🔗 Share this article

In the middle of the bustle of midtown Manhattan on one spring day in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, affixed his hand to a counter, and protested about the extra fees on vegan milks. “How long until you cease making excessive earnings while patrons, creatures, and the environment endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters streamed the demonstration live.

But, the unconcerned customers of the coffee shop paid little heed. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the most statuesque person ever nominated for an Academy Award, deliverer of one of the best speeches in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a Star Trek film. Law enforcement arrived to shut down the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, listen to me at the top of my lungs speaking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would move past to the far corner, place their request and stand there looking at their devices. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have 15 minutes!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe performers with principles is more accurate. He protested against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in nonviolent resistance actions over animal rights and the climate crisis. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been arrested, and has even spent time in jail.

But now, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that marched for peace abroad and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their twilight years, a former president reverse the clock on abortion and many other achievements.

Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an veteran progressive who might have a Che Guevara poster in the attic and consider a political figure to be too soft on the economic system. When interviewed at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of a New York town, where he lives with his spouse, the actor Anna Stuart – he stands up from a chair at the hearth with a warm greeting and extended palm.

Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a ancient tree. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The mechanism is in the door. All they have to do is a single action to activate it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every exception, every loophole that the Congress has written so assiduously into their legislation.”

Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father John Cromwell, a famous Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the 1950s purge of political persecution merely for making comments at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for fostering young talent and contrasting it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous 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 alleged subversion. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee representative still demanded an apology.

He refused and, with a large payment from Howard Hughes for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a Tony award. James muses: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his closest companions – a lot of them – avoided him and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was guilty or not – similar to today.”

Cromwell’s mother, Kay Johnson, and his stepmother, Ruth Nelson, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their path. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”

However, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a picture with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were producing art and my father was engaged and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”

Art and politics intersected again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play a classic work for predominantly Black audiences in a southern state, another region, a state, and an area. Some performances took place under security protection in case white supremacists tried to firebomb the theatre.

The play struck a nerve. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not waiting for anything. Nobody’s giving 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, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ 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 ejected of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something rash. John O’Neal informed the man that he was infringing upon our legal protections and that they would get to the bottom of it.”

However, mid-story, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m hearing my words,” he says. “These are not just stories about an actor doing his thing growing up, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being beaten, 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: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will reveal that she is among those urging Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has little appetite for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be formulaic and “because my father tried it and it was so bad even his wife, who adored him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, John.’”

We push on with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for years when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a farmer in a beloved film, a 1995 movie about a pig that yearns to be a herding dog. 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 the film, spending $sixty thousand to hire a PR representative and buy trade press ads to promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of accolade that means an actor is offered scripts rather than having to trudge through auditions.

“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 director: ‘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: ‘Jamie, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend a month 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 worthy, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The recognition for the movie led to roles including leaders, religious figures and a royal in a director’s a film, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the spacefaring pioneer Dr Zefram Cochrane, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “greed” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the deal”. 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 intimidating Captain Dudley Smith asks Kevin Spacey’s a role, “Have you a valediction, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an award recipient, disagreed with director and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what Vincennes should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their disagreement.

This spurred Cromwell to try a alteration of his own. Hanson disapproved. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘Jamie, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s background and his propensities, I said: ‘You motherfucker, fuck you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive