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• Article on Mr. Cromwell
• Archived CNN article on Mr. Cromwell
• The Queen
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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome James Cromwell to this program. The Oscar-nominated actor has enjoyed a terrific career in film and television, including movies like "Babe," "The Green Mile" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt" which I saw for the eighteen-thousandth time just the other night, Mr. Cromwell.

His latest project, though, is one of the most talked about films of the fall, "The Queen." He stars in the movie alongside a favorite here on PBS, Helen Mirren. Here now a scene from "The Queen."

[A film clip is shown]

Tavis: A penny for your thoughts. I was looking in your eyes as you watched that monitor. What were you thinking?

James Cromwell: Oh, I'm always listening to the dialect to see whether I actually hit it or not. That was always the shaky part of it. You know, it's one thing to play a character, but to sound like him especially when people in England who know say, "That's not the way they talk."

Tavis: See, I was just about to say - then again, I'm not English - but for a brother, it sounded pretty good to me (laughter).

Cromwell: That's right. That's all I care about (laughter).

Tavis: I'm just a brother, but it sounded all right to me.

Cromwell: I'm not British, so I don't care (laughter).

Tavis: You know, when I first saw the trailers for this and, of course, Helen Mirren's been everywhere for the last few days, they did a remarkable job. I'm not an Oscar voter, but it seems to me that whoever did her makeup should win something because she looked remarkably like the queen.

Cromwell: Yeah. It's not only the makeup, which is wonderful, but it's also the way Helen works. She internalizes the character and makes certain choices as an actress and it affects the way - I mean, I never change from one character to another and people say - you know, they accept me as a pig farmer, they accept me as a police detective, they accept me as the president hopefully because I'm doing the work and there's a certain truthfulness in what I'm doing.

She brings the truthfulness of her understanding of that character and the work that she's done and it does affect the way she carries her face. The woman who did the dialects, the wonderful dialectician, actually teaches the dialect as a part of psychology.

There is a psychological component to why the English upper class chooses to make sounds a certain way. The way the jaw is held, where the tongue is placed, the body, the breathing, all of this as part of their training and their station in life and the meaning of that in psychological terms which also affects the way you behave and, to some degree, the way you look.

Tavis: That's way too much invested to sound a certain way (laughter).

Cromwell: That's what we do.

Tavis: I know. I don't mean as an actor. I'm just talking about as a real person, an everyday person. That's way too much invested to have a certain sound because you belong to a certain class. That's just too much for me.

Cromwell: If I happened to be a dialectician, they would know not only where you were from in Mississippi, but they would know probably something about your parents, where you went to school, that you left Mississippi, that you moved. They would hear every sound and that's what makes it authentic. You know right away.

Like when we shot "Babe." One of the problems with "Babe" was, if you'd shoot a monster and it's an animatronic - that means a puppet - if the motors inside overheat, you can expand the size of the head, but you can't do that with a pig because everybody in the back of their minds immediately sort of grocks the size of the animal. If you change it in any way, we immediately know that's not a real pig.

So that's the way it is with your voice. If you heard somebody who said they were from Mississippi and they didn't get the sound, you'd know right away and right away you'd drop out. They're just putting it on. They missed it.

Tavis: That's fascinating. Well, you sounded good to me, I repeat.

Cromwell: Thank you.

Tavis: That said (laughter), when you walked in, I had heard you were fairly tall. You're like, what, 6' -

Cromwell: - almost 6' 7".I may be shrinking as the days go by.

Tavis: Well, we'll call you 6' 7". You walked in here with your 6' 7" self and I'm thinking how much that has hurt or helped you in your career, to your point about playing the president. I accept you, what, three times now playing the president, at least. I accept you in that role. There's a certain stature you have not just as an actor, but a certain stature you have physically that's hurt or helped in your career?

Cromwell: I think initially it hurt. When I started to come up in television, of course, I'm going to always be a character actor. It's the nature of my physiognomy. But I think people saw me as a second banana character actor and that it was limited in terms of what I could play. I personally never thought I would wind up playing white collar people. I'm more attracted to Stretch Cunningham, to blue collar people. I'm not blue collar, but I like it because it's sort of the way I don't comport myself as someone in the middle-class.

Actually, once they got an idea of me doing something different than situation comedies, then they sort of thought, oh, well, his stature now adds something. The fact that he towers over people, his reach, that his hands are this way. Then it became an advantage. When I first came, people said to me, "You're going to have trouble especially in films because there are contracts written where stars refuse to work with anybody." No star wants to be "the guy" and have to go like this (looking up). It just doesn't look good.

Tavis: (Laughter) You can't outshine the lead here.

Cromwell: No, it doesn't look good.

Tavis: Those Archie Bunker "All in the Family" fans heard you say something that you went right on past. I got to go back and get it. I heard you say Stretch Cunningham. So for those "All in the Family" fans, we know your role on that now historic series starring Carroll O'Connor. What I did not know, but discovered in preparing for our conversation, was how you almost at a particular point in that series ended up - speaking of the lead - as being the lead during the Archie Bunker contract lead, Carroll O'Connor, contract dispute. Tell me the story here.

Cromwell: Well, I had actually met the casting director through a friend of mine whose father worked at the studio. She didn't pay any attention to me. I was just another actor. I got a call much later on, I think maybe six months later, from my agent to get immediately down to CBS to read for this casting director. I read for her. I'd never watched the show. I looked at it and I don't know what it was that caught me.

I didn't even know that I had Art Carney in the back of my mind and I didn't copy Carney, but it came up. It seemed like the kind of guy. So I did it, she liked it, she sent me to the director, the director liked it and took me right up to Norman and Norman said, "Terrific. We'll see you on Monday." I was in the show. I thought, what is this show? I don't know anything about this show and I didn't know what the story line was.

It turned out that Carroll had quit because he wanted his name above the title. Norman Lear said, "What am I supposed to tell Jean Stapleton? I mean, she's an equal part of the success of this show. What, am I going to tell her that it's all Carroll?" So he said no. He said, "There are nine hundred million Chinese who've never heard of 'All in the Family', so I really don't care." Carroll stayed out three shows. We did three shows.

The fourth show, we were rehearsing he was dead. He had died in Buffalo. I had taken him to Buffalo on some convention and he had died and that would have been the end. Then I would have moved into the house or I would have become the guy sort of taking care of the family. Archie had described him as the funniest guy that he ever met. When Carroll came back, I had every joke. Carroll had to feed me every - he was the straight man. Oh, was he conceited. I never worked on that show again.

Tavis: (Laughter) I wonder why. I wonder why.

Cromwell: You know, he saved my life.

Tavis: In what regard?

Cromwell: If I had done that show, if Carroll had not come back, or if Carroll had been more generous and I had stayed on that show and done more instead, people would have identified that character and that would have been the end of my career. It would have been like The Fonz. You can't think of him without seeing The Fonz.

Tavis: Henry Winkler.

Cromwell: It's gone. Your acting career is gone. It's what O'Neill wrote about in "Long Day's Journey into Night." His father gave up being one of the great American actors because he found a money-maker, "The Count of Monte Cristo," and just played it and played it and played it. Pretty soon, he couldn't play anything else.

Tavis: Speaking of fathers, your father was a director in this town. He did, what, fifty-seven some odd movies?

Cromwell: Yeah.

Tavis: Did you have a choice?

Cromwell: Oh, yeah.

Tavis: Did you really have a choice?

Cromwell: Yeah, I really did. I was going to be a mechanical engineer. I was going to design sports cars. I don't know how serious I was. I was incredibly immature. My father came to a fraternity the day after a fraternity party. You know what fraternity houses look like and smell like?

Tavis: I lived in one.

Cromwell: Yeah. I always thought that was the reason he took me, but he took me to Sweden. He was making a picture with all of Ingmar Bergman's people. As a young man, I thought, wow, these people talk to each other. They have intelligent conversations. Then they create something, they play scenes. I thought, wow, man, I think I should do that.

Well, I went back and sort of messed up my relationship with Middlebury and my father came to talk me out of it and said, "Listen, whatever you do, don't be an actor because you're too damned tall." I thought, hey, it comes from my father. He should know.

Tavis: Was your dad tall?

Cromwell: Yeah. He was tall when he started in New York. He started in New York in 1910 and I'm sure that some bastard said the same thing to him. Don't expect to be an actor. So my father didn't do his acting. He was a wonderful actor. He won a Tony as an actor. He became a director and I said I'll become a director.

But the problem with following your father when your father does something is there's always that little, you know, I don't want to exceed my father, so you always find ways basically to sabotage the work that you do, whereas the acting came sort of - my mother was an actress. There was nothing to it. I just did it and my life happened.

Tavis: You know, you're the first person that I've heard utter that or certainly phrase it in the way that you did about a son who doesn't want to exceed his father. I literally was forced to reflect on - I have a book coming out here in a couple of days. In this particular telling of a story, I had to revisit that own experience in my own life and I remember how badly I felt.

My parents wanted me to go to school and get an education and all this good stuff. So I go to school, I get an education and I come out here to Los Angeles to work for Tom Bradley, the late great mayor of this city. On my very first paycheck, I realized that I'm making more money on my first check than my dad has made in twenty-some odd years in the United States military. I felt horrible. I'm making more money than my dad. Like I have exceeded my dad on my first job out of college.

Cromwell: It's funny because, as a parent now and I look at my sons and my daughter and I think I would like nothing better for my son's picture to hit and for him to be, you know, the next - well, pick somebody nice - the next wonderful director. That would be just terrific, but I know inside that he would feel rather strangely about it. I hope he wouldn't, but he probably would.

Tavis: There's so many fascinating things in your past and I had no idea watching you all these years that all this existed. Let me throw a few things out at you, if I might, and get you to share some with me because I'm so fascinated by this. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. We all know the names. Three men who lost their lives in Mississippi.

Fast forward years later, Ronald Reagan goes to Philadelphia, as you know, to announce his campaign for president, saying how much he supports states rights. That's a whole other conversation for another time. But Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, we all know them in the history of the civil rights movement. You knew Michael - you called him Mickey - you knew Michael Schwerner.

Cromwell: Yeah.

Tavis: Tell me about this relationship.

Cromwell: I went to school in a place called Pelham and we used to dress together on the football team. In fact, I think he bought my pads. I was not a very good football player (laughter). You know, he was just a guy. I didn't really pay any attention, but I got to know him because I played football with him for a season. I didn't know anything about what had happened to him and went on with my life. I didn't even know that he was involved with Corps and that he had gone to Mississippi.

My father cut out a little thing on the bottom of "The New York Times" that said that this theater was interviewing people to go down south to do these two plays in rep. I went down and auditioned, got the job, got off the plane in New Orleans. I'd never been to New Orleans. I met the head of the theater, two black guys, John O'Neal and Gilbert Moses. They took me to the Quarter. As we walked into the house, there's a plaque on the side of the door that says "Coloreds Only." I thought, oh, isn't that quaint? That's a throwback.

I met the woman who owned the house, a black lady, a wonderful lady, great place. John said, "Let's go to dinner." We go to dinner, just sitting in a restaurant and this white guy comes up, the owner of the restaurant. He's shaking. He says, "You have to leave." John said, "Why is that?" I forgot what he said. It should be obvious. Now I'd never been thrown out of a restaurant and I immediately started to get up. John said, "No, no, I'll handle it." He said, "You know, you're violating my civil rights and you understand I'll bring a complaint, da-da-da-," and that was my introduction.

My introduction to Mississippi was - we drove in to Mississippi. You have that sign, "You are entering Mississippi." Watch your behind is what it is (laughter). We went to McComb and the church on the hill just like the other church in Birmingham had a firebomb -

Tavis: - Sixteenth Street Baptist.

Cromwell: Yeah. We went to the Freedom House and there was a little fourteen year old girl surrounded by all the brothers that lived in the house and worked for Snick. She was explaining how she had been beaten, kicked, spat at in integrating the local Woolworth's. I had no idea. I didn't know.

I had rehearsed "Waiting for Godeau" in New Orleans. New Orleans was sort of an open city. I never paid really much attention to it. There were Black actors, there were white actors. I never thought about it. Then we used to drive and we would hear the state cops. They would follow us. They thought we were a joke. They didn't take us seriously. They were taking Snicks seriously in registering voters and they would call us the chicken and they were the fox.

Somebody mentioned at one point, you know, there are those three civil rights people that are missing. I didn't know anything about Bull Turner. I didn't know anything. It wasn't until they dug them up and I read about it. Geez, it was Mickey all this time. He'd come from Chicago. In the Freedom Houses, I had met white guys from all over the country who had come, and he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Listen, I went out with flyers when we went - I've forgotten where we were. I went into the white neighborhoods. In my innocence, I thought, well, we'll get them to come see a play. They'll like it. They should see this. I went to a church while they were having a church service and said to the deacon, "Would you mind if I left these flyers?" He said, "No, come on in." Then I gave him a flyer (laughter) and I turned around and the rest of the people are chasing me down the street because they knew exactly by just reading the address what the play was about.

The extraordinary thing about it was that it was easy to lose track about what you do theater for. John and Gil both created that theater for those people in Mississippi who were registering to vote for the first time and expressing who they were through the exercise of their civil rights. They needed to learn who they were in the world, what they looked like. John's idea was to bring theater so that they could begin to see them. We played for Fannie Lou Hamer. Remember Fannie Lou Hamer?

Tavis: Oh, do I. "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Cromwell: Bless her heart. She got up in the middle of "Waiting for Godeau" and she turned to those people who had never ever seen a play and she said, "Now I understand that this play is very difficult, but I want you to know something. We're not waiting anymore. We're not like those two guys. We're not sitting and waiting for anybody. We have our destiny in our hands and we're making it." She gave the best speech.

Tavis: I'm listening to you talk and I'm hearing you relay to me how it is that this Free Southern Theater helped these African Americans in part discover who they were and their place in the world. How did that happen for you? I teased you earlier about not having a choice, given who your father was, but how discerning and figuring out that this is what you were supposed to be doing, how did that happen for you?

Cromwell: Well, two anecdotes. The minister of the church where we rehearsed, I had trouble with "Godeau." I had done it once before and I always had problems. He came to me and he gave me a note. He said, "You know, one of the things you got to watch is your relationship between Patso and Lucky." Patso is the master and Lucky is the slave." I play Patso and John, who is Black, played Lucky. He said, "You got to understand things. That rope goes both ways. The noose is around Lucky's neck, but it's as much around Patso's neck. Slave and master are connected in a way that they are both dependent upon each other. Without the one, there can't be the other."

Now that was an analysis of that play. That's what the Panthers used to do. He looked at that because he understood, by living the experience that he'd been through in the south, he understood something about that play that maybe an Irishman understood, but as white person, a totally unpoliticized person, did not understand.

We played a little town - I've forgotten the name of this town. I by that time was trying to figure out how to make this event more accessible, so I wore Blackface and John wore Whiteface and Gil wore Whiteface and the other actor wore Blackface. I wanted to neutralize the race issue so that they wouldn't see it in terms of black and white. We had a colloquy and I would ask them, "Did you think Godeau was coming?"

This woman in the back row raised her hand. She had a black glove on because she couldn't afford the two pair of gloves, a white pair and a black pair for funerals, so she had a black glove and she raised her hand. She had never seen a play. She had never seen a movie. She had no television. I said to her, "Did you think Godeau was coming?" She said, "No." I said, "How did you know?" She said, "I looked in the program and his name wasn't listed." (Laughter) Nobody has ever, ever said that is the play. That's the play.

That play made a difference because of the innate wisdom, human decency, courage of the people in the South doing what they were doing, everybody. The man who ran a grocery store begged us to leave because he was afraid he was going to be firebombed if we stayed. Everybody contributed to my understanding that what I was doing had an importance.

Tavis: How has that experience informed your life?

Cromwell: My life has various components. I have an internal life, I have a spiritual life, I have the quest of my life, I have my destiny. My work as an actor, the thing that really intrigues me is to what Shakespeare said, "Hold the mirror up to nature." I want people, when they see me acting, to see themselves. Even though I don't look like most people, I want them to see a normal person making choices and that they can look at the choices and say, "Oh, that's a good choice" or "Oh, wow, we made that choice" or "That choice doesn't work."

Like in "General's Daughter," that man is a decent man who makes a very bad choice. I wanted them to see that, when they make those kind of choices, bad things happen because they go against what everybody knows. I know you're going to ask this question and I already thought about it. I think what Spike Lee said, "Do the right thing," do the right thing for me is that's it. We all know what the right thing is and yet we let self-interest and our greed and our pettiness and our unconsciousness shape the way we interact with other people and we don't do the right thing. When we don't, crap happens.

Tavis: I'm out of time here, but I could have done this for hours. But I'm always fascinated by someone from the majority community who has had these kinds of experiences, that is to say, integrating, being involved with, living with or around, working with the whole of humanity and that humanity then comes through them. It's a powerful example of what happens when we get beyond the stuff that separates us.

Cromwell: You know, it's why I do it. It's what we should do in this business. We are supposed to bring the world to people so that they can see the humanity. I mean, I just got back from Turkey and I watched a film from Rumania, a film from Korea, a film from Hungary. Extraordinary films that allow people to see that we're all in this together. We're all one people. There's no difference between any of us. We're all one. We're either going to make it as a whole or we're not going to make it.

Tavis: Can I just say wow? I did not know that when Mr. Cromwell showed up, he'd be all this and then some. But how delighted I am to have you here. Thank you for coming to see me.

Cromwell: Pleasure. Nice talking to you.

Tavis: I've enjoyed talking to you as well. It was a great conversation. Mr. Cromwell stars, of course, alongside Helen Mirren in "The Queen." I don't need to tell you to check it out. I'm sure you'll do that anyway and, if you weren't going to do it, after this conversation, you'll really want to go see this guy in this movie. Thanks again for coming by.

Cromwell: A pleasure.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.