Subject: Messageboard Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 21:23:52 +1000 From: Mark Longmuir To: Mark Longmuir Steve Besford,UK: John Sessions: RIP? (01-Jul-1999 19:53:07) Nattie - slightly on edge due to recent events: Before you go around scaring people again, perhaps you ought to check your phrasing. Others can provide info (though I know he's in Midsummer Night's Dream) (n/t) (01-Jul-1999 20:05:27) Check him out at www.imdb.com. The most reviled one has been busy lately. (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 00:25:44) Dean: Re: John Sessions: RIP? (03-Jul-1999 01:43:46) -- Mark Longmuir - longmuir@labyrinth.net.au Homepage: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~longmuir/ Whose Line is it Anyway? - http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/8451 "Stop tap dancing, you fool!" --------------------------------------------------------------------- [Image] [Image] Whose Board is it, Anyway? John Sessions: RIP? Thursday, 01-Jul-1999 19:53:07 195.92.197.56 writes: The situation is this: Paramount have just restarted their weekly runs of WLiiA from Brit Series One. My father and I, after laughing our socks off at the polished later series with Mochrie and Stiles as regulars, are now confronted with the raw trembling essence that was series one. When it came out, I think it is fair to say that everyone in the UK was fascinated. But John Sessions!!! The man WAS a genius!! It was a totally different kind of improv but no less valid. My family were so impressed by his quickfire wit and deep intelligence we immediately went to see his one man show "Napoleon" in London. It was one of the few unanimously enjoyable family occasions I remember and now I realise how much I miss John Sessions in this kind of form. I desperately need to find out what he is up to now. My mother suggested that he was writing. Occasionally he pops up every three or four years on a one off TV drama. Despite being an actor myself I am hopelessly ill read and out of touch with the theatre scene. I need help in tracking him down. I need to feel good about the human spirit again. I need John Sessions. Can anyone tell me where he is? Steve Besford,UK ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Message thread: Steve Besford,UK: John Sessions: RIP? (01-Jul-1999 19:53:07) Nattie - slightly on edge due to recent events: Before you go around scaring people again, perhaps you ought to check your phrasing. Others can provide info (though I know he's in Midsummer Night's Dream) (n/t) (01-Jul-1999 20:05:27) Molly: Steve, my boy, don't do that. I almost had a heart attack. I want to repeat what Nat said, please becareful what you post. (n/t) (01-Jul-1999 20:22:36) Lorna: Pot+Kettle+black= Go figure (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 09:18:43) Serena: tee hee hee!!! (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 14:50:34) dana: you are too much, lorna! (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 18:04:25) Check him out at www.imdb.com. The most reviled one has been busy lately. (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 00:25:44) Dean: Re: John Sessions: RIP? (03-Jul-1999 01:43:46) Back to main board ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Prev Page Next Page Now viewing page 4 of 5 (03-Jul-1999 21:31:07 to 01-Jul-1999 15:55:27) [Image] Message subject: Name: (optional) Email address: (optional) Type your message here: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to main board ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright © ITW Newcorp, Inc. 1997-1999 All rights reserved. [Image] [Image] Whose Board is it, Anyway? Re: John Sessions: RIP? Saturday, 03-Jul-1999 01:43:46 216.100.151.109 writes: This is from the Daily telegraph of aigust 1, 1998. Lord, it's hard to be humble He is trying to shake off his too-clever-by-half image, so why star in a new 'smart-alec' radio show? John Sessions wants to play ordinary blokes and speak Latin. Interview by Helena de Bertodano JOHN Sessions has a dream. He wants to play someone he is not, someone very normal. "I would like to play a married bloke with kids who comes home and has dinner with the missus. I've been playing homosexuals and oddballs and historical figures, and although I like doing that, I'd love to do people who are in the mainstream of life as well. Drop that hint for me, will you?" You can see his point. For such a character would be the greatest test of Sessions' acting abilities. He plays homosexuals - he is a homosexual; he plays oddballs - he is, if not exactly an oddball, certainly unusual; and he plays historical figures, most recently the bewigged Fielding narrator in the BBC's dramatisation of Tom Jones. Yet he is a man so immersed in history that such parts are second nature to him. He even says that he wishes he had been born in the second half of the 19th century. For whatever reason, the "mainstream" parts continue to elude him. Recently he auditioned for a Hugh Grant film. "I really, really wanted to be in it. I auditioned for a part as a married man with a wife who was pregnant. But I didn't get it." He looks crestfallen. This is a very different John Sessions from the seemingly insufferable smart alec on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the improvisation show which made his name. "John Sessions is almost as talented as he thinks he is," read a review 10 years ago. "But he needs to stop smirking." Sessions himself agrees. "There's a show I did in 1987 where I'm completely punchable. I'm wearing a bow tie and I've got a fat little face - I say that, but not as fat as it's become." Now, at 45, he is older and humbler. "I'm trying to change my work, to make it more mature." As part of this drive, he can be heard tonight on Saturday Night Fry, a new weekly chat show on Radio 4 (6.15pm). Stephen Fry is joined by Sessions and other guests to discuss themes ranging from Englishness to the advantages and drawbacks of celebrity. It will be an erudite show with a lighthearted touch. Each week Sessions will deliver a five-minute piece, written by himself, on the programme's chosen theme. One of the themes is language: whether grammar and spelling really matter. Sessions believes passionately that language should be sacrosanct and, to that end, reads a piece about the late Anthony Burgess, sitting in heaven chatting with God. It is full of learning and wit, but its complexity means you cannot afford to miss a word. As one of the guests says when Sessions finishes: "Crikey." This is a little how I feel after two hours of conversation with Sessions. The topics he touches on range from Scottish literature to English poetry to religion, 18th-century rationalism, St Augustine (complete with Latin quotation), Picasso, Chekhov, Shakespeare's Richard III, Oscar Wilde, art history, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sherlock Holmes, Upper Clyde shipbuilders, Arthur Scargill, the politics of Northern Ireland, Charles Dickens, Henry James, football managers, D. H. Lawrence, Ibsen, Brecht, Beethoven, Russia's faulty weapons systems, the Gulf War and New Labour. At one point Sessions even leaves me with an essay he has written as a possible candidate for Saturday Night Fry. It is about Churchill, Hitler, the nature of happiness and the German obsession with death. He returns after a few minutes and awaits my reaction. What on earth can I say? I cannot really concentrate in the circumstances and I suspect it is way over my head. So I just say "Wow". This seems to be sufficient. Despite all of this, Sessions is very likeable. He does not seek to establish an intellectual superiority, he just seems to delight in knowledge. Who else can claim to have read Sir Martin Gilbert's eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill not once, but twice? However, he is not pompous and he is the first to make fun of himself, providing a commentary over his own conversation. When, for example, he says he needs to move house because he has so many books and so much music piling up, he stops himself and adds in an awestruck voice: "Oh, he's sooo artistic." We meet in East Putney where he lives in part of a white stucco Victorian mansion. He is wearing black jeans and trainers with an untucked but carefully ironed white shirt. A builder is extruding the pipes upstairs, trying to locate a leak - so we sit in the kitchen, talking through a cacophony of bangs and judders. The only book I can see in here is The River Café Cook Book. "I'm not a bad cook actually. I do a pretty good boeuf bourguignon." He lists dinner parties as his only recreation in Who's Who - although he says that these are more other people's than his own. His great friends are Robbie Coltrane, Stephen Fry and Ken Branagh, and a couple of non-celebrity friends from his schooldays. He was born John Marshall in the Scottish town of Largs in 1953, the son of a gas engineer. Although the family left Scotland for Bedford when he was three, Sessions still has more than a trace of a Scottish accent. He was bullied at school, and only came into his own when he realised that his impersonations of people could make the bullies laugh. He went on to Bangor University, but what he really wanted to do, even then, was to become an actor. His father disapproved heartily, wanting him to be a teacher or to work for the Gas Board. So it was not until he was 26 that he finally went to RADA, where he met Branagh and co, his juniors by several years. His father finally accepted his son's choice of career in the 1980s, when he co-starred in the television adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue. And when Sessions did his one-man show, The Life of Napoleon, directed by Branagh, his parents came to watch - "a great high" in his career. Both his parents are now dead, and his only surviving family is a twin sister, who lives in Canada, and a much older brother. Although Sessions has recognised his homosexuality since his teenage years, he only "came out" in 1994. Has it made life easier for him? "It hasn't made a blind bit of difference. So that's that topic out of the way," he says, moving swiftly on. But he says later that he will miss not having children. "I miss it already. Although I have five godchildren and a wonderful niece. . ." he tails off. "I was talking about this to a friend the other day, who is in fact a few months younger than me, but it's like he's older because he's a father and a husband, and responsibility breeds character." He lives alone and has rarely shared his life fully with another person. "It's the old thing, there's a lack of commitment, I suppose. I don't know, I feel very committed to my friends, there's no shortfall there." It is his freedom from responsibility, he believes, that has made him rather self-absorbed. A few years ago Stephen Fry said to him that he should try to get through a sentence without using the first person singular. "Maybe the word 'I' still crops up a bit too often," says Sessions. "Sometimes you see that absolute arse-paralysing self-absorption in others and then, in a flash of recognition, you realise 'I too have been that soldier' on occasions. If you have kids and the stresses and strains of a relationship with a wife or a husband, you haven't really got time to sit and be Hamlet." As it is, he finds plenty of time to sit and worry - about the end of the world, death, crippling illness. He says he watched John Diamond's recent television documentary on throat cancer in "tears of terror". He is a smoker himself - although a cautious one, only smoking his cigarettes halfway down and putting the packet at the other end of the room, so that it is a conscious effort every time he wants one. Although Sessions underwent years of psychoanalysis, he now thinks it is a waste of time and money. He has turned to homoeopathy - and takes Impatiens when he feels the world is too much. "That takes the edge off, when I'm all a bundle of nerves." He harbours an ambition to be a novelist, but is doubtful whether he will accomplish it. "You wonder, 'Does the world need a book from me?' and the answer is, 'Probably not.' " But he would like to do something that would take him out of the limited world of showbusiness. "I have thought of doing something completely different for six months - perhaps going off to work on a farm." He adds hastily: "If you mention that, please be twinkly about it otherwise people will think I really have gone mad." Clearly very concerned about the image he conveys, Sessions finds it almost impossible to complete a sentence without groaning at his own choice of words. Discussing whether or not he yearns to be a superb classical actor, like Paul Scofield, whom he so admires, he says: "I've been thinking about that recently. I think I'm not a very great actor. I'm pretty good in my jobs hopefully." He looks disgusted at himself. "Did I say, 'I think I'm pretty good?' People have said I'm reasonably good in certain jobs." He stops again to parody himself. " 'People have said I'm reasonably good . . .' " There is a perception that Sessions has been out of the public eye for a long time - a review praising a recent performance ended: "Where has John Sessions been?" "It did puzzle me a bit," says Sessions. "I've been working and making a good living and all the rest of it, but there was nothing that really grabbed the public." This is true. Since leaving Whose Line Is It Anyway? seven years ago, he has appeared in a couple of plays - My Night with Reg and Paint, said Fred! - and has written and performed a comedy series Likely Stories, which was not a particular success. "It didn't rate. It was good, dare I say it, but it was characterised by what people who are not crazy about me. . . Let me start that sentence again. It was me jumping from character to character in a suit, probably looking pleased with myself. That's my way of trying to keep confident, and it probably wasn't telegenic enough." There have been other jobs - films including Princess Caraboo, In the Bleak Midwinter and The Scarlet Tunic. He grimaces when I mention the last. Why the face? "It wasn't what it should have been. I'd better not say any more." But in the past year, there has also been Tom Jones and In the Red, a successful BBC comedy drama sending up the BBC itself, in which Sessions played the part of Hercules Fortescue, a nit-picking personnel officer. Not to mention Stella Street, a late-night cult BBC2 series, in which he and Phil Cornwell play a roll-call of Hollywood stars supposedly living in Surbiton. Another series is planned for the autumn. As well as that, he is making documentaries on Wordsworth and Coleridge for independent television; a play on John Reith, the BBC's founder, to be broadcast on Radio 3 next month; a series called Private Passions, also on Radio 3, in which he assumes various bogus personalities from the world of music; and a BBC documentary on the Scottish novelist James Hogg. Oh, and he has just been in Italy shooting a film of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline. So now the answer to the question "Where is John Sessions?" is very simple. He is everywhere. Dean ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Message thread: Steve Besford,UK: John Sessions: RIP? (01-Jul-1999 19:53:07) Nattie - slightly on edge due to recent events: Before you go around scaring people again, perhaps you ought to check your phrasing. Others can provide info (though I know he's in Midsummer Night's Dream) (n/t) (01-Jul-1999 20:05:27) Molly: Steve, my boy, don't do that. I almost had a heart attack. I want to repeat what Nat said, please becareful what you post. (n/t) (01-Jul-1999 20:22:36) Lorna: Pot+Kettle+black= Go figure (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 09:18:43) Serena: tee hee hee!!! (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 14:50:34) dana: you are too much, lorna! (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 18:04:25) Check him out at www.imdb.com. The most reviled one has been busy lately. (n/t) (02-Jul-1999 00:25:44) Dean: Re: John Sessions: RIP? (03-Jul-1999 01:43:46) Back to main board ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Prev Page Next Page Now viewing page 4 of 5 (03-Jul-1999 21:31:07 to 01-Jul-1999 15:55:27) [Image] Message subject: Name: (optional) Email address: (optional) Type your message here: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to main board ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright © ITW Newcorp, Inc. 1997-1999 All rights reserved.