Graves is Glover’s godfather and his Balearic literary salon was the first place Honor vamoosed to after Claude’s philandering, when Julian was four months old. Photograph: Lucasfilm/Paramount/Kobal/ Rex/Shutterstock ‘I’ve been so lucky with all these big franchises’ … in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. “She was the great filter to Robert and the first question she asked my mother was, ‘And what is your philosophy, Honor?’ And my mother thought, ‘Fuck!’ and said, ‘Miss Riding, I have my own personal philosophy.’ Laura thought that was wonderful. Of course we’ll get you another sheet.’” They were greeted by Laura Riding, his fellow poet and companion. “To apologise, to say, ‘This is so embarrassing. They were desperate to meet him, so his father Claude pretended to have put his toe through a bedsheet, in order to make an approach. He paints a picture of his parents so loaded with piquant detail that you feel as if you’ve seen the film of it.īoth BBC journalists, they were in Mallorca, renting a flat from poet Robert Graves, who was at the peak of his fame. He considers the word sceptically, before describing about the most boho upbringing you’ve ever heard. I wonder if this aversion to authority is the result of a bohemian childhood, both his parents being journalists who divorced in a decade – the 1940s – when people really didn’t. I’m going to act the part of an officer.’ For a fortnight, I did that, bossing everyone around, hoping I was being sympathetic but not tolerating people’s mistakes. “I was on the officers’ training course, bottom of the whole class, relegated for two weeks.

This explains his career: if you want to thrive without bossing other people around, you’ll be on a lifelong quest to find people who’ll boss you. Photograph: United Artists/Sportsphoto/Allstarĭescribing his long and often quite lurching CV – from classical stage to huge hit to political drama to flop to megafranchise – he claims he’s merely been “obeying the rule of Dame Edith Evans, who said, ‘If the work’s there, do it.’” The theme he returns to is how much he hates telling other people what to do. ‘What a sad, sad loss’ … with Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only. “By definition, they’re going to be nice, unless you screw up.” I consider it part of the actor’s duty, if he’s got anything to pass on.” Laudable, of course, but it doesn’t sound like the whole story. “You do it for expenses – if you’re lucky, they pay £200. “I thought, ‘This boy really knows what he’s doing.’” Glover must have done 30 or 40 shorts, he says. Glover came by the role when he made a short film with Hookings. If they get beaten up in the ring, they just slosh their faces and go about their business.” Think of what they smelt like in that time! They never washed their bottoms. It’s a subtle and lingering performance, in an incredibly evocative, earthy film, which Glover hasn’t yet seen. Glover is Lord Ashford, by no means the least likable aristo of the piece, but pompous, thoughtless. We’re here to talk about his role in Prizefighter, which stars Russell Crowe and is written by Matt Hookings, who also plays turn-of-the-19th-century pugilist Jem Belcher. I auditioned for the RSC – and because I was tall, and good at standing in front of lights, I got in Glover had gone angling for acting work after school, give or take a year at Rada and some national service. I was damn good.” That was seven decades ago, and Clark was a famous art critic. “One reviewer said, ‘Julian Glover’s Cassius is about as lean and hungry as Kenneth Clark.’ I didn’t care. How could he possibly think anyone would not be nice? Who has hurt him? He has to think back to the 1950s, to a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Julius Caesar. Basically, in the flesh, this man reminds you of every important moment on the large and small screen, from even before you were born. What’s more, you would have easily picked him out as Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones. In fact, to look at, he seems to have altered almost not at all between starring in 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit and, say, playing the baddie in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two decades later. Glover, now 87, is so vividly recognisable from The Empire Strikes Back, in which he played villainous General Veers, that it’s like teleporting back to the 1980s.

And you extract what you want, as long as it’s nice.” We’re sitting in a cafe in Barnes, London, and it is all a little surreal.

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