In the middle of the hustle of New York's urban core on one spring day in 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, glued his hand to a surface, and protested about the extra fees on plant-based alternatives. “How long until you cease making excessive earnings while patrons, animals, and the planet suffer?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists broadcast the protest live.
But, the unconcerned customers of the establishment paid scant attention. Maybe they didn’t realise they were in the presence of the most statuesque person ever recognized for an acting Oscar, performer of one of the best speeches in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a sci-fi franchise production. Law enforcement arrived to shut down the store.
“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the full volume talking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would move past to the other side, place their request and wait looking at their cellphones. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have very little time!’”
Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest activists who act – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He marched against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the civil rights group, and took part in civil disobedience actions over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been arrested, and has even served time in prison.
Currently, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that marched for global harmony and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their twilight years, a former president reverse the clock on abortion and many other achievements.
Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an veteran progressive who might have a Che Guevara poster in the attic and consider Bernie Sanders to be too soft on the economic system. When visited at his home – a log cabin in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his third wife, the actor Anna Stuart – he rises from a chair at the hearth with a friendly welcome and outstretched hand.
Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody intelligent say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The mechanism is in the door. All they have to do is a single action to turn it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every exception, every loophole that the Congress has written so assiduously into their laws.”
Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood filmmaker and actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of political persecution merely for making comments at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for fostering young talent and contrasting it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.
This seemingly innocuous observation, coupled with his leadership of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “shifted somewhat to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to give evidence to the government panel on alleged subversion. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee emissary still demanded an expression of regret.
He refused and, with a large payment from Howard Hughes for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with a fellow actor and won a theater honor. James reflects: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – avoided him and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was at fault or not – sort of like today.”
Cromwell’s mother, Kay Johnson, and his stepmother, Ruth Nelson, were also accomplished actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their footsteps. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”
But, a visit to a Scandinavian country, where his father was making a film with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were producing art and my father was engaged and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”
Creativity and ideology intersected again when he joined a theatre company founded by African American performers, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly African American audiences in Mississippi, another region, Tennessee, and an area. Some performances took place under armed guard in case white supremacists tried to attack the theatre.
The play struck a chord. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the social advocate Fannie Lou Hamer urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not sitting idle for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re taking what we need!”
Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the civil war.’ A kind Black lady took us to our rooms.
“We went out to have dinner, and the owner of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been ejected of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my fist balled. I would have done something rash. a company founder informed the man that he was infringing upon our legal protections and that they would get to the bottom of it.”
However, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m listening to myself,” he says. “These are not just stories about an actor doing his thing maturing, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being beaten, people were being shot, people had crosses burned on their lawns.
“I feel strange recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”
Later, his wife will confide that she is among those urging Cromwell to write a memoir. But he has minimal interest for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be predictable and “because my father tried it and it was so bad even his wife, who adored him, said: ‘That’s really awful, John.’”
We push on with his story all the same. Cromwell had been notching up film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a farmer in a beloved film, a 1995 movie about a animal that aspires to be a sheepdog. It was a surprise hit, earning more than $250 million worldwide.
Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $sixty thousand to hire a publicist and buy trade press ads to publicize his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the honor, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to go through auditions.
“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so sick of the routine that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a director: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no differently than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘Jamie, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend a month with.’
“It was the chip on my shoulder which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a unknown person who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not good enough, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just fucking sick of it.”
The acclaim for the movie led to roles including leaders, religious figures and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ The Queen, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the spacefaring pioneer Dr Zefram Cochrane, who observes of the spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”
Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “avarice” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much shouting.”
He offers the example of LA Confidential, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing Captain Dudley Smith asks an actor’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what Vincennes should reply. A quietly defiant Spacey won their disagreement.
This prompted Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson objected. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘Jamie, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s experience and his tendencies, I said: ‘You motherfucker, curse you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive