Shaun Lawton
Shaun Lawton wrote first and acted second. Born in New Marske in the North Riding of Yorkshire, he worked as a playwright, poet, actor and songwriter, and the work he is remembered for is Desperado Corner, a sprawling four-act play about working-class boys from Redcar, described by people who saw it in terms far ruder than a catalogue entry can carry. He showed it to the director Di Trevis, who staged its premiere at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in 1981.
His screen credits sit at the opposite end of the scale, in small parts spread across three decades of British and European production. He was Zimmermann in Possession, the 1981 film that remains the strangest thing on his record. He played an intelligence man in Wild Geese II, a security guard in The Great Riviera Bank Robbery, a man in a marketplace in Aeon Flux, a footman in Anonymous.
Two later roles carry more weight if not more screen time: the Reverend John Magee in John Rabe, a 2009 historical drama, and a Manchester City supporters' club representative in The Keeper. It is the working life of an actor whose real writing happened in a place a film catalogue cannot show you.
Movies (7)
Where to start with Shaun Lawton
Possession first, and not close. It is a hysterical, brilliant, genuinely upsetting film about a marriage coming apart in Cold War Berlin, and being any part of it is a better credit than most careers manage; Lawton's Zimmermann belongs to the bureaucratic edge of a story that otherwise refuses to behave.
After that, John Rabe hands him his most substantial screen role as a clergyman inside a wartime drama, and The Keeper is a decent football picture with a real story under it. Æon Flux and Anonymous are set-dressing appearances in expensive films, watchable on their own terms and irrelevant to his. Wild Geese II and The Great Riviera Bank Robbery are for completists working through British genre cinema of the early 1980s.