Heathcote Williams

Poetry came first, and the poetry is the reason to know the name. Williams wrote book-length polemical poems, among them Whale Nation, Falling for a Dolphin and Autogeddon, and invented a form he called documentary or investigative poetry: verse used to make an argument about whaling, about cars, about the environment, at a length and volume that prose journalism was not attempting. Philip Hoare described Whale Nation in 1988 as the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling. His last published work, American Porn, was a critique of the American political establishment.

The screen career reads like what happens when casting directors encounter a genuinely strange man and decide he is a type. He is Prospero in the 1979 film of The Tempest, which is the one lead that used all of him. Everything after that is eccentrics and functionaries, done well: Nick Greene the publisher in Orlando, Dr Haggage in Little Dorrit, Nucingen in Cousin Bette, Peter Reed in Stormy Monday, Doctor Klauserman in The Legend of 1900, an undertaker in The Reckoning, Mr Eaglet in a 1999 Alice in Wonderland, Sadge Merrall in City of Ember, Shaper in Blue Juice, Jakob Gerst in Basic Instinct 2.

It makes for an unusual shape. A poet and playwright with a substantial body of his own work spent three decades standing at the edge of other people's films, and the films are the smaller half of him. If you come to this page from the acting, the writing is where the real argument is.