Heathcote Williams

Heathcote Williams (born 15 November 1941) is an English poet, actor and award-winning playwright. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror. He is perhaps best known for the book-length polemical poem Whale Nation, which in 1988 became "the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling." In the early 1970s, his agitational graffiti were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill district. --- John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams was born in Helsby, Cheshire. After his schooldays at Eton, he changed his name to Heathcote Williams. His father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer. From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book was The Speakers (1964), an account of life at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park. In 1974, it was adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company. His first full-length play, AC/DC (1970), a critique of the burgeoning mental health industry, includes a thinly veiled attack on his fellow denizen of 1960s alternative society, and doyen of the anti-psychiatry movement, R.D. Laing. Its production at the Royal Court Theatre, did not, however, appear to impede cordial relations between the two in later years. AC/DC won the London Evening Standard's Most Promising Play Award. It also received the 1972 John Whiting Award for being "a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society." It was described in the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page review by Charles Marowitz as 'the first play of the 21st century.' AC/DC was produced in New York in 1971 at the Chelsea Theater Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In a 1990 interview Pacino quotes Williams’ assertion that “Fame is the perversion of the human instinct for validation and attention. Without [attention] our feedback system breaks down because we don’t know who we are”—the shorter version of which being the more admonitory: "Fame is the first disgrace." Williams has been notoriously reluctant to cooperate in the promotion of his work on a commercial level, refusing, for example, to go to the US to promote AC/DC. He has been the despair of his publishers. The only book-signing tour he has ever done – "enough," he complained, "to cripple a rock-star" – was merely the result of relentless pressure from Jonathan Cape's PR department. --- The theme of Williams' early one-act play The Local Stigmatic is fame and its adverse consequences, possibly a reason why Al Pacino, with financial assistance from Jon Voight, would perform it Off-Off-Broadway before he himself achieved what the play pillories. In later years the film version became known as 'Pacino's secret project,' his debut as a director. It was finally released as part of the Pacino: An Actor's Vision box-set in 2007. Williams' own film performances include Prospero in Derek Jarman's version of The Tempest (1979), Wish You Were Here (1987) and Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). His portrayal of the central character's psychiatrist in Wish You Were Here became something of a YouTube favourite. Williams has more recently enjoyed a steady stream of bit-parts in big-budget Hollywood productions, such as The City of Ember and the ill-fated Basic Instinct 2. --- Williams lives in Oxford with his long-term partner, the historian Diana Senior. They have two daughters, now both adults. A son, Charlie, born in 1989, was later adopted by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. He acquired the Gilmour surname when in 1994 the latter married his mother, novelist and journalist Polly Samson. Williams and Samson had become involved with each other during the publication of Whale Nation, Samson being responsible for publicising what she succeeded in turning into a best-selling volume despite its refusenik author.