Q:  Would you ever consider a one-man show? 

DJ:  No.  Almost for the same reason.  I don’t believe I could sustain interest on my own for an evening.  I also want someone else to chat to in the interval, to have a meal with afterward, to be in the dressing room with.  I’d get so lonely.  Ooh!  I just couldn’t go through that.  And also it’s just you taking all that responsibility.  But I do this two-man show, and that’s ideal.  Just the two of us. (Lord Byron) It’s great fun.  Also the variety of another sound, of another voice.  Not just listening to your voice.  However you colour it, whatever you do with it, there’s just you and your voice.  I mean there’s acting and there’s performing.  There’s an area of performing that needs to be in a one-man-show that I don’t have, I don’t think.  Unless it’s a prodigious piece like St. Marks’ Gospel – Alec McCowan’s thing - which is something else.  That’s an extraordinary piece, but it’s very much that only he could do.  Nobody else could do that.  I   wouldn’t do a one-man show.  

Q:  Do you have any unfilled ambitions? 

DJ:  Ooh!  (pauses) Lots of Shakespeare I still want to do!  I want to do Macbeth;  I want to do Lear, eventually, when I’m older.  I’d like to have a go at Coriolanus, but I think it might be too late.  But I think Macbeth.  I think Macbeth I’d certainly want to do.  Plus Angelo in Measure.  I’d like to play Prospero again.  Very much.  I will do it again, I’m sure.  I’d just like to keep working.  I’d like to do some more modern work.  Yes, a new play.  And one big commercial movie!

Q:  You’re currently making a film called the Fool, what is that about? 

DJ:  Well, the lady who did Little Dorrit has written a screenplay.  It’s the same period as Dorrit, it’s not Dickens, but it’s very Dickensian.  It’s 1850’s.  It’s a story that she’s invented herself based on- have you ever heard of  “Mayhew’s London”? George Mayhew was a man who went round in the middle of the nineteenth century recording conversations and little snippets, and meeting people.  He was a kind of Nigel Dempster, but of all strata of society, and he committed all this to a book called “Mayhew’s London.”  It was a picture – first hand – of snippets, conversations and interviews of people from a coalman to a peer of the realm.  From all these characters she’s made this story of a man who is… It’s really about money.  It’s about the “haves” and the “have-nots”.  He is a small check clerk in the theatre, his father ran a pawnshop, and he’s been brought up with the poorest of the poor.  He’s also, at the same time, masquerading as a lord, and he’s known in all the posh circles and he has lots of money.  We find it is somebody else’s money.  He’s not a rogue or a crook.  He plays these two people and then, at the end of the film in his head, these two people come together.  There’s a scene where I talk to myself -  can’t wait to do that! The two characters talk to each other.  The rich character acquires a million pounds which he then proceeds to throw out the window, and it flutters away.  It’s all about the rich and the poor.  It’s quite interesting.  I think it’s going to be an “art’ movie.  I don’t think it will displace Batman!

Q:  Maybe that’s the big film for you! A villain in a Batman sequel!  I could see you in that.

DJ:  You mean the Joker?

Q:  Well, I think Jack Nicholson’s got that covered.  But perhaps the Riddler – getting the high comedy, dressed rather as you were in Tales of the Unexpected episode Stranger in Town.  

                Tales of the Unexpected, 1982
DJ:  Oh yes, I enjoyed that.  I learnt lots of little slight of hand tricks, but I’ve forgotten them now.

Q:  You once said you were difficult to cast in movies, why is that? 

DJ:  Because I don’t really fall in any category, and I think you need to in the movies.  I wouldn’t be the first casting for anything in a movie, unless it was absolutely tailor made for me.  I’m not first cast as a villain; I’m not first cast as a kind of juve lead anymore in a film; I’m not first cast as the heavy character man.  When you think of Caine, or Hoskins, or Jeremy Irons, you can actually see what they could play in films.  But imagine me, and you don’t see.  It’s not obvious where I fit into films, it’s just not.  Maybe come so now that I’m older.  Suddenly.  It’s like Gielgud.  Exactly the same.  Not castable when he was a young or middle aged man; not really.  There were plenty of other people around who would be better.  But now, the old Sir John, is his own man in movies.  There’s nobody like him.  But he wasn’t as a young, or a middle-aged man.  I think I’m in that category, really.  It doesn’t worry me.  I’d love to do one big Hollywood movie; like he did with Arthur.  That sort of thing.  It would be great.  I don’t want to wait around till I’m eighty, though!  Bit younger!

Q:  What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are as an actor?

DJ:  Oh, dear.  (long pause)   My strengths?  I think I have discipline.  I think I have commitment to what I do.  I try to serve the play.  I don't let my ego, my self-conceit, get in the way of the truth of the play.  I don't try to project me, the actor, I try to project the person and the play.  The playwright, I think, is the most important person. So a search for truth, I think, is a strength, a lack of - or a denial of  -demonstrated, kind of show-off conceit.  (pauses) Weaknesses? People talk a lot about the great quality on stage - and I’m not sure that it’s true - danger.  Well, I’m not dangerous.  Therefore I’m saying that I don’t have the prime quality that nearly all critics say you’ve got to have on stage.  So that could be a weakness.  But that’s assuming that I agree that danger is a prime quality.  Gielgud never had danger.  I don’t quite know what they mean by danger.  I can’t quite always see it when they see it, but I don’t have it, I don’t think.  You see, one’s own ideas of one’s strengths and weaknesses are not always what other people see you.  I think a part like Cyrano, there’s moments when he needs to be dangerous.  I think I can meet that kind of challenge, but to become known as a dangerous actor, and therefore a good actor, I question, because that presupposes you’re going to see a personality.  And there are certain parts that I would be wrong for.   And I think, perhaps, one of my weaknesses is that I can’t analyse myself.  I can’t answer questions like that very well, because (pause) I would much rather have someone who had seen me act a lot tell me what they consider my weaknesses are, from a spectator’s point of view.  I think they vary with each part you play, too.  What’s strong or weak about you, as Cyrano, will be different to what’s strong or weak about you as Benedick, or Tusenbach, Prince Myshikin.  Each one is different.  Each role requires different things and what’s strong and weak is a variable.  If you want each part to be true then that is not the same for every character and every part.  So the weaknesses and the strengths change.  I’m wriggling out of this question, aren’t I?

Q:  You don’t have to provide a list of ten weaknesses!  It sounds like a typical Libran’s answer – very balanced.  Altogether, very integrated.

DJ:  Oh, good!  (with relief) 

Q:  You’ve mentioned Cyrano several times, is that your favourite part?

DJ:  It’s one of them, yes.  Because of the character.  Because of the whole coming together of the play, that cast, the director, the designer.  It was all a wondrous experience.  Bloody hard work, but it was wonderful how it all came together.  Marvelously well for us and I’ll never forget it.  We had some rich, theatrical moments with that play; both in the play and in the audience reaction to it in Stratford, in London, in Washington and in New York.  A marvelous experience.

Q:  Are there any particular actors, or performances, that you admire?  

DJ:  Oh, I admire all actors!  I know how difficult it is.  I mean I’m just in awe when I get to the theatre.  Good, bad, or indifferent, because even when I know they’ve done it badly, they’re actually doing it.  I know how difficult it is and what it takes to get up there.  So when I see people being, what I think is, good – good in the sense it’s getting through to me- then it’s wonderful.  And when it’s not very good I know that they’re still having a go;  still trying.  It’s a great club to belong to, and I like actors as a race of people very much.  They’re usually very generous with each other, too., and that’s very nice.  I think we produce so many great artists in this country that it would be a little invidious to pick one or two and say they’re the “best”.  That’s becoming a critic, because they need “best”.

Q:   I was thinking in terms of ones you would go to see, not “best”.

DJ:  It’s usually performances.  I would go out of my way to see - oh, so many – from Sir John, Sir Alec, through Scofield to Finney, through Richardson to McKellan.  Vanessa, Maggie, Judi, Glenda.  They're all worth the price of a ticket.  There's a very, very rich crop.  With Sir Laurence, he was kind of preeminent. He was extraordinary.  I mean, his like doesn't come that often.  And he was pre-eminent as a man of the theatre, a man of our business.  So the journalists - the hacks - desperately want a replacement.  There's not a new Olivier; there can't be one.  It’s silly to go on talking about it – “the mantle of…” – “The Mantle of Olivier”. “ The Mantle of Gielgud”.  It’s silly.   It makes good copy in the papers.  Nice headline, nice little paragraph.  But it's not true, it's rubbish.  We've got too many who are wonderful that you can't pick one out.  You could with Olivier, because he was extraordinary, but they don’t come that often.

Q:  They really seem to need someone on a pedestal, ready to be knocked down.

 DJ:  Oh yes, they love that in this country.  They hate success.  They like to feel they’ve bestowed it, so therefore they can take it away again.  “We made you, we can break you” sort of thing.

Q:  You seem like a very private person.  How do you cope with the public acclaim, and leaving the theatre to find people waiting for you at the stage door?  I get the impression that it’s not something you find easy.

DJ:  No, it’s not.  It’s part of the job.  Stage Door I’ve gotten used to, and I quite enjoy it now.  That’s fair, because that’s your audience, and if your audience wants to get closer and say “thank you” that’s fine.  That’s absolutely acceptable.  The other side of it, I can’t do – the chat show, the high profile telly interview - I’m not keen on that.  Certainly the social side of it, where it’s rent-a-celebrity time, that I can’t and won’t do.  I still get “Hail Caeser” shouted at me in supermarkets sometimes.  Even now, fourteen years later!  That can be embarrassing.  It’s also embarrassing when you are known, but not instantly recognizable.  So you get a lot of, “It’s, eh….. You aren’t, … are you?”  Now that’s worse than someone coming up and saying, “Mr. Jacobi, can I have your autograph?”   “I should know you.  What’s your name?”,  and you say your name and they say, “No, that’s not it."  That’s desperate, that’s awful!  That’s the worst, being kind of, half-known.  In America, they’ll stop you in the streets.  Someone came up to me in America recently and said, “Saw your show last night.  You were great; the show stank!”  And I heard myself saying, “Thank you.”! 

Q:  Well on that note, thank you!