“I remember Nic Cage saying to me, when I was in Face/Off with him, 'You know, I mean Alessandro, who do you wanna be man? I mean like, you know, who are you? What's your deal?' And I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about, I have no idea, I don't know what I wanna be, I just wanna play a lot of different characters.' And he was like, 'Well, you better figure it out,' and you know I never really did. Some great actors have strong personalities that come through in all of their roles. There's some part of them that you can see in every one of their performances, even though, technically, there's all of this mastery that obscures it.”(29)

Alessandro Nivola

From a glance at his filmography it would appear that Nicholas Cage has played a very wide range of parts — from the ruthless assassin of Face/Off, to the terminal alcoholic of Leaving Las Vegas, to the wild romantic of Moonlighting, to the needy screenwriter of Adaptation, to the drug addled cop of Bad Lieutenant (Port of Call New Orleans), to the investment banker turned hen-pecked husband of The Family Man, and so on and so on. Yet paradoxically there is a very clear image of Nicholas Cage’s personality that comes through, a personality that we all feel that we know.

The public tend to think of casting as an audition where various actors come in and take a test to see who does best. When it comes to casting for the screen, however, the process is much more like speed dating. It is not a honed performance that you are looking for, but just the opposite. You are trying to get a feel for the actor’s own personality and how it might mesh with the role. It is not even a considered interpretation that you hope for so much as an honesty and openness to how the character may evolve. You may start out with an ideal image in mind, but you are really just waiting for someone to come along with whom you can fall in love — in that role. You are looking for someone who can fire your imagination.

“It always starts with me. Whatever character I'm playing is me. It's a version of me. Who would I be or what would I sound like if I were this person?“ (29)

Steve Buscemi

An actor who is prepared to invest himself in a role will always trump the skills of a great impersonator. What is required for the screen is more the channelling of feeling than anything that can be admired as a performance. It is the truth of the actor himself, exposed to the imaginary happenstance of the story, that enthrals us

Don Henderson was an actor of limited range, but one who always brought his own character to the part. One day he proudly told me that he held the world record for having played the same character — that of George Bulman — through three completely different TV series, The XYY Man, Strangers, and Bulman, each one having run through several consecutive seasons. Although officially credited to the writer, Kenneth Royce, Don, in effect invented this character to the degree that it became impossible to imagine any other actor playing the part. Over the course of 65 hours of television Bulman gradually became Don’s mirror image.

Originally intended to have been a bent copper, he came to stand for the very opposite, becoming disillusioned with moral corruption in the police force and retiring to run his own private detective agency as a sideline to repairing clocks.

Originally, the character was meant to be a pretentious autodidact who spouted garbled quotations much to everyone-else’s merriment; in Don’s hands this become transformed into gnomic epithets delivered with a knowing smile that recalled the mystical utterances of Caine in the TV series Kung Fu.

Originally the character was said to be scruffy, which was unremarkable, except that Don, who was just so in real life — (It was said that he married his second wife, Shirley Stelfox, in a pair of jeans.) — used it as a licence to carefully assemble such telling items of wardrobe as Hush Puppies, a “Will Power” T-shirt bearing a portrait of Shakespeare, Edwardian gold-rimmed half-specs, and a pair of woolly gloves.

In an episode of Strangers, which I directed, he came up with one of his most memorable scene-stealers — eating a fried-egg sandwich whilst wearing those grimy gloves. Then there was the invention of punctuating plot- laden dialogue by drawing on a nasal inhaler.

On an episode of Bulman, which I also directed, he came in one day, pleased as punch, because he had come across a supermarket plastic bag with a graphic of The Keystone Cops on the side. From that moment on, Bulman carried the bag (or one similar) in lieu of a briefcase everywhere he went. (It was meant to have his case notes inside; in reality, it normally carried Don’s script.)

Don’s performance came so much from left field that it was impossible to take a critical stance towards it. You either bought it or you did not. Some viewers just “didn’t get it”, but for others it held a special place in their lives. Anyone who drove through Manchester in a car with Don, as on occasion I did, could have little doubt that he was a star. Everywhere people would wave, and shout out. Of course, it was never the stories from his series, that the punters remembered, but one or other of Don’s little quirks.

Though Don rarely appeared in comedy as such, I always thought of him as an actor in the tradition of the great silent stars of comedy, like Harold Lloyd. For one of my own rare forays into comedy, The Boy Who Won The Pools, I invited him to play a supporting role. During the shooting of a scene, between Don and Derek Deadman, I ruined a take — for the only time in my life — by bursting out laughing. To get through the whole scene I had to bite hard on my hand. It was only later, at the edit, that I discovered the truth of that old adage of veterans: “If it’s hilarious on set it’s sure to die a death on screen”. Don’s character, needed to rub up against a bit of violence and skulduggery for his humanity to shine through. That is why his detective series worked. Shortly before his death he bought the rights to the character of Bulman, and — who knows? — if granted more time, that redoubtable character may well have shown up on TV in yet another series.