In the middle of the hustle of New York's urban core on one spring day in 2022, James Cromwell walked into a Starbucks, affixed his hand to a counter, and protested about the extra fees on vegan milks. “When will you stop raking in huge profits while customers, creatures, and the planet suffer?” Cromwell declared as other protesters broadcast the protest online.
However, 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, deliverer of one of the best speeches in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a sci-fi franchise production. Law enforcement arrived to close 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 go around to the other side, get their order and wait looking at their devices. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have 15 minutes!’”
Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of the industry’s greatest activists who act – or maybe performers with principles is more fitting. He marched against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance actions over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been detained, and has even served time in prison.
Currently, at 85, he could be seen as the symbol of a disillusioned generation that demonstrated for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their twilight years, Donald Trump turn back the clock on abortion and many other achievements.
Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an veteran progressive who might have a revolutionary poster in the attic and consider a political figure to be too soft on the economic system. When visited at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of a New York town, where he lives with his spouse, the actor his partner – he rises from a chair at the hearth with a friendly welcome and outstretched hand.
Cromwell measures at 6ft 7in tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody intelligent say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The mechanism is in the lock. All they have to do is a single action to activate it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every loophole, every exception that the legislature has written so diligently into their laws.”
Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father a family member, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was banned during the McCarthy era of political persecution merely for making remarks at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for fostering young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.
This apparently harmless comment, coupled with his leadership of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “shifted somewhat to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to testify to the government panel on Un-American Activities. He had little of importance to say but a committee emissary still demanded an apology.
John Cromwell refused and, with a large payment from Howard Hughes for an unproduced work, moved to New York, where he performed in a play with Henry Fonda and won a Tony award. James reflects: “My father was not touched except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – cut him out and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was guilty or not – sort of like today.”
Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his father’s wife, Ruth Nelson, were also successful actors. Despite this deep lineage, he was initially hesitant to follow in their path. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”
However, a visit to a Scandinavian country, where his father was making a film with a famed director’s crew, proved to be a turning point. “They were creating something and my father was involved and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I have to do this.’”
Creativity and ideology collided again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly Black audiences in a southern state, another region, a state, and Georgia. Some performances took place under armed guard in case extremists tried to firebomb the theatre.
Godot struck a chord. At one performance in a location, the social advocate Fannie Lou Hamer urged the audience: “I want you to pay attention to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not sitting idle for anything. Nobody’s offering us anything – we’re taking what we need!”
Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the southern US. I went down and the rooming house had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. 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 proprietor of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been thrown out of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my fist balled. I would have done something stupid. John O’Neal informed the man that he was violating our civil rights and that they would get to the bottom of it.”
But then, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m listening to myself,” he says. “These are not just tales 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 assaulted, people were being fired upon, 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: ‘My story’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of various activities as well as acting.”
Subsequently, his wife will reveal that she is among those lobbying 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 poor even his wife, who adored him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, John.’”
The conversation continues with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career took off thanks to his role as a farmer in Babe, a 1995 film about a pig that aspires to be a sheepdog. It was a surprise hit, grossing more than $250 million worldwide.
Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Oscar 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 gamble paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of recognition that means an actor is offered scripts rather than having to trudge through tryouts.
“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so tired of the dance that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a filmmaker: ‘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: ‘James, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend four weeks 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 stranger 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 recognition 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 interstellar pioneer Dr Zefram Cochrane, who observes of the spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of star trek.”
Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “greed” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of social media popularity on casting decisions. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the business transaction”. 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 “genius piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing his character asks an actor’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an award recipient, disagreed with director and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what the character should reply. A quietly defiant Spacey won their battle of wills.
This prompted Cromwell to try a alteration of his own. Hanson disapproved. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘James, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s background and his propensities, I said: ‘You expletive, curse you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive
