Building a career and then destroying it

Many other cinemagoers, we are sure, still recall with horror the bloody, scarifying moments when Shaw slipped slowly into the gaping mouth of the huge Great White Shark at the climax of “Jaws” in 1975. And it was in “From Russia with Love”, the second James Bond film, released in 1963, that Shaw suffered another momentous cinematic exit.

In that one, he plays SPECTRE assassin Donald “Red” Grant, who has been trained to assassinate Bond (played by Sean Connery). The two engage in a ferocious fight to the death in a carriage on the Orient Express train, and Grant is about to prevail until Bond tricks him into setting off a booby trap, one of the gadgets hidden in a special briefcase supplied to 007 by Q Branch. Triumph for Bond, end of Grant, naturally.

John French knew Robert Shaw well, professionally and personally, having been Shaw’s agent for the last five years of the actor’s life, which ended in 1978 aged a relatively young 51 years. For three years before that, French worked for Shaw’s then-agent as an assistant. French thus appears in his own book around the two-thirds mark, with the decision to do so in the third-person “he” and not the first-person “I”, thus avoiding what he feared might be the risk of  changing his Shaw biography into a sort of hybrid autobiography.

But despite the closeness between the two men, readers are assured by French’s publisher of a “perceptive, sympathetic, but unsparing portrait of the blessings and curses endowing this mercurial, engimatic but deeply engaging man”. What’s that old phrase – warts and all? Impressively, considering that the agent/author enters the picture so late on, French delivers an absolutely fulsome account, as detailed pre-himself as it is post-himself. Readers are still given a treat, with no short shrift of the actor’s early years.

Robert Archibald Shaw was born in Westhoughton, near Bolton, Lancashire, UK, on August 9, 1927, and so with his death in 1978 it means a good number of Shaw’s contemporaries were still around to tell their tales for the biography, which went into print 15 years later in 1993. It remains available through Dean Street Press.

In a way, then, can Shaw’s demise be considered a case of “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse”? Perhaps not quite, although Shaw had become an awful alcoholic and the book tells us that, “The flipside to Shaw’s diverse abilities was his well-earned reputation as a hellraiser. A fiercely competitive man in all areas of his life, whether playing table tennis or drinking whisky, he emptied mini-bars, crashed Aston Martins, fathered nine children by three different women, made (and spent) a fortune, and set fire to Orson Welles’ house”.

It certainly doesn’t sound like a recipe for life longevity, and French recounts how Shaw’s passing came after he had driven himself too hard and too fast but was never able to get past the tortured relationship to his father, who had committed suicide by taking poison in 1938 when Shaw was just 11 years old. His father Thomas was a General Practitioner, and in 1926 he married Doreen Avery, who trained as a nurse. Doctor Shaw was a chronic drunk, always carrying a hip flask and often borrowing money to frequent the pub until closing time.

His drinking got progressively worse and he would go into Robert’s room after an evening of imbibing and weep on his son’s bed. Shaw never got past the relationship, his feelings becoming harder and harder to cope with. As an adolescent he became prey to brooding and unpredictability, a loner whose moodiness made him difficult to get close to.

Winning was essential because he hated losing, whether playing rugby, tennis, boules or arm-wrestling,  for instance. If he wasn’t good at something he worked on it until he was proficient. He delighted in doing down opponents, even if, at golf, it was a one-legged man.

Shaw had success on the school stage and by his late teens was set on becoming an actor, and, he would always add, a writer. While he is most probably remembered as being a celebrated Oscar-nominated star, for “A Man for All Seasons” in 1967, he wrote six published novels, the second one, “The Sun Doctor” in 1961, winning the Hawthornden Prize for novels by writers under the age of 41. It was sold for translation to France, Sweden, Denmark and Holland. Some of these books received ecstatic reviews. Shaw also wrote plays, and they included the praised “The Man in the Glass Booth”, written in 1967 and filmed in 1975.

He passed entry to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 1946 but from being Head Boy at Truro School in Cornwall, and the natural centre of attraction,  now he was just another student, small fish in a big pond. French says his predictable reaction, conditioned by his inability to “win”, was to become aggressive and uncooperative, an outsider. He despised the teaching methods and the organisation of RADA, describing it as a concentration camp.

When he graduated in summer 1949 he was on the employment market with 200 other actors that year.  So it was slow going for him at first, with lowly stage appearances as a “spear-carrier” and months out of work waiting for offers.

Here The Budapest Times can reveal that your correspondent Osterberg is so ancient that as a 6- and 7-year-old he used to watch Shaw when he made a breakthrough by landing the role of Captain Dan Tempest in the action-packed television series “The Buccaneers” that ran for 39 episodes. Where’s that credit card? – now you can buy the complete series on DVD.

Eventually, over the years Shaw worked himself into the position where he didn’t have to look for work because work, instead, came looking for him. Though heavily discontented with his parts, he was undoubtedly making an impact on his fellow professionals. At the same time he had inflated ideas of his worth.

In his personal life he was a man’s man, uneasy with women, occasionally lusting after them but not really understanding nor making a true friendship with one. While never a womaniser, he would pursue one relentlessly if captivated. As a young man he hardly drank at all, regarding alcohol in much the same way as he did the opposite sex, of interest but a matter of no great passion. He could be wildly extravagant but generous, hating snobs, and his life was often in total turmoil. Eventual professional and financial pressures saw him become a fall-down drunk. Tax problems forced the family into exile in western Ireland.

A favourite word of his had been “energy”, created from the adrenelin of success, establishing himself as an actor of quality with a certain degree of public fame. His writing was being applauded internationally, he was mixing with people he admired intellectually, earning almost as much as he spent and getting regular offers of work.

But he did not feel he had reached the first rank of actors, and in time the energy died. He would take any part – even if he knew they were “pieces of shit” – for the money. The only quality threshold was the size of his fee. The huge success of “Jaws” helped right the Shaw ship for a while but the following six films were all failures, if not disasters.

John French has the details in full, and they make sad and sorry but fascinating reading. Robert Shaw felt ill while driving in Ireland, stopped the car, got out and died of a heart attack at the roadside on August 28, 1978. The price of success, and a troubled childhood, indeed.