drunk. And yet I am logical. Pragmatic. Ever sane. Maybe too sane. It sometimes feels like I’m the only sane person in a world of flakes and maniacs. Why can’t they just SEE? I ask myself. It’s perfectly SIMPLE. And then I kick a wall and hurt my foot.

So if there’s a movie character I feel closest to, it’s Hazel Motes from John Huston’s Wise Blood. Haze – draped over the skinny shoulders of Brad Dourif at his eyeball-popping best – is galvanised by logic. He’s so resolutely, unflinchingly sane that it’s driven him completely mad.

Haze, bent out of shape by an unspecified war wound and memories of his fire-and-brimstone preacher grandfather, comes home to Tennessee intent on spreading heresy. Made bilious by the milky-eyed convictions held by his Christian brethren, he abhors religion and yet is preoccupied with it, obsessed with theology in the way a child is obsessed with his playmate’s trinkets, focused on ripping to shreds the comforts of faith. Naturally, his extreme sincerity is ignored by the masses, seized on by the feeble-minded, exploited by the deceitful and upstaged by his hat, driving Haze into paroxysms of logic. It’s hardly a wonder it all ends in (burning) tears.

An anti-preacher losing the run of himself because no one around him will listen to reason resonates with me, a lapsed Irish Catholic and, unfortunately, rational novelist. My heart pangs for Haze because I know where the lad is coming from: a place of bitter incredulousness, where sometimes you’re so puffed up with sound philosophies that you can’t quite get them past your teeth except in a great big rancorous rush. Sanity’s a maddening thing in a world as complex as ours. Also, I wouldn’t mind young Dourif’s bone structure. Or such a mesmerising hat.

Lisa McInerney

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Stevan Alcock is not Veronika Voss

veronika-voss
Veronika Voss

Stevan Alcock is a writer, editor and translator. Originally from Yorkshire, he lived in Berlin for many years, before returning to England to study for a BA in German, and an MA on contemporary prose fiction. His debut novel, Blood Relatives (4th Estate), set in 1970s Leeds, is a dark, daring, funny coming-of-age story, vibrant with family secrets and hidden identities, punk and gay liberation, all overshadowed by the horror of the Yorkshire ripper. He is fascinated by Rosel Zech as the butterfly-like Veronika Voss. Eithne Farry

When I first saw Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss in 1982, I had been living in Berlin for nearly 18 months. I was captivated by Rosel Zech as the washed-up eponymous film star, just as Robert, the reporter in the film who chances upon her in a bar, is also captivated by her residual beauty.

Shot in black and white, the film is set is in the mid-50s. Veronika reminisces to Robert of a time before the war, when her fame shone brightly; but in the new post-war West Germany she is all but forgotten, broke and drug-dependent. An echo, surely, of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

Robert visits Veronika at her villa, where the furniture is covered with white sheets, with candles everywhere as the electricity has been disconnected, although she tells him – and herself – that the candles are there ‘because they are so much more flattering to a woman.’

Veronika is a patient of the nasty and parasitic Dr Katz and her accomplices, who keep Veronika dependent on morphine, take possession of her will and drain her of her wealth until she has nothing left. Their clinic is all clean white and glass; indeed, the other patients wait behind walls of glass. The clinic could be seen as an allegory of the chilling, clean aesthetic of the new West Germany.

Zech plays Veronika Voss with compelling melodramatic tragedy, subsisting on the self-delusion of a past grandeur that was in fact Nazi Germany. She brings a luminosity and depth to what is, frankly, a shaky and porous plot.

Robert uncovers the truth behind the façade of the clinic and, assisted by his journalist sidekick Henriette, they seek to rescue Veronika. But it goes wrong: Henriette is killed and Veronika, trapped by her dependency like a pinned butterfly, is abandoned by the quack doctors. Without morphine, Veronika takes an overdose of sleeping pills and is found dead a few days later.

Fassbinder’s films often featured the mannered and decadent in moments of decline. His characters are caught up in their own obsessions and self-delusional needs; they echo our own fears. Fassbinder himself was often terrified of failing utterly.

Zech claimed it was a mystical experience working with Fassbinder: ‘He was giving something away all the time,’ she said, ‘you felt loved and cherished’.

Veronika Voss won the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear award in 1982. Fassbinder’s death shortly afterwards – like Zech’s character, from an overdose – was a blow to Zech, who had envisaged further collaborations. Instead, she retreated into lesser roles on German television and never again hit the heights she had achieved with Fassbinder and Veronika Voss. Zech’s name became so synonymous with the film that she found herself frequently reminding people, ‘I am not Veronika Voss’.

Stevan Alcock

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Lucy Ribchester is Sister Damned in Dark Habits

Dark Habits
Dark Habits

Lucy Ribchester was born in Edinburgh and grew up in Fife. After university she worked as an events coordinator for London’s Everyman Cinema, as a concert-hall manager, and most recently as a Cruise Coordinator for the National Trust in Scotland, where she developed a love of the sea and learned how to ceilidh dance. Her debut, The Hourglass Factory (Simon and Schuster, £7.99), is set in 1912 London in the world of suffragettes and circuses. Eithne Farry

It is not often you’ll find me extolling the virtues of entering a nunnery. But then there aren’t many nunneries like the Humiliated Redeemers Community, Pedro Almodóvar’s imagined house of God in his 1983 film Dark Habits. Here the nuns welcome in sinning women as their lifeblood, while themselves transgressing on a mass scale; because without sin there is nothing to save. ‘Very soon,’ says the Mother Superior, ‘this place will be full of murderesses, drug addicts and prostitutes… Praised be God.’

The central story belongs to Yolanda, a singer on the run from the police. But it’s the nuns themselves who are the soul of the film: Sister Sewer Rat, who keeps a secret identity as lurid novelist Concha Torres; Sister Manure, whose acid hallucinations allow her to have visions of Jesus; and my chosen Alter Ego, Sister Damned (played by the magnificent Carmen Maura), a bongo virtuoso who tends to the chickens in the convent garden and keeps an adopted rescue tiger known as The Boy.

It’s not only the fact that Sister Damned owns a pet tiger, nor that her pet tiger is called The Boy, nor that the only place acceptable to own a pet tiger is in an Almodóvar film made in the 1980s, that makes me want to be Sister Damned. She is, of all the characters in the movie, the one most contented with what she has – a woman who has found the secret to happiness with small acts of kindness and a bedroom full of rescued animals.

Like so many of Almodóvar’s films, Dark Habits takes place in a beautiful, brilliant melting pot of feminine camaraderie and wisdom. Here, women find solace in glamour and make life into a joyful spectacle, even in its dreariest moments. And as with his other films, Almodóvar never once judges his characters nor invites us to do so. In one of the most poignant scenes the Mother Superior runs after an arrested prostitute, calling for the police to wait so that she can put on her high heels – a small recognition of feminine dignity.

What happens to the sisters in the end breaks my heart, but the existence of them in the first place is enough to restore your faith in the power of humans to redeem each other.

Lucy Ribchester

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Shelley Harris is Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday

His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday

Author Shelley Harris has been a teacher, a local reporter, a stuffer of envelopes, a shop assistant and a bouncer at a teen disco. As part of her research for her latest novel Vigilante (Weidenfeld and Nicoloson), in which an ordinary woman, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, dresses up as superhero and sets about righting wrongs, Shelley took to the streets of High Wycombe in a mask and a cape. As she says on her blog: ‘we want to be mighty and we want to be magnificent. We want to be heroes.’ Eithne Farry

Whip-smart, snappily-dressed, and with an infallible bullshit detector, Hildy Johnson is my cinematic alter ego, a fantasy version of myself: a woman cleverer, quicker and funnier than I could ever hope to be.

In Howard Hawks’s mile-a-minute screwball comedy His Girl Friday, ace reporter Hildy (played by the luminous Rosalind Russell) fences with her former editor – and ex-husband – Walter (Cary Grant) as he tries to persuade her back into the newspaper game. She has other ideas: marriage to stodgy dullard Bruce, and a domestic idyll in Albany (‘I’m going to have babies and take care of them,’ she tells Walter). But Walter knows this new life will be unbearable – to both of them. Charming and unscrupulous, he doesn’t give a fig about her homemaking skills. ‘Quitting would kill you,’ he says. ‘You’re a newspaper man.’

Much of the action is set in a reporters’ room overlooking the gallows where convicted murderer Earl Williams is due to be executed the next day. There’s sin and punishment here, right alongside the sparkling dialogue; Williams is a pawn for the power mongers in City Hall, who will sacrifice him to their own ambition if Hildy and Walter don’t stop them.

Part of the joy of this movie is its light and shade: a man’s life at stake as wit crackles between Hildy and Walter. ‘There’s been a lamp burning in the window for you, honey,’ he tells her. ‘I jumped out that window a long time ago,’ she counters.

Of course, Walter’s right; everyone can see it except Hildy herself and the hapless Bruce. She’s a reporter to her bones, her brilliance and inventiveness eventually toppling the city’s government. (‘You’ve done something big, Hildy… they’ll be naming streets after you!’) And since, after all, this is a romance, who does she end up with? As we always knew he would, Bruce returns to Albany with only his mother for company, and Hildy goes back to the man who finds it impossible to see her as a cook, or a housewife, or a mother. She goes back to Walter – who tells her she’s the best newspaper man he’s ever worked with.

Shelley Harris

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Lauren Owen is Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets

Kind Hearts and Coronets
Kind Hearts and Coronets

Lauren Owen grew up in the suitably Gothic gatehouse of Escrick Park, an 18th-century mansion in Yorkshire, which had been converted to a girls’ boarding school. Her dad worked there, and she spent the holidays exploring the house and grounds and pondering the lives of the people who used to live there. With an MA in Victorian Literature, and the remembered sleepless nights from reading Robert Swindell’s scary Room 13, she set about writing the deliciously macabre The Quick (Vintage, £7.99), in which a shadowy aristocratic secret society, Dickensian urchins and a heroic maiden in peril rampage through the foggy, gaslit streets of Victorian London. Eithne Farry

‘It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.’ Such is the view of Louis Mazzini, antihero of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). In spite of this impediment, Louis murders his way through six members of the D’Ascoyne family (all played by Alec Guinness) to inherit a dukedom.

Louis is a terrible man, of course. Not only a murderer, he’s also a cad – stringing along childhood sweetheart Sibella whilst courting the virtuous Edith.

He does have a wonderful work ethic, however. He adopts an impressive array of disguises and hobbies in his quest, mastering swimming, archery, photography, and shooting. Louis dreams big. The title he longs for is far off, but he gets out there and makes things happen. At first he works in a shop, pushed around by arrogant customer Ascoyne D’Ascoyne. Louis gets his revenge, though. Striking a blow for ill-used retail workers everywhere, he drowns D’Ascoyne, beginning an ambitious project of mass homicide.

Louis also has wonderful sang-froid. He begins the film waiting to be hanged, but it would take more than this unpleasant situation to shake his composure. When Sibella visits him in jail (having masterminded his conviction for murder), she explains that she couldn’t bear her last sight of him to be the look of hatred he had sent her in the courtroom. ‘In view of the fact that your evidence had put the rope around my neck, you could hardly expect a glance of warm affection,’ Louis replies. I first saw the film during my adolescence, and I always envied Louis’s superb self-control. If only I could treat my own teenage misfortunes with so much ironic detachment.

The final lesson I took away from Kind Hearts and Coronets was the risky seductiveness of putting pen to paper. Louis gets a last-minute reprieve from the gallows, only to leave his written confession behind him in his jail cell. We’ve had Louis’s cool, ironic narrative voice with us all the way through the film – making asides, hinting at what’s to come, more or less running the show. Now this source of Louis’s control will be his undoing. It’s a good lesson for everyone – particularly authors. Use your words very carefully.

Lauren Owen

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Adam Roberts is Solaris

Solaris 1
Solaris

Born in 1965, Adam Roberts was educated at ‘a rundown’ state school in Kent and the ancient University of Aberdeen. While teaching English Literature and Creative Writing (at Royal Holloway, University of London) he set about eschewing the traditional path of a science fiction novelist – constructing 10 volumes of the one epic story written over a large number of years – and instead challenged himself to invent something new and original with every book. With that as his motto he has penned, among other things, a steampunk fantasy, where Swift’s Lilliputians are enslaved by the British Empire (Swiftly), a Soviet-era paranoid conspiracy theory novel (Yellow Blue Tibia), and an imagined second English Civil War where hackers and tech heads take power from the Establishment (New Model Army). His latest novel, Bete (Gollancz), concerns the nature of intelligence, artificial intelligence and talking cats. Eithne Farry

If I were offered the chance to be any film character, I would like to be Solaris. I’m talking, of course, about the films made from Stanislaw Lem’s great science fiction novel Solaris (first published in Polish in 1961; first English translation 1970). The first movie was made by the peerless Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and was released in 1972. The second – Soderbergh’s 2002 film – suffers from not being by Tarkovsky; but I’ve always liked it. It has a very different feel, and lacks some of the potently rebarbative strangeness and slowness of Tarkovsky’s film; but it’s closer to the novel and achieves an eerie beauty just this side of the real-deal uncanny.

‘So,’ I hear you ask, ‘which character in either – or both – of these films would you like to be?’ But you misunderstand. I’ve already explained who I’d like to be. I would like to be Solaris. That is, I’d like to be the sentient planet around which the human characters are in orbit, and which interferes in their lives by (for instance) recreating a material, living-breathing-thinking version of Hari (renamed ‘Rheya’ in the 2002 film), the main character Kelvin’s dead wife, out of his memories. If this choice looks as though I have delusions of grandeur, then permit me to explain myself. We watch these movies and naturally identify with the situation of the human characters, because we are human ourselves. I choose to read them differently. Lem famously objected to Tarkovsky’s version of his book, saying that he had taken a story about the alienating nature of man’s encounter with the radical otherness of the cosmos and turned it into Crime and Punishment. But it has always seemed to me that Solaris, the entity, is a proxy for The Writer (‘So: Lem is… ‘). At a pinch, it could stand in for the film director – for Tarkovsky, or Soderbergh.

As a writer myself, this interpretation resonates with me. Writers and directors create characters, summon them into life from nothing, out of the neutral nothingness of metaphorical neutrinos. We do so for our own reasons. Solaris is a book, and two films, that situate this act of creation on (as it were) the receiving end. It is Euripides’ Alcestis recast not only as science fiction, but as the disturbing fable of the arbitrary power of art to embody on any terms. Just as Euripides the writer – as mysteriously distant and alien to his created world as the planet in Lem’s novel – takes a widower and forces him to meet again with the simulacrum of his dead wife; so Solaris gets to the heart of how unnerving that power is. And, what is more, it understands how sometimes a piece of characterisation can look perfect from the outside, and yet be strangely and unsettlingly wrong and alien. So I’d like to be Solaris, not because I crave the godlike powers of a planet-sized being, but because I recognise in it – him? her? – a fellow worker in the unforgiving field of ‘making characters’.

Adam Roberts

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Emma Jane Unsworth is Tina in Sightseers

Sightseers
Sightseers

Emma Jane Unsworth was born in Prestwich and lives in Manchester. She has a tattoo of one of the big metal lions that resides outside Heaton Park on her arm and a Betty Trask award for her debut novel Hungry, the Stars and Everything. Her second novel, the visceral and vulnerable Animals (the title comes from a Frank O’Hara poem) has been described as ‘Withnail with girls’. It heads out on the town with hedonistic Laura and Tyler as they riotously down shots, take drugs, ponder poetry and physics, art and religion and do their level best to defy the strictures of polite society. It is therefore maybe not entirely surprising that Emma should choose the murderous Tina from Sightseers as her filmic alter ego. Eithne Farry

Gawky, ginger, immature, sadistic… Really there was no competition when it came to selecting my cinematic alter ago. It had to be Tina from Sightseers. Released in 2012, Ben Wheatley’s dark British comedy sees Steve Oram playing Chris, a caravan fan, who takes his new girlfriend, Tina (Alice Lowe), on a road trip round Northern England to showcase his favourite tourist spots. It’s no walk in the park. The holiday quickly escalates into a bloody rampage, provoked initially by Chris’s fury at a man dropping a Cornetto wrapper on the floor in a tram museum. Oh come on, we all know what it’s like – sometimes the smallest things can tip you over the edge. Besides, it’s important to respect your heritage and the environment. People have to learn…

Pot pourri fetishist Tina is, it would seem, overwhelmed by the world even before she hits the road with Chris. Aged 34, she lives at home with her mother, a megalomaniacal whinger grieving the loss of the family pet terrier, Poppy. For Tina, the caravan holiday with Chris signifies both an escape from depressing daughterly responsibility, and tardily won sexual liberty. The landscape they traverse – the rolling hills, the winding roads, the wide open sky – is the proverbial wilderness, fraught with possibility and peril. Especially when Tina gets out her crotchless knitted underwear. Very Viz. But before long the playful observational comedy becomes an ominous counterpoint to brutality. We enter a nightmarish moral hinterland as the couple indulge (Tina albeit reluctantly) in a full-blown killing spree and find themselves on the run. Like a less sexy Bonnie and Clyde. In a caravan.

There’s a timelessness as well as a lawlessness to Sightseers. It could easily be set in the 60s, 70s or 80s without changing a frame. Tina is no everywoman, though. She is a constant, excruciating surprise. I love this film because it’s absurd, and dark, and funny. Also because I’m interested in social disobedience; in people operating on the outskirts of what’s considered acceptable, and the animalistic urges within human nature that can leave you out on a limb. Also because I’m obsessed with campervans and have set my third novel in one. Caravans and campervans offer a strange mix of adventure and domesticity. I mean, really, what kind of maniac wants to live in what is essentially a Wendy House on wheels? Well, this kind of maniac. And Tina. It beats being at home with her mother.

Animals is out now with Canongate (£12.99). More information on Emma Jane Unsworth can be found on emmajaneunsworth.com.

Emma Jane Unsworth

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Michelle Lovric is Ray from In Bruges

In Bruge 1s
In Bruges

Author and editor Michelle Lovric’s latest novel The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (Bloomsbury) is about Irish skulduggery, sibling rivalry and torrents of hair. Her 2005 novel The Remedy, a medical murder-mystery, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. 2010’s The Book of Human Skin took on holy anorexia, unmitigated villainy and an unusual form of bibliomania. So it’s no small coincidence that Lovric finds her filmic alter ego in one of playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh’s darkest characters. Eithne Farry

Should I worry that I identify so strongly with a philistine, impotent, dwarfist, suicidal, child-killing Colin Farrell? In Bruges is one of my favourite movies, strongly flavoured with the ink-black Irish bile that flows from my favourite playwright, Martin McDonagh, whose Lieutenant of Inishmore piles up more bodies per square inch of stage and more nervous laughs per minute than anything else I’ve ever seen.

In Bruges has a less biblical body count, but the humour is just as pleasantly vicious. Colin Farrell’s Ray bungles the contract killing of a priest and shoots a child. He’s hustled off to Bruges by his minder, Ken (Brendan Gleeson). The two explore the city while awaiting instructions from their boss, Harry, monstered with magnificently vulgar brutality by Ralph Fiennes.
Bruges is enchanting in the mist. Ken is softened and transformed by the beauty of the mediaeval city. But Ray is hilariously impervious to the city’s charms. The more lovely the view, the darker his view of it: ‘I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.’

Two things draw me to the movie: its treatment of the sense of place and the issue of complicity. The death of a child is outside the moral code of the contract killer. Ray carries his guilt like a burning brand, scorching everything he sees and thinks. He knows a child killer does not deserve to live. So Ray begins to embrace and even to be complicit in the idea of his own righteous death.

Complicity is explored in my novel The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters. The narrator, Manticory, is complicit in the exploitation of her own body and hair by various men who turn her and her six sisters into stars of the stage and the pharmacy shelves. Manticory is also dangerously complicit in the bullying of Darcy, her oldest sister, whose machinations she entirely fails to curb until it’s too late, and she herself has become part of a crime.

Sense of place is crucial to The Harristown Sisters, set in famined Ireland and in Venice. In Ireland, pessimism falls like the rain; the crooning crows mock the poor, barefoot Swiney sisters. Like Ray, Darcy Swiney is utterly untouched by Venice’s sinuous canals, her dreaming palaces, the history sweltering out of her stones. But Manticory, like Ray, sinks into the city and becomes part of it, and it becomes part of her.

Michelle Lovric

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Hermione Eyre is Reverend Samuel Runt in Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon

Journalist and former croupier Hermione Eyre has interviewed some of the most beautiful women in the world, which was perfect research for her bold historical novel, the pop-arty Viper Wine (Jonathan Cape) where vanity, addiction and a beauty treatment distilled from snake venom take hold in the court of Charles I. Mixing up contemporary sources with modern details, Viper Wine is Gothic horror with a very modern twist. Eithne Farry

As Sir John Gielgud said, there is no such thing as a small part, only small actors, and Murray Melvin is a huge presence in any film, even when he has few lines. With his pursed lips, long face and fabulously economical style – he can deliver a crushing put-down without saying a word – he is the bridge between realism and camp. I have nothing obvious in common with him, but still, I should like to nominate as my alter ego Reverend Samuel Runt, the dour, repressed clergyman played by Melvin in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Melvin’s performance in this role is deliciously complex. He is obsequious to his employer, the wan beauty the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), and yet, due to his position as a man of the cloth, he holds power over her and the rest of the household, which he exercises with theatrical homilies and gravely sententious asides. He does not have enough power to stop the disaster of her marriage to Barry Lyndon, however; he is a sort of failed Rasputin. In my mind, as I was writing Viper Wine, I had Murray Melvin play the part of Chater, the personal priest of Venetia, Lady Digby. Their relationship is similar to that of the Reverend Runt and the Countess, and yet it goes further. Chater advises on her dress; he is secretly, and without hope, in love with her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby. His prurient interest in all their doings I shared. As the author of the novel, I was in control of these characters, and yet in another sense, I could only look on with longing as they went about their business. Like the Reverend Runt, I sometimes felt they could neither see nor hear me, though in the end, I knew I would have the final word.

Hermione Eyre