Time Capsule
THE SEASONED BRITISH ACTOR ON HIS FILM (AND PANEL SHOW) LIFE IN PICTURES
WORDS IAN FREER
Tom Courtenay
HAVING RECENTLY WRAPPED on Queen At Sea with Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay is taking a well-earned break, doing crosswords, going for walks, training his puppy Nelly and watching sport (“It looked at one time we might come unstuck,” he says about the Ryder Cup). So, to mark the Blu-ray release of his excellent 1964 World War I drama King And Country, it’s a good time to talk through his glittering career in key images. “I saw the pictures you sent on my wife’s computer,” he tells us. “I don’t have a computer anymore. Let’s try this.”
JUST DESERT KING AND COUNTRY (1964)
“I’d done two other films, but I was still young when I did King And Country. I bought this little tiny house in Chelsea and was having some Norwegian wood — like the Beatles song — put on the wall. So this carpenter, an old boy, came round. He saw I had this huge tape recorder that I was using to learn my lines from this scene, which is where Arthur Hamp is giving testimony about what makes him desert the army in World War I. So I played this story and this old boy had to sit down. He’d been in the trenches and it just overwhelmed him. It was a wonderful moment. I’ll never forget it.”