Kate Kellaway Profile: John Malkovich
John Malkovich was in London with the cast of The Man in the Iron Mask, assembled for the film’s premiere. When I arrived at the Dorchester in the late afternoon, it was seething with musketeers in mufti (Jeremy Irons, Gabriel Byrne), and an uncrowned king (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Malkovich arrived a little late, and walked into a room with mighty pink curtains looped at the corners, trailing pink tassles. The patterns in the room quarrelled quietly among themselves, but a conciliatory sun shone above Hyde Park Corner and through the windows.
Against the background of the room, Malkovich seemed pencil-sharp, grave and metropolitan. He was wearing a perfectly cut black suit, white shirt, and a sealing-wax red tie. He has – and this was evident within seconds of meeting him – a severe charm. Looking around, he murmured: “The sultan [of Brunei] came up with a few bob for this.”
He frowns a lot – without displeasure. The two vertical lines in the middle of his forehead would be easy to draw, and stand out because his head is bald and smooth with a newly hatched look. His brown eyes are more sleepy than animated: he has the ghost of a beard. But the most arresting thing about him is a smile that seems to take him by surprise – a delayed reaction at being himself.
The Man in the Iron Mask is part pastiche, part adventure story – more than anything, a fancy-dress party. Did he enjoy making it? “I like the childlike – if not childish – way of pretending. One of the nice things about this business is that sometimes you can do the same thing as your little boy.” (Malkovich explains that his son has just been offered a career as a musketeer, presented with a bow and arrow for his sixth birthday.)
Malkovich plays Athos, the only musketeer who comes with real emotions attached: he is in mourning for his son. He plays him to the hilt, mixing sorrow and rage.
“Sorrow and rage come easily. I was only in analysis for seven years, so I am not a `professional’, but I would say that rage is inverted sorrow and – usually – vice versa.” As he says this, his voice is lazily detained, like someone making time; it seems made for elegy.
Malkovich is a maverick. His theatrical career has been serious- minded and risk-taking, his film career hit and miss. In 1976, he was one of the founder members of the Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago. He first captured – perhaps “seduced” would be a better word – London in 1990 with Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. He played a short-order cook, opposite Juliet Stevenson. The cook was called Pale, but there was nothing pale about the performance. It had, according to one critic, “a dangerous physicality”.
Malkovich is good at playing men who are sane, bad and dangerous to know. He played cold, sexy Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and a glacial Gilbert Osmond in Jane Campion’s film The Portrait of a Lady. But Malkovich did not start life as an object of desire. He grew up in the Illinois town of Benton where his father worked as a magazine editor and his mother edited the local paper. He was a stout child, bullied by his older brother, Danny. In his mid-teens, he lost 30kg on a crash diet of jelly. But today, the most seductive thing about him is not his trim appearance; it is the sense that he is partly elsewhere, aloof and concentrated, absence and presence together.
Playing a musketeer came easily to Malkovich, perhaps too easily. Did he know Rainer Maria Rilke’s line about difficulty? He said it is the difficult things in life that are worth attempting, that have real value. Did Malkovich recognise that idea? “Not only do I recognise it, I’ve done it.” He has, he says, profited from difficulty.
And in life – what was the most difficult thing he’d ever faced? He frowns. “Getting divorced was very difficult.” This is an understatement. He had a breakdown when his marriage to Glenne Headly failed (reputedly because of an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer). For a year, he could not stop crying. But he does not dwell on this: what matters to him in life and theatre is “work” – and “emotional time” for yourself. “If you have time, there are things you can get over,” he says. His voice drifts. It has an interrogative lilt that turns everything into a question.
Malkovich is often self-mocking but has much to congratulate himself upon. He is accomplished: he does embroidery and sketches. He likes good clothes. He has modelled for Comme des Garons. Does he admit to being vain? He blushes, just perceptibly. He says: “I’m thick- skinned. In some ways I’m very vain. But I don’t think an incredible amount about my appearance. Looks only carry you so far.” He has the tone of someone who thinks himself anything but alluring.
He is wary of public opinion. He thinks society suffers from a short-term memory and a predilection for the negative. He is thankful to be “sealed off from opinion”. He lives in a Provenal farmhouse with his girlfriend Nicole Peyran. He says that since he was 22, he has wanted children (he is now 44). His seven-year-old daughter Amandine is “lippy, pretty”. He describes his son Loewy as “very poetic, very haunting – as I think boys are. I like both children enormously – they are my best friends.”
I ask him what makes him angry. “Bullies,” he says. And he has no difficulty with a question about what he might call his own autobiography. He says with slow enjoyment: “Some Things They Say I Did.”