Clair asked:
If you could play any film character, who would you be and why?
I’d like to have a bash at playing Gustav von Aschenbach in Death In Venice, please.
Although the cross-generational aspect of his unrequited, hopeless desire is not something to which I personally relate, Aschenbach’s doomed plight struck a major chord with me many years ago, when I was still in the grips of my own similar obsession. Now that I am approaching the appropriate age for the role, I find that I rather fancy the idea of slowly rotting away in a deck chair, hair dye oozing down my forehead, to the strains of Mahler. Elegant, ridiculous decay, at once sublime and absurd: there’s something really rather delicious about it.
(The fact that Bjørn Andresen’s Tadzio bears a disquieting resemblance to the object of my own desire, and that Dirk Bogarde’s von Aschenbach bears an equally disquieting resemblance to my first boyfriend, only serves to heighten the perversity.)
troubled diva 