Michael Gothard

He was bell-laid once, and once only.

He refused to appear without spectacles. He always played insane characters. His cheekbones were as beautiful/creepy as Joni Mitchell's. I got the impression he suffered with some internal muscle-skeletal damage then suicided.

He was no more special than Michael Gough, William Squire and those other bell-laids who started at the Royal Shakespeare Company and then bided their time playing freaks on Doctor Who and in Hammer garbage.

I thought he was strangely hot in The Devils.

^ You say "strangely hot".

I say "hotly strange".

R1, do you mean beau-laid?

Dearie me!

I have barely heard of this bell/beau/laid person but it seems he played in a version of 'The Three Musketeers' as the lover of Madame de Winter played by the appalling Faye Dunaway.

Fighting cheekbones at dawn!!

He looks strangely like Nancy Pelosi.

Since I love Nancy Pelosi, I love Michael Gothard.

R7 = simpleton.

Felton!

I guess they needed a freakishly-faced actor to play opposite Dunaway.

I thought he was horrifically hammy in The Devils. Really the only weak link the cast.

The Devils was 100% ham.

It's the sort of film that young people go to because they want to be "in" and choose not to ever see again.

(it had tiled-bathroom decor by the homosexualist Derek Jarman)

I did have a feeling you all might hone in on his specific attributes and style of work, but you surprised me with the specifics.

I never saw THE DEVILS, and likely won't given the damning reviews. I did like Michael in HEROSTRATUS, but then he was playing the lead role and it was quite an earnest film for an arthouse piece.

[quote] He was bell-laid once, and once only. He refused to appear without spectacles. He always played insane characters. His cheekbones were beautiful/creepy.

I thought for a moment you were talking about James Spader, R1! He took over the market on that niche after Michael passed.

My pals in school would always refer to him as 'weirdface', 'bonebag' and 'cow-eyed' whenever talk turned to what had been on telly or in the cinema starring him. I have to agree with R3 on this one and admit I always thought his face very attractive, but then I do have a preference for lanky fair types (Paul Bettany is another one) because they tend to be generously hung. IIRC the Duke of Buckingham in Richard Lester's 1973 outing of THE THREE MUSKETEERS insults Gothard's character Felton for his "long face", which is rather funny in metacontext.

[quote] I have barely heard of this bell/beau/laid person.

I know R6, and that's a damnable shame I'm trying to correct. Even if not for my sake, it's what Oliver Tobias would want.

I half-remember an ancient newspaper clipping in my teenage bedroom (it just MAY be the one below) which acknowledged he was slightly oversensitive (if not crazy) back in the 1970s.

Brilliant find R14. He looked like a Rockstar so he could get away with being emotionally-unpredictable when he was younger.

Could he have been family? He died an unmarried bachelor only ever having dated a few women publicly as part of short-lived relationships, and per the clipping above he spent time in Paris as a 19/20-year old model. It was the 1960's then...

This quote from the article is a bit iffy in today's light, though....

[quote] Gothard cherishes his private life. For the past few years, he’s had several steady girlfriends. The last one was a Swedish lady studying make-up in London. They were together for about a year but Michael says, “Eventually we both realised that we had different interests. She went back to Sweden. I never have any regrets about anything that was so nice.” He has no rigid idea of what he wants in a woman and says he’s a traditionalist, he likes women to be feminine – not carbon copies of men. He feels it’s difficult for women now. “They don’t know who they want to be like – they’re searching for identity. I only hope they don’t lose their nice qualities lke gentleness. Women have soft bodies, they ought to be soft by nature. If women become as aggressive as men, it will be like going back and they’ll be no one to idolise. I think women are more civilised than men. If, in trying to obtain more social equality, women become hard, it will be sad. At the moment I think they’re very confused – they don’t know whether to be submissive or assertive, which is understandable, Still, I find them immensely intriguing. Women are more advanced, more profound than men. They have inborn instincts and other things like intuition and softness. Men would have to use their will-power to achieve these and would have to use their intellect to do so.”

Do these shapely buttocks belong to him?

^^indeed they do, R17. For a gaunt man he had a lovely rear.

Speaking of bareback IMDB trivia tells us that in one episode of ARTHUR Michael acted opposite a teenaged Peter Firth, well known for his controversial role as tortured youngster Alan Strang in the first film adaptation of EQUUS released in 1977 and as Ivan Putin in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER in 1990.

[quote] In the early '70s I whiled away many a happy half-hour in front of the television fantasising myself as a Celtic wench captured by him as a gift for his liege-lord Arthur, then later enjoyed by both mead-drunk on a bed of sumptuous furs warmed by a roaring fire in the Longhouse.

I’m rewatching that show this Winter as part of a little vintage adventure-series marathon we’re having at my house.

In one episode midway through the series Gothard’s protagonist character rapes a woman (offscreen). It’s presented as a just reaction that the poor girl earned because she dared choose another man (her husband) over waiting & pining for him for years, and because she once I’ll-advisedly tried to deceive him into giving up the secrets of their tribe defences (the tribe which kidnapped her).

Now, as it was written in the ‘60s and shot in 1971 I suppose ‘different times’ comes into effect. It is also something that a pre-Medieval man would do without a second thought, like a warlord out of ‘Game Of Thrones’. Still it was very jarring. I instantly soured on his character after that episode; I wonder if women watching at the time did, as well? (the intended show demo was teen girls & boys, per the Internet).

He transitioned and married Prince Charles (but no bottom surgery).

For someone with such a short patchy career and a gruesome controversial death, his BFI profile is glowing.

A "gruesome, controversial" death, R21? I would hardly call suicide by hanging all that gruesome and certainly not controversial.

Oh, R22. You must be some blasé, sophisticated man of the world.

Do you take drugs?